As much as we trust the free market, it isn’t always honest with us. It often tells lies. Big lies. Specifically, it lies about the cost of things. For example, your local supermarket may offer hamburger for $6 a pound. That’s the retail price, but it’s nowhere near the true cost.

The cost of producing a pound of beef includes a host of social and environmental costs, for example the loss of species as cropland takes over habitat, groundwater depletion, the harms to health from pesticides, and disasters caused by greenhouse gas emissions from cow burps, manure and farm equipment.

These are not abstractions; they are real costs. If you had to pay them at the counter, your hamburger would be priced a very great deal higher than $6.

Calculating them, however, is a challenge. What is the cost of a species of pollinator going extinct? The cost of an aquifer drying up? The costs to our healthcare systems of pollutants? The costs of fires, floods, storms, rising sea levels and other disasters caused by global warming? It’s a challenging task.

Nonetheless, the costs are hugely important (and too often overlooked), so attempts are being made to calculate them. I have posted previously about efforts to calculate the “social cost” of carbon—the economic impact that climate change caused by additional CO2 in the atmosphere has on agriculture, health, energy use and other aspects of the economy.

Economists also attempt to develop “true cost accounting” specifically for the damage caused by agriculture. An analysis by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization indicates that the hidden costs on society and the environment of the worlds’s agrifood systems amount to at least $10 trillion US a year.

A pioneering Dutch nonprofit called True Price has worked with the UN and the Rockefeller foundation to come up with environmental costs of common foods produced in the U.S. They considered climate change caused by greenhouse gas emissions, water use, and ecosystem effects from land use.

So what is the true cost of your hamburger? The answer is a lot. Pound for pound, beef had by far the highest environmental costs of the foods they examined. Starting with a store price of $5.34 a pound and then adding in costs for emissions from cow burps and manure, water use including that used to grow cattle feed, and ecosystem effects from land use, added another $22.02 for a final price of $27.36. That makes for a pricey burger.

Chicken was much cheaper: $2.20 a pound retail plus only $1.83 for environmental costs yielding a total price of $4.03. Tofu came to a mere $2.63 total. Eating soy directly is vastly more efficient than feeding it to animals as middlemen.

These are real costs. They will be paid one way or another even if the free market suggests otherwise.

Just as we want ingredients listed on our food packages for the sake of our health, maybe we should start listing the true costs of our food on packages for the health of the planet. If people saw what their choices were really costing, even if they didn’t have to pay them at the counter, they may make very different choices.