Chapter 52

Cheap Food, Expensive Healthcare 

Harley Halvorson walked a wet six blocks from his home on Jefferson Street to the newspaper office on River Street long before dawn. The little town on the banks of the Upper Iowa slept through the night’s last breaths while the few sodium street lamps it could afford smeared low clouds and mist overhead with unnatural light. He could not see across the bridge. The thick air felt like freezing rain before snow.

“When was the last time you enjoyed going to the doctor?” he muttered.

Harley unlocked the front door to the Weekly Bulletin, stepped into the musty smell of old type, soybean ink and newsprint, and walked to his desk in the dark.

With the repetition of years he turned on his drafting lamp, punched the 0/1 power switch on his computer, scooped up his coffee mug and walked to the sink in the corner of the small editorial office. “Zero to one, already down a point,” he said aloud as he did every day. His manual Smith-Corona typewriter, long gone, replaced by a string of secondhand machines made by “micro-this” or “digital-that,” remained unmatched for sheer clatter of words running well ahead of deadline.

This morning’s deadline ticked like a metronome against the weekly editorial. Other than a few headlines and a little rewrite, once that sucker was done, he would turn it all over to Marcy, the able compositor who shepherded the “Bull” (maybe “fought” was a better verb) weekly into production and delivery. If the editorial didn’t show up on time, she would greek the space and ship the files to the printer in La Crosse regardless. Harley could read Latin, but his customers complained the only time she’d done that – folks thought they were reading something pre-Vatican II. Not bad for Lutherans, come to think of it.

‘Ley (“Lee” to his friends) Halvorson hated editorials. He’d heard of a dog who could write better opinion than he. Yet people expected somebody whom they paid $36 a year for 52 issues to have a thought or two about things of import. They paid their tithes and offerings when they went church, too. They didn’t have to like the sermon, they just wanted to hear what the pastor was thinking. So write he did. Every week.

“What about the pharmacy for dessert, then, coffee with that?” Through long experience, prickly editor Halvorson recalled that the Smith-Corona talked a better line o’ type if he put a little heart into it, or at least a little bile.

The coffeemaker dribbled away as Harley cleared his mind of the other things that bothered him, editorial grist he would grind out in weeks ahead, pounding the paint off his plastic keyboard, hammering words onto the failing screen before him. The thing flickered, but waited for thoughts beyond raw cuts in the bluffs, wounds in sedimentary sandstone and limestone eons old, cat-skinned by developers carving out lots for large commuter and retirement homes with a view of the river. Wild and scenic, you bet. And night-piercing strobe-lit radio and cell phone towers that downed neotropical songbirds by the thousands every spring and fall. Clear channel, starry night, you got it. Sinkholes and atrazine in the groundwater -- how about a little extra nitrogen with that for your well, sir? Or, antibacterial soap with triclosan, just an everyday disinfectant that turns to dioxin in sunlight. He mused. What kind of soup does that make with antibiotic-laced feedlot runoff in Oneota Creek?

Finally, with a first cup of coffee near at hand, Harley began to write.

Cheap Food, Expensive Healthcare

My doctor bill now exceeds my grocery bill. As a person with a more-or-less logical mind, I’m wondering lately if it’s just my family balance sheet, or do my neighbors realize this also?

At first, I thought this was a function of my age. At least until I talked to the father of a family of four down the street, and with a younger friend over coffee. I then began to think more about what I eat, where it comes from, how much it really costs. Most of my food is considerably processed. It has traveled great distances. I don’t know the people who grow it or what they put on it. I don’t know the people who manufacture my food or what they put in it, or even much about what they put my food in, except that it makes plenty of garbage and recycling on my curb. I wonder. Am I what I eat?

Meanwhile, I notice that the small farms and dairies once thick in this county vanished over many years in favor of large corn and soybean and confinement operations. (Did you hear the one about the Inside Cow and the Outside Cow?) The farmers who graced my table via Trigby’s Market just 40 years ago with a steady supply of milk, cream, butter, eggs, hens, veal and beef, mutton, wheat and barley flour, oatmeal, fresh produce and fruit in season, and much more, are, for the most part, gone. Now, some of these farmers died, and some moved away, but many retired or took jobs in the bigger towns around just to keep other food on the table. A few heard the call to “get big or get out.” They stayed in because they wanted to survive, at least as “operators.” But how do their doctor bills read? I wonder.

