The following statement was made to me in an email last night, and it got me thinking. "If government did not subsidize the meat and.... The following statement was made to me in an email last night, and it got me thinking.

"If government did not subsidize the meat and dairy industries (18 percent of greenhouse gases), and the suburbs (driving cars releases 17 percent of greenhouse gases), we wouldn't have the problem to begin with. Most people would be vegetarian and live in cities without cars from economic necessity. Government is not the solution to our problems. Government is the problem."

I initially responded that before there were subsidies, people were not vegetarian and lived in rural areas. I wasn't making a judgment, simply throwing it out there as food for thought.

Sure enough a response came back: "Maybe before the industrial age, people lived outside of cities, but for the past several hundred years, we had farmers and we had mostly city-dwellers. In addition, meat was a luxury, not a routine."

I don't know much about the history of the subsidies, but the idea that people had mostly lived in cities for the past several hundred years seemed a bit far-fetched. I decided to look into just when urban residents in the United States outnumbered rural residents. It looks like the answer is somewhere between the 1910 and 1920 census, just short of 100 years ago.

For the bulk of the years after 1920, people have mostly lived in cities and mostly relied on cars for transportation, with the earlier years being less-reliant on the automobile and the later much more reliant. That struck me as quite interesting. As much as I may like to think otherwise, our urban (not including suburban) history has never accounted for the way most people live. We went from being mostly rural to mostly suburban, with the probable exception of a few years in the 1920s and 1930s.

As for farming subsidies, it looks like they started with Hoover and were continued and expanded by Roosevelt. Hoover's program was the Farm Board, which fixed price floors for wheat and cotton only. Of course the result was many farmers switched from other crops to wheat and cotton and as a result, we produced too much of it. Roosevelt supported the Agricultural Adjustment Act, which dealt with the problem of oversupply by paying farmers not to produce. Seems clear one government program required another to solve the mess it created!

Meat subsidies seem to date to the 1940s.

So what was the diet like in the early 1900s before these subsidies? Here are some quotes I found on the topic from Foodtimeline.org.

1900-1909: New products flooded the American markets. Corporate giants such as the National Biscuit Company (Nabisco), Campbells, Swift, General Mills, Quaker Oats, Kraft, Jell-O, and Hershey's provided products, "invented" recipes and created a steady demand for a wider variety of foods. Waves of immigrants introduced new foods and flavors. The first Italian-style pizzeria opened in New York City 1905. Advances in transportation, food preservation, and home storage began to equalize local food availability and lessen dependence upon seasonal variations.

1910-1919: What people eat in all times and places depends upon who they are (ethnic, religious heritage), where they live (urban centers, rural outposts) and how much money they have (rich have more choices than poor). Which means? In the USA during the 1910s newly immigrated Italian families ate very different food from South Carolina plantation owners, West Virginia coal miners, Chicago businessmen and San Francisco Chinese.

1920-1929: 1920s America was an fascinating time for food. When else would it be possible to juxtapose Prohibition (popular no alcohol sentiment co-existing with underground speakeasies), exotic culinary experimentation (Chinese food was popular), opulent wealth (Delmonicos & 21), extreme poverty (tenement kitchens), social nutrition movements (home economics & Ladies Aid Organizations) and vegetarian alternatives?

Not much of this sheds light on how much meat was eaten compared to today, but cookbooks from the early century are not lacking in meat-based recipes. A history of the Union Stock Yards in Chicago may be a good place to look. And with a quick glance it becomes clear that capitalism was already making meat available and affordable long before meat subsidies. "From the Civil War until the 1920s and peaking in 1924, more meat was processed in Chicago than in any other place in the world."

Back to the initial statement, "If government did not subsidize the meat and dairy industries and the suburbs we wouldn't have the problem (of global warming) to begin with." It's clearly understood now that both the methane from cows and automobiles contribute to global warming. Like in the 1920s, if you took away the wheat subsidies, you would expect to have less wheat. Today if you took away the meat subsidies, you may end up with less meat and fewer cars, but while I've long-since thought the relationship strong, it doesn't seem completely accurate that there wouldn't be suburbs if you stopped the subsidies and if the last century and a half of American culinary life is any indication, there would still be steak houses. Should there be? That's another question.