08/29/2026
"Good steak! But 120$ for three ribeye? Over 40$ a pound, and it was good, but I think it needed someone to come to my house and grilled it for me for that price. Two Stars. - Ace"
Ace, I’m glad you took the time to share your review, because I think it raises a worthwhile conversation. You’re not the only one who’s commented on our prices seeming awful high - in fact, you should meet our friend Lenny - he thought we were ripping people off even way back before cattle supplies sunk to a 75 year low and beef costs went sky high.
I did find your review a bit amusing, since you paid the price on your own free will (as none of our products are compulsory despite their clear health benefit) and acknowledged it was good, yet still gave us the rarest of all - a 2-star rating. It makes me think, what were you expecting that you didn’t get? I started wondering if you’re just a tough grader, and I got curious - so I checked out some of your other reviews, and saw where you heaped praise on the local Taco Bell and Burger King with raving 5-star reviews, and I started to think instead that maybe we don’t want to do the things it requires of a food enterprise to achieve the pinnacle of your grading scale.
It certainly appears that, at least on matters of food, price matters more to you than value, and I’m afraid you’re not alone - that seems to be exactly where too many millions of Americans come down on the issue. I was among them myself, in fact. One of the worst falsehoods I learned in college was that I could eat whatever I wanted and it wouldn’t matter. And it didn’t, for a while - at least it didn’t seem to - so I kept living that way. So what if I completed the $10 Taco Bell Challenge (trying to eat $10 worth of food off the Taco Bell menu used to be a feat in the days of the 59 cent taco) or lived off of fast food meals fried in canola oil - if I didn’t get sick, it didn’t hurt me, right? No harm, no foul, as they say. But after a while, as I got a bit older, and my metabolism slowed down, and my own health got a bit worse, I started learning more about food and how our food affects us, and it started to matter to me a whole lot more, because I realized I wasn’t really getting what I was paying for, but I was definitely paying for what I was getting.
It’s quite strange when you think about it, isn’t it? We’ve got precious little more sacred to us than our health, and we’ll rarely even ask about price when it comes down to a medical procedure or treatment - but when it comes to what we put in our bodies every day - the thing that impacts our health more than anything else - we too often look only to the bottom dollar.
That really seems to get to the root of your critique, doesn’t it? That general intuition that food should be cheap, and when it isn’t, there’s a problem. Especially local food - if it's raised locally, without all the transportation costs, why does it cost more? Shouldn’t the same food cost less, if you don’t have the same costs? But what if we’ve got that exactly wrong? What if it’s not the same food at all? What if cheap is a warning sign, not an opportunity?
Food - at least, what we call food, that’s consumed en masse today in America - is cheap, by any historical standard. Yes, it’s gone up a bit these last few years - but 100 years ago, Americans spent 40% of our income on the food we consume (it’s still that way in low income countries, by the way). Today, the number is near 10% - down by a factor of four. Hidden in all of those savings is the fact that our food is not the same - it’s more highly processed, less nutrient dense, less quality, treated with chemicals and filled with additives and preservatives that artificially change the flavor and the shelf life. And in the process, the processing companies that do the processing profit more, and the farmer earns less. The farmer’s share of the food dollar has dropped by at least the same amount - from over 40% to just over 10%.
The reality is, we think we’re paying less, but we’re actually paying more and getting less, and eating worse, and it shows up not in our grocery bill but in our hospital bill, as the cost of healthcare as a share of GDP has increased by - not coincidentally, mind you - a factor of 4. The thing is, Ace, growing real food the right way is hard, and it’s expensive. If you don’t believe me, buy a calf, or plant a tomato seed in your yard. When they treat your food with herbicides and pesticides and steroids and chemical fertilizers and additives and fillers, all those chemicals and petroleum waste products make it grow bigger and yield more, and make it less attractive to pests and bacteria so it won’t spoil, and fill it with nutrient-free bulk and lab-created compounds that trigger addiction mechanisms, and all of those shortcuts lower the price tag on the shelf. But none of that stuff is natural. Real food should spoil - why do you want to eat it if nothing else in nature would? Food should make us feel full, not hungrier - if you want to eat more the more you eat, doesn’t that tell you something is off? Food made of food is expensive because it should be expensive, because real food is hard. Maybe the better question is not why is our product so expensive, but why is that fast food meal deal so cheap?
The hidden cost of our broken food system goes beyond just the healthcare cost. The average farmer in the US in an average year loses money, and has to work two or three jobs for the privilege of feeding us. And it gets harder every year, as costs go up, margins get tighter, and times seem to keep getting tougher on the farm - a large reason why su***de rates among farmers are nearly 3 times higher than the general population. We do a good job in our society of honoring our teachers and our military - and rightfully so, both are noble professions rooted in service and sacrifice. My granddad was both a teacher and a veteran, we revere education in our family. But farmers work more and earn less than either one. Wouldn’t it be nice if we started to see people rally for better farmer pay alongside better teacher pay?
The point is, Ace, you’re not alone in thinking that real food just costs too much, and with the economy like it is, you can be forgiven for questioning how much we have to charge for a ribeye. We know as well as anybody you can only spend each dollar once. Of course, you’ve got options - we’ve got plenty of lesser known cuts that sell for much less than a ribeye, so ask us next time you’re in the store and we can show you some great hidden gems. But the bigger point is, maybe you - and a whole lot of us - should start to think a bit differently about what we’re spending for what we’re eating. Because when food is cheap, it’s not an opportunity, it’s a sign of a deeper problem, and somebody’s getting exploited. And maybe that somebody is the farmer, and maybe it’s the restaurant worker… but maybe, it’s also you.