You may say that I am a sentimentalist, and old fool with a typewriter, but I can tell you that agriculture is no growth industry in this region. Wendell Berry, a far better writer than I, points out that our modern industrial agriculture is high cost and low profit. Where’s the growth in that for small farmers, for family farmers? Yet, there is a growth industry in this region and it’s healthcare. We have two of the finest healthcare institutions in the country within an hour or so of here. One of those is even world famous. Drive another two hours or more, and you’ll find half a dozen fine organizations dedicated to making you well, to curing what ails you, to educating you and your children about your obesity. Why some former farmers, man and woman, now work in these places. Good pay, good health insurance, good benefits.

But when was the last time you enjoyed going to the doctor? (Pregnant mothers excepted.) Do you get as much pleasure from that as from your Sunday dinner? How about the pharmacy after the doc? Is that pharmaceutical product as good as apple pie with ice cream for dessert? We have all complained about rising prices, but folks, we have been eating cheap food for years. So cheap, in fact, that it's subsidized heavily every half decade by our tax dollars in a new and ever more mammoth Farm Bill that greatly supports "agribusiness." While farmers’ profits are whittled away in the name of industrial efficiency for these agribusinesses' equipment and chemicals and interest rates and fuel (oil, for Pete’s sake) and transportation, our rich land and clean water are impoverished, blanketed, and polluted with things that apparently make us sick. But not to worry, we have great healthcare all around, and furthermore, it’s profitable and creates lots of jobs! Is this what cheap food really costs?

Nonetheless, my friends, there is a bright spot here, a bright spot there. Small farmers are coming back. They grow fine, healthy food that’s pure pleasure to prepare and eat. They live on land they love and care for greatly. You can find them if you look, ask around, talk to your neighbors about where their food comes from, and who farms up slope of your water supply. Next spring look for your doctors, nurses, and pharmacists at the Farmers’ Market. If you don’t see them, your local supermarket manager, or your county, state and federal legislators, either, find out why not. Ask them why the Conservation Security Program, that pays farmers to conserve the land, lies bottled up in Washington. Ask them why we should trust the present administration with the safety of our food, when it cannot provide us clean air and clean water.

The Weekly Bulletin’s front door slammed. “Good morning, Mr. Halvorson! How’s that editorial coming?” called a cheery voice. “Got to put this weekly to bed sometime, ya know!”

“’Morning, Marcy. I’ll get to it in a minute. I’m thinking.”

 ###

Next... Chapter 53.

Thanks for these resources:

When Democracy Comes Home to Stay, by Adam Warthesen, p. 5, Land Stewardship Letter, Vol 21, No. 4 (.pdf)

Rules for a local economy by Wendell Berry

A New Agricultural Policy for the US, The Minnesota Project (111K .pdf)

Office of the State Archaeologist of Iowa

Sunlight Converts Common Anti-bacterial Agent To Dioxin MINNEAPOLIS / ST. PAUL, Science Daily, 04/15/03.

Photochemical conversion of triclosan to 2,8-dichlorodibenzo-p-dioxin in aqueous solution
Douglas E. Latch, Jennifer L. Packer, William A. Arnold, and Kristopher McNeill; Department of Chemistry, University of Minnesota, Department of Civil Engineering, University of Minnesota. Published in the Journal of Photochemistry and Photobiology A: Chemistry, 2003, 158/1 63-66.

John Gabbert writes and edits The Upper Basin Chronicles.

Upper Mississippi Basin Stakeholder Network and The Upper Basin Chronicles © 2003 Saint Mary's University of Minnesota.

Your comments are invaluable. Please email feedback to the author via (mailto link) The Upper Basin Chronicles, Chapter 52.

The characters presented here are purely fictional, and neither bear resemblance to persons living or dead, nor represent the views or opinions of Saint Mary’s University of Minnesota.