What goes into a $1 MacDonald’s Big Mac? Well, according to McDonalds’ website, it includes two all beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles and onions on a sesame-seed bun. Now let’s look a little closer and focus on just the cheese. Its main ingredients are milk, cream, water, cheese cultures and cheese enzymes. Looks good. The list doesn’t stop there. For creamy, even melting, there is sodium citrate and sodium phosphate in the cheese. For texture and flavor, there’s salt, citric acid, lactic acid, acetic acid, sodium pyrophosphate and natural flavor. For consistent color, there is “color added”. For slice separation, there is soy lecithin and to prevent spoilage, there is sorbic acid. This is all that goes into one tiny slice of American cheese. Let us put aside how over-processed our food has become. The bigger question is, how can all that work culminate in a burger that cost a mere dollar? Is the system actually so streamlined and efficient or are there a multitude of costs that are deliberately hidden from us?

In 2008, the documentary Food Inc shocked the public by revealing what goes into their food. It also exposed the laws and regulations that allow for such horrors to happen. While it seems like food policies are drafted with our interests in mind, it is actually the opposite. Many of the policies protect the food industry instead, placing blinkers on the consumer by deliberately withholding information and creating the illusion of cheap, safe food. Food industries fight almost desperately against any sort of transparency. They fought against calorie information, trans fat, country-of-origin labelling for meats and GMO labelling. Veggie Libel Laws make it against the law to criticize the food industry’s foods. In Colorado, you can actually go to prison for it. The Cheeseburger bills makes it incredibly hard for consumers to sue food producers for enabling obesity. The FDA and the USDA have such a convoluted division of responsibilities yet does not actually have the power to recall food products. The list goes on, but flies under the radar.

All this is enabled by the practice of regulatory capture. Many FDA and USDA officials were former employees of these big food companies that the organization regulates. Monsanto’s former executive Michael R. Taylor is Commissioner of the FDA. Margaret Miller was a chemical laboratory supervisor at Monsanto but her job in the FDA now involves approving reports like those she wrote. This conflict of interest has resulted in heavy subsidies on the fast food industries that feed the big meat and corn industries. A meal at MacDonald’s isn’t actually cheaper than a healthy, home cooked meal. It is heavily subsidized to make it appear so. Policies subsidize the ingredients, the factories and even the workers who put together these cheap burgers. Over half of all fast food workers are enrolled in one or more public assistance programs, getting 7 billion dollars of aid. This enables fast food companies to pay minimum wage and further subsidizes their costs. As these atrocities pile up, it creates the illusion that unhealthy fast food is cheaper, tastier and by far more desirable than healthy food and creates a conundrum for the poor whose financial strains denies them the power of choice.

The individual consumer can, of course, influence this. This is where the business oriented system works in the customer’s favor. If there is a demand, there will be a supply. But governmental policies are making it very hard to choose, for those who have a choice. It is not enough to educate the public if we are barraged by attempts to un-educate enabled by the very organizations that are supposed to protect us. Eating better needs to start from the policies, or even by ensuring that food safety laws are really ensuring only that.