Imagine a world where everything is the same, where even the giant box of sixty-four Crayola crayons—the magic box that fractured the spectrum into such treasures as periwinkle, fuchsia, and burnt sienna — has been reduced to one dull monotone, and one made of inferior but cheap-to-produce wax, all in the name of efficiency and profit margins. What a sad place that would be.

This is the world where commodity has finally taken over. But how far away from that humdrum dystopia are we? We are a nation fixed on commodities and hooked on convenience. Too often we shop solely motivated by price points that can only be maintained by corporate economies of the grandest scale.

One of the problems with commodity goods— products resulting from the lowest common denominator and the strategy of fast-faster-fastest, the attitude that drives the global economy—is that the price never reflects the true cost of the goods being traded, such as the impact on the environment and fair labor practices.

The real problem is that cheap shit breaks, and the nuisance it causes far outweighs any up-front savings, and largely, you can’t fix something that was mass-produced. It just needs to be replaced.

Quality may seem more expensive when you’re at the checkout counter, but quality isn’t about cost, it’s about value. Quality is patient. Quality takes the long view. Quality takes time, and is evident by its lasting character.

There is always the acceptable low end of any product — not every car can be a Bentley, not every guitar a genuine Les Paul — but the sign of a commodity, on the other hand, is that it is made and marketed to be the cheapest version of its kind, mass-produced with a disdain for differentiation and a lust for low cost and high profit. And so we get cars that break down, and guitars that look pretty from a distance but can’t stay in tune.

Which is why commodity food, and especially meat, sucks. It is against everything this book advocates and celebrates. Commodity in the food world is the exact opposite of slow food.

A commodity by its very definition should approach zero qualitative differentiation across the market. A commodity is fungible, as the economists like to say, meaning that the market doesn’t care who the producer is, and the less signature, meaning the less you can tell anything apart, the better. Personal style, charming inconsistencies, local flavor, anything original, exceptional, or even marginally unique needs to be removed. “From the taste of wheat it is not possible to tell who produced it, a Russian serf, a French peasant, or an English capitalist,” Karl Marx once mused.

Once upon a time, the concept of commodity in food was intended to make certain that farmers were paid a fair price even in bad years. In eighteenth-century Japan the shogunate set a price for rice that would assure farmers and everyone involved in the supply chain, from delivery men to merchants, a living wage, and guarantee that everyone — including the samurai, who were paid in rice — could afford to eat.

But these days, the “going rate” — the market price of a commodity — is manipulated by the robber barons of Wall Street, likely in collusion with Big Ag, which games the sys- tem to maximize profits, crushing small family farms in the process. This numbers game favors output and gross intake over the more intangible yet enduring qualities of satisfaction, reputation, and legacy, not to mention what is actually good for you.

Efficiency is admirable. However, when efficiency is championed over quality or safety in food, when profit margin pushes for chickens that grow like weeds but are so sick they need to be juiced with an ocean of chemicals just so they don’t die before we kill them, we all suffer.

The ins and outs of trading food commodities are sophisticated and difficult for anyone without a degree in economics to parse. But know that the kind of commodity trading that Goldman Sachs and its peers practice has helped push food prices to historic highs—money that never reaches the independent farmer—and has been a major factor in worldwide food shortages. Hunger is a justice issue, not a poverty issue, as my friend Tony Butler, the executive director of Bread and Life, likes to say.

We want to see all consumers take other factors into consideration besides price per pound when they buy food, and understand that anyone who buys commodity goods is basically complicit in their crimes. If an industrial farmer is dumping poison in a river and paying a relative pittance of a fine as part of “the cost of doing business,” and you’re still frying his chickens, you are part of the problem.

It’s time we stopped using money as a shield for the barons of industrial farming—the claim that healthy meat is too expensive, or that poor people can’t afford it, must be squashed. Our goal should be to feed everyone the best food possible. We demand a new commodity rate for sustainable meat, for food that is healthy and produced not in factories but on farms. All people have the right to eat this way.

Excerpted from The Carnivore’s Manifesto: Eating Well, Eating Responsibly, and Eating Meat by Patrick Martins with Mike Edison, published by Little, Brown and Company. Copyright 2014 Patrick Martins and Mike Edison.

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