Egg prices going up again and Americans are losing their minds, again. And I’m once again trying to figure out how to talk about the underpinnings of the industrial capitalist food system when most people just can’t see or believe so many obvious things about it, like the fact that even with rising prices, overall profit margins in the grocery business are still razor thin.

Or the fact that we in the US still spend less of our household income on food than people anywhere else. In. The. World. (something I’m reminded of every time I cross the border to visit my family in Canada). Don’t take my word for it. The USDA will back me up. So will the CIA. And lots of reputable scholars like this guy.  

As Errol Schweitzer shows in this morning’s edition of The Checkout, the German juggernaut Aldi is cleaning up in this moment of consumer outrage and frugality. Its model of limited selection and labor costs, hyper-efficient distribution, and relentlessly centralized planning—what Schweitzer calls “Grocery retail, stripped to the bone”—seems to be just what many Americans want and need right now.

And as with so many inconvenient truths about the cushy and energy-intensive way we’ve been living in the industrialized world, facts don’t seem to get traction when they come up against people’s fears (hunger), anger (Biden), or generalized and rational but unacknowledged anxiety about all the things about that world that are—and often need to be—falling apart.

Maybe the thought of having to eat less of something we like and want—even temporarily—just creates too much cognitive dissonance in this land of promise and plenty. Maybe low food prices are LITERALLY the hill that Americans want to die on. What’s an educator to do with that?