[vidarh]

I guess he's saying that for food to be this cheap seen with our eyes, there needs to be a substantial oversupply. And since there are physical limitations to how much food we are able to actually eat, if there's an oversupply a bunch of it will be thrown away, whether by farmers, distributors or consumers:

Either they fail to sell the food, or the low prices gets consumers to buy more than they need.

[SixSigma]

Food only looks cheap at the point of consumption. Millions of tax dollars went into the subsidy.

[Retric]

Depends on the type, some food receives no subsidy. Meat tends to receive a huge subsidys.

[toomuchtodo]

http://farm.ewg.org/

2013 Farm Subsidy Database is above. Almost every crop is subsidized in one way or another.

[Retric]

"82 percent of farms in Washington did not collect subsidy payments - according to USDA. Ten percent collected 67 percent of all subsidies."

[alexeisadeski3]

Relevant number is percent of food not percent of farms.

[Retric]

I never said anything about percent of food, my comment was based on type of food. We have huge subsidies for some types of food. That does not mean ex: pot growers get a large subsidy. It's really a fairly narrow group of foods which get the vast majority of subsidies and are then produced in truly mind boggling quantities.

There was a great corn documentary a while ago where a small processor kept making larger larger grain silo's for a while as productivity increased. Until, they simply gave up they now just have a huge pile with a tarp over it. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1112115/