Cheap No More
Casually cruising through my morning reads last week—I’m a subscriber to WaPo, NY Times, and the LA Times—one article they all touched upon outside of the scope of the daily world horrors was about **GASP** a $16 dollar McDonald’s hamburger and I exclaimed, “It’s about damn time!” sending the cats scrambling from their warm spot between me and the fireplace.
I’ve been involved in the food business one way or another for almost forty years now. I’ve grown the food, harvested the food, packaged the food, cooked the food, sold the food, and written about the food. I’ve been on the front lines in the grocery store and behind the scenes in the kitchen. I’ve been on commercial fishing boats in rough seas and plucked turkeys in weather so cold the water in the hoses froze so others could have a nice holiday dinner on their table. Feeding others is not for the faint of heart.
I read in earnest about some TikTok post from a kid in Idaho who ordered a “limited edition “smoky” double quarter pounder BLT with fries and a Sprite” and got hit with a bill for $16.10. Everyone was outraged. They blamed it on the President of the United States! How dare he allow McDonald’s, one of the largest international fast food chains with an annual revenue of $22 billion dollars gouge customers for a burger. The outrage! Political pundits quickly tied the cost of the burger to the outcome of the 2024 election and I thought if this is what it comes down to, as a species we’re f*&#@d.
There are so many moving parts that go into getting that burger into a box, each which costs money and all of those costs are rising for a number of reasons from increasing fuel costs to fair labor practices that pay workers a living wage.
Fast food was always equated with cheap food, but as I began to break down the actual costs of each ingredient, there’s no doubt about how fast food companies made all their money. The average cost of a fast food burger in America today is $5.75. That’s with a quarter pound patty.
That’s not from grass-fed/finished beef or Certified Organic beef or pastured beef or beef grown with no hormone implants or antibiotic use. That’s feedlot beef out of middle America. That’s beef that’s been trucked into massive dirt lots where all the food gets trucked in and then the cattle get trucked out and then the meat gets trucked all over the country. All the feed, predominantly grain, takes fuel to plant, fertilize, apply pesticides/herbicides/fungicides, harvest, handle, and truck to the feedlots. And that’s just the beef!
That $16.10 burger also had bacon on it which was smoked. Add in the whole process above for the pigs because that bacon isn’t coming from local woodlot or pastured pork who forages acorns and hickory nuts.
The burger is also served on a bun…made with wheat, topped with sesame seeds. When McDonald’s first opened the price of wheat was less than $2 a bushel; now it’s close to $6 a bushel.
Of course a burger isn’t a burger unless you’ve got lettuce, tomato, mayo, and ketchup, maybe even a slice of onion. Want to go down an ugly rabbit hole? Just google slave labor and tomato. You’ll find out which fast food restaurant chains refuse to pay tomato pickers a few more cents a pound.
Mayonnaise is made with eggs and we all know what’s happening to the price of eggs, too.
So I did some math based upon the ingredients from the farmers market. I’m not going to go into the individual breakdown of each product so you’ll have to trust me on the grand total which came out to $4.19 for the same viral burger. That’s using premium ingredients from your farmers!
Let’s get this straight. Fast food might be convenient, but it’s never been cheap and today it’s become downright expensive. Instead of blaming the cost of a burger on the government, consider all the hands that touch the ingredients that go into your food. For me, it’s worth the effort of cooking my own burger to know who produced my ingredients and that the lion’s share of the profits went into the farmer’s pocket.