How important is free global trade to your living standards? The answer can be easily illustrated with reference to a sandwich made by one Andy George late last year. Worried that Americans are increasingly clueless about how food is produced he set about making a single chicken and cheese sandwich from scratch on screen.
He made his own cheese, harvested his own wheat, collected honey to sweeten his bread, killed a chicken himself, evaporated sea water to get salt to pickle his homegrown cucumber and grew his own sunflower seeds for oil. The whole thing cost him six months and around $1,500 or 300 times the cost of the average sandwich.
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