The purpose of the food system is to ____.

Prime Future 230: the newsletter for innovators in livestock, meat, and dairy

If you are reading this in the US, you might still be wearing stretchy pants after Thanksgiving feasting, as our forefathers intended. 

Which makes it the perfect time to talk about a tricky subject. 

Over the last five years in the United States, food prices have risen 28% while food insecurity has risen to 13.5%. That's 1 in 8 families with what the USDA defines as “a household-level economic and social condition of limited or uncertain access to adequate food.”  

FoodFix author Helena Bottemiller Evich calls food insecurity “a measure of precarity.” Precarity is not commonly used like it’s word-cousin, precarious, which means “not securely held or in position; dangerously likely to fall or collapse; dependent on chance; uncertain.”

Now reconcile that with this aspiration expressed in a recent LinkedIn post from the CEO of a prominent NGO:

“Going forward, consumers will need to cover more of the true cost of the food that they consume. So, it is quite likely that the cost of food will increase not just as a result of weather variability but also to ensure that producers can respond to market demand for food in the future.”

Let’s discuss how flawed this terrible take is and why it matters so much how policymakers and those influencing policymakers think about the purpose of the food system.