>
>I'm kind of thinking she and who ever she is feeding (her family &
>friends?) maybe a tad worse off in the long run and the  Hot Dog will have
>become a very expensive "saving"?


There is the reality that a great many Americans - I'm one of them - simply
do not have the income to support a  diet  of $13-buck steaks.  Thirteen
dollars would feed me and my  daughter for about three days, and I
grow/forage a lot of my food. Then there are the millions of Americans who
are so poor and hungry they eat in soup kitchens or go without.

There's also the "diet for a small planet" issues that caused many '60's
and 70's folks to turn to vegetarianism. Cattle are not very efficient
converters of food energy, nor is American agriculture in general
energy-efficient, returning less than one calorie in food value ( whether
you feed it to cattle or humans) for every 11 expended. Most agribusiness
energy expenditures are non-renewable fossil fuels. The Worldwatch
Institute has done a lot of seminal research on world food supplies and how
we will manage to feed a burgeoning population; I can't bring the precise
figures to mind right now, but the amount  of land needed to produce the
grain necessary to feed each Chinese a single egg per day is staggering,
never mind if they were to switch over to beef-eating! Private ownership
and maldistribution of land makes the notion of foraging wild game or
free-ranging everybody's egg and meat-producing animals politically
untenable.

There must be others out there contemplating these economic and ethical
issues. Please forgive if the subject is politically incorrect or too has
already whipped to death on this list.