Even in Oz it's not good, although we haven't yet achieved the true hideousness of the US food chain. So our food costs are lower but still obscene (total cost, not dollar cost).

The one thing you slid past was the vegetarian option - if a higher meat component pushes the cost up, lowering it pushes the cost down. For the most part, anyway - me eating roadkill when I'm cycle touring is probably fairly neutral, in that few people farm animals specifically to make them into roadkill, but a lot of native animals become roadkill.

Also, talk to us about packaging, Brad, that's another exciting area of "just how dumb are we, really?"

And finally, have you looked at scanning/OCR recently? I've bought a Sony PRS-505 (my first ever Sony {hoik spit} product), and I'm struggling to find some books online, so I'm using my 30D and a sheet of glass to scan books and OCR them. Slow, but beats paying another $2000 for a decent sheet-feed scanner and cutting the spines off my books. There's got to be a better way...