Category Archives: Buy

Are the higher prices charged by organic growers or farmers market stallholders a threat to the viability of these sorts of alternative food systems? That’s the stance taken by Jane Black in an Atlantic article from earlier this month. She warns

[...] that the “good-food-costs-more” argument is being taken to an extreme that puts at risk the goal of a mass food-reform movement, which is to make good food available to the greatest number of people possible.

I find myself divided on this one. I agree with the main thrust of her argument, that it’s important not to go overboard with the quality-costs-money mentality and forget about the larger issue of increasing the reach of this kind of food. What we really want to do is get more people on board with this way of eating, and that’s harder to do if there’s an economic barrier to it, however slight.

But I just can’t muster the same outrage she does for $8-a-dozen eggs. As the farmer she quotes quite correctly points out, that’s 67 cents for a single egg—which is just about the densest nutritional bundle of food you can get. A hearty breakfast is two eggs worth, or a little over a dollar. And this is outrageous elitist pricing? Please.

A few days before Black’s article was published, I went to see a talk by Joel Salatin in which he specifically addressed the issue of pricing. Referencing that scene in Food Inc. where the low-income family complains of the high cost of fresh fruits and vegetables at the grocery store before buying fast food from a drive-thru, he was incredulous, saying “You can buy a whole pound of my artisanal grass-fed beef for less than the cost of a burger and fries from Burger King.”

And that’s what this comes down to for me. The pricing argument doesn’t really stand—most people who say they can’t shop at farmers markets because they’re too expensive still spend $2 on a bottle of soda or a bag of chips, or five or six bucks on a fast food meal. And that’s just the money wasted on food that doesn’t feed you. Everyone spends money on things that aren’t necessary, so a shift to spending some of that money on better food for yourself or your children is just a question of priority.

Black took a more balanced position on her personal blog after a few bloggers took issue with her initial piece, but I think she’s still mixing up two messages. The deeper point—that we should try to make good, healthy, sustainable food available, affordable, and convenient for more people—is obscured by the more superficial argument—that there’s something wrong with paying $8 for a dozen eggs.

We spend less time and money on feeding ourselves than any other civilization anywhere in the world at any point in history. Nobody’s saying you should spend half your income and all your free time on food, just something an inch or two closer to what every other generation of humans before us did.

Thoughts?

Feature image by John Loo, from Flickr.