The high cost of food these days has mostly to do with the skyrocketing cost of grain and of transportation. Here's the silver lining: because of this dynamic, locally-grown produce and grass-fed meat is becoming more affordable. Excerpt from a Times story about why this is better for us all:
The food-should-cost-more cadre wants to change an agricultural system that spends billions of dollars in government subsidies to grow commodities like grain, sugar, corn and animal protein as cheaply as possible.The current system, they argue, is almost completely reliant on petroleum for fertilizers and global transportation. It has led to consolidations of farms, environmentally unsound monoculture and, at the end of the line, a surplus of inexpensive food with questionable nutritional value. Organic products are not subsidized, which is one reason those products are more expensive.
As a result, the theory goes, small farmers can’t make a living, obesity and diabetes are worsening, workers are being exploited and soil and waterways are being damaged. In other words, the true cost of a hamburger or a box of macaroni and cheese may be a lot more than the price.
In the Dallas Morning News the other day, Laurie Bostic and Kim Martin, a couple of small Dallas-area farmers who are doing a land-office business growing produce at their Barking Cat Farm, said that the market is right for more farmers like them to get into the business:
We left our jobs as engineers and went into business together, establishing a Rockwall County farm that grows flowers, herbs and produce for the Dallas-area market. We find the work to be both extremely hard and fantastically rewarding.We started out primarily as specialty cut-flower growers with a small percentage of total planting space in vegetable and herb crops. But due to the overwhelming demand for local, fresh, healthy food, we have done a complete turnaround. Even now, we have a long way to go to meet demand. We have never advertised. Other than a few newspaper stories and mentions in regional magazine articles, our customer base has grown strictly on word of mouth.
Point is: There is a fast-growing demand for the kind of agriculture we practice.
Although we both love working the land, we have also grown into healthy-food advocates since we started farming primarily food crops. The state of our industrialized food system is alarming. The fast-food industry has significantly changed not only our culture but also how we as a nation treat the environment and the creatures we get our food from – and not for the better.
Consumers are getting wise to this and changing the way they shop for food. Yet even if you buy non-processed conventional and organic foods in grocery stores, you may not realize that most of it travels an average of 1,500 miles before it gets to the shelf. That represents a tremendous amount of wasted energy and results in a food product that is neither as healthy nor as nutritious as what we can pick from the ground and feed to somebody within hours of harvest.
So while locally (often organically) grown groceries have been a sensible choice for taste and health reason, they're now becoming more economically reasonable. Why not try your local farmers market this weekend? Or a small meat or produce producer in your area? Local Harvest is a website that will show you what's available where you live, and where to buy it.
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Oh, I should add that I only learned about the local meat delivery from word-of-mouth, so sometimes there are resources available that we might not be aware of. Ask around!
Thanks to Mark for injecting a bit of sanity into the discussion. Local and organic foods are now popular ideologies for upper-middle-class folks trying to be better than the next person, and the idealistic fog generated blocks out most rays of common sense.
What many of these enthusiasts are not told about organic production is that because herbicides are not used more trips through the field with cultivation equipment is required to clear weeds, which uses far more energy than a truck moving on a highway. Thus the _gain_ in organic production is swamped by higher energy use. Or expensive American hand labor is used, driving the prices out of reach of lower and lower-middle class groups.
European local production idealists mounted a campaign against vegetables grown in Africa because they are flown in on GHG-producing jets. Someone decided to compare the energy used from seed to table and found that European mechanized agriculture contributed far more GHG's to the environment than did Kenyan labor-based farmers, to the extent that Kenyan vegetables produced fewer GHG's than European local vegetables , even after air shipping. Not to mention that African and South American vegetables provide much-needed jobs in the developing world.
Much of this debate is really little more than an excuse for protecting American jobs at the expense of people in Africa or South American that live in much more fragile economies, but are not considered neighbors whose interests are worth protecting.
A few things to keep in mind:
1.) As it relates to cash cost and greenhouse gas cost: local is more important than organic. I can understand the aversion to the price of organic. If you can't afford it don't buy it. But it doesn't cost any extra money to read the labels on two cans of vegetables to find out which one come from the U.S. and which one was shipped from the southern hemisphere.
2.) I don't understand why people think they have to have beef at every meal. Yes, local grass fed beef costs more. Eat it one night a week instead of three and you're probably now saving money. Protein comes from lots of sources. Beans are excellent sources of protein minus the cholestorol and plus the fiber. Eggs are good protein, and cage free eggs run only a buck more than factory farmed ones.
3.) Poor people can eat ethically. My wife and I are both students and we don't make much. By eating just a little less meat each week, we can have delicious grass-fed beef on Sunday nights and Wild Alaskan Salmon on Friday nights. And as far as vegetables go, the stuff we get from the farmers market is no more expensive than the supermarket--and tastier.
I wish I could find a farmer's market that was running when I don't work. That's a very specific problem, since I work mostly weekends, and most of ours run only on weekends. (Added to transportation, since I don't own a car.)
I'd go at least when they were in service.
Being Minnesota, that's only a few months out of the year. *chuckle* But.. I'd appreciate it while it was working.
Local and organic foods are now popular ideologies for upper-middle-class folks trying to be better than the next person, and the idealistic fog generated blocks out most rays of common sense.
Yeah that it. Let's not be worried over the recent beef recall, the even more recent recall of cattle heads because the tonsils were left in or the fact the gov't won't even expand or allow private testing for BSE. Yep, I just want to feel better than the poor sops who eat those $1 McD's double cheeseburgers, or the poor schoolkids who consumed the recalled beef, if by feeling better you mean I'm protecting myself from possible BSE infection. Hey I also don't mind eating vegetables laden with pesticides and herbicides because they soak into the skin and simple washing won't work, or all the E Coli I can get from eating spinach or onions or whatever lettuce. I should just plow over my garden plots right now, chop down my fruit trees and pave over the whole damn thing.
Furthermore, and I know I'm just being faddish and want to feel better about myself, I should prefer drinking polluted municipal water supplies because excess nutrient runoff from industrial farming/golf courses/lawn treatment will cause higher levels of THM's in the water, a cancer causing disinfection byproduct when chlorine encounters organic carbon in the water. Let's not even talk about all the prescription medicine, OTC's and personal care products in said water supplies, at least I feel better than the next person because I'm, picky about my shampoos/soaps/detergents.
And God forbid Mr. Upper-middleclass me piss all over the peons because I reduce my electrical usage through conservation, efficient appliances, and using a variety of active and passive solar technologies. I mean, all the mercury emissions from coal plants, radioactive waste from nuclear plants, and ecological damage from hydroelectric plants are good for the peasants while unconscionable dandy me gets my jollies in making myself feel better than the next.
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