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, though. 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. But 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 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 do not actually have the power to recall food products. The list goes on, but flies under the radar. Consumer Reports released an article focusing on what goes into feeding the meats we eat. Chicken can be fed processed feathers, feces, meat and bone. Downer cows—cows too sick and diseased to be sold for meat—are regularly fed to chicken, fish and other cows. Farmed salmon are fed concentrated fish meal and fish oil. It doesn’t take an expert to say that this sounds ridiculous. Why is nobody stopping this practice? Why do we never hear about this on our regular news outlets?

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 to the consumer 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, which 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; this 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. The prevalence of organic food is an example of this. Big companies such as Walmart and Wegmans started looking into organic options when consumers started to grow interested in organic foods. Marketed for their health value due to not utilizing chemical pesticides, organic food became popular with consumers seeking a healthier option after several prolific health scares. With increased demand, organic farmers were able to expand both their business and product line. Nowadays, most supermarkets have an organic section and the selection of organic foods are ever expanding. The same applies to safe food. We can choose to buy free-range eggs and pasture-fed beef. Every time we purchase, we are voting. It is our choice to vote for safety and transparency or blissful ignorance.

But of course, governmental policies are making it very hard to choose, even for those who have a choice. The choice is even harder, and sometimes impossible, for those who don’t. For those less well off, the choice between a cheap burger and a far more expensive healthy meal is made for them, whether they prefer the burger or not. This goes back to the idea of the $1 Big Mac. The poor go for the cheap calories. This produces the illusion of demand and feeds the industries. In turn, the companies produce more supply, resulting in a vicious cycle. Our policies does little to alleviate this and instead, most of them support this trend. It is not enough to educate the public if we are barraged by attempts to un-educate, attempts 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.