Americans have been experiencing increasing food prices, and it’s likely you’re searching for ways to make trips to the grocery store less expensive. Clipping coupons, buying wholesale and swapping in generic options can help you save money, but the first instinct for many Americans is to buy foods that are naturally less expensive.
Buying cheaper foods is certainly one way to cut the grocery bill, but what makes some foods so much more cost effective than others? Is has a lot to do with our government and what it chooses to subsidize. The following infographic demonstrates how much money the government allocates to the top agricultural subsidies in the U.S.
However, as you’ll see below, the cheaper our food gets, the fatter we get. Not surprisingly, corn happens to be the number-one subsidized crop and also used to make low-cost, high-calorie foods, “helping to make Twinkies cheaper than carrots and Coca-Cola competitive with water,” as Michael Pollan of the New York Times explains.
In fact, though we are experiencing a rise in food prices right now, food has historically been getting cheaper and cheaper and mirroring the rising obesity rate in the U.S. So when you’re planning ways to manage the coming food price increases, be sure you don’t sacrifice your health for your food. Remember that the cheapest option isn’t always the best.
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