I should be marking student homework or assignments right now, but I think I need to write this down while it is still fresh. I have been thinking lately about the North American (possibly all Western civilizations?) relationship to food and housing. Perhaps it is because my wife and I just bought our first house, and have now entered into the predicament common to the majority of North Americans: life-long mortgage debt.
It seems to me that a house that provides shelter should not cost you nearly your entire adult life to have the right to live in it. In a previous post I talked about the education debt cycle, but this is an even more extreme debt. We have purchased a very moderately priced house that is within our budget, and it is perfect for us. It is a blessing from God, and we are happy to be here. However, this house will take 25 years to pay off. Essentially the majority of my time is spent working, and the majority of the money made working goes towards paying off the mortgage. In the first 5 years of our mortgage, we will have paid 50 thousand dollars into this mortgage. However, of that 50 grand, roughly only 20 grand will be paying off the house, and the other 30 grand is paying for interest. And this is at a very low mortgage rate of about 3 percent!
It is expensive to not be rich. If I were wealthy (in the traditional sense of the word: money), I would be able to purchase a house outright, and save tens of thousands of dollars that I would normally have had to pay into interest.
Now, on to food. I must first mention that the rest of this mini-essay is based on speculation, as I have not done any research on this theory.
I think that for most of history, and for most people today, the majority of human time is spent in obtaining food.
The rest of the world spends most of their time getting food, and very little of their time on getting housing; where the Western World spends the majority of their time in obtaining housing, and very little time getting food. It seems to me that it should take a person 1-5 years to build a house, and have somewhere to live. It shouldn't be that complicated to build a simple, square house with a roof, especially in Canada where there is no shortage of land available. The rest of their life would then be spent on working to get food to feed their family. In North America we spend almost half our life obtaining a house, and very little time in getting food. We can go to the grocery store or fast food restaurant, and in minutes we can have all the food we need at very little cost.
Since we have such easy access to large amounts of relatively inexpensive food, I think North Americans have a complicated relationship with what they eat. I realize that "all generalizations are false", but I think we have more problems with obesity as a result of this. While we toil away at paying for housing, the rest of the world is toiling away at finding food. If we in North America had to spend most of our precious time working for food, I think there would be less problems with obesity, and with the crazy amount of food wasted.
I am quite tired, so hopefully this made sense. I am curious to hear what other people have to think on this matter.
