Walking toward the back of Kroger to buy some ground beef, one notices very quickly that the expensive stuff is on the left and degrades as you move to the right.

• On the far left is Laura’s Lean Beef.  It is organic and farm-raised, and 93% fat free.  It is $5.49 per pound.
• To it’s right is lean beef, 93% fat free.  Who knows where it’s from: $4.49 per pound.
• Next is ground sirloin at 90% fat free.  It claims to be Angus: $4.69 per pound.
• Then there’s ground round at 85% fat free.  Doesn’t make any claims: $3.99 per pound.
• Then ground chuck at 80% fat free.  Yum: $3.39 per pound
• And of course, there’s hamburger at 75%.  That tasty stuff is ¼ fat (or at least I hope that’s what makes up that 25%): On sale for$2.58 per pound.  Or $2.38 if you buy it in a tube!

As I am staring at these choices and thinking about the cost and the benefits, I also notice the other option.  Sitting at the bottom is a massive foam package of pounds and pounds of hamburger, which I can only assume drops that price even more, and any interest I have in a nice juicy burger is immediately replaced by the incredible urge to shower while eating some celery, after emptying my bowels of whatever disaster I ate for lunch.  In other words, I am struck by the disgusting nature of how our food divides us.  We don’t buy the organic beef because it is so expensive, so we settle for sirloin.  Someone, worse off than us, looks at the sirloin and picks the ground round.  And the serious penny pinchers buy that disgusting bucket o’ beef/fat.

There is a truly simple principle at work that none of us ever questions: why is it that the wealthiest get the best food?

The people that need the best food can’t afford it.

I’m not looking for an economics lesson, but I’m asking a moral question: why do we need to display all of these “options” when few are able to make any choice at all.

Again, don’t get smart and say “they don’t have to eat beef—they can eat chicken”.  That’s not my point.  Focus!

The people that can afford to choose really can choose the good beef.  The poor can save up and buy the good beef, but then eat only carbs for the next five meals.  Or they can get the disgusting, unhealthy crud at the end of the line and actually get several servings of protein.  Either way, their health and very livelihood is on the brink.

The people that need the best food can’t afford it.

It isn’t just beef, but that’s a perfect example.  It is in the produce section and even the cereal aisle.  Healthy food costs more.  Crud is cheap.  In our supermarkets, only the wealthy can afford to eat healthy.

What would happen if we stopped thinking of the value of the product, but the product’s value to our society?

A couple of years ago, one of the big chain grocers bought the last supermarket in the city of Detroitand closed it.  Now there are no supermarkets in the whole city.  This isn’t a city that’s squished into 12 square miles or anything, full of little boroughs, but a big, sprawling city with no supermarkets.  To get groceries, people go to dollar stores and those retailers full of canned goods and Grade F meats.  A whole city, full of poverty, and no healthy food around for miles.

As we listen to the leaders in Washington fighting over how to eliminate debt through draconian cuts to one area of public life or another rather than look at any other options, think about our food.  Think about who is already suffering.  Think about how unfair and unjust it is that they are already more likely to have heart disease at 40 because of where they live and what they do for a living, and on top of that, all they can afford is that disgusting bucket o’ beef.

This is the face of America’s great crisis, not abstract accounting.

Check out this updated response to food justice concerns.