The Price Is Wrong

Umbra on the cost of organics

Posted by Bricolage at 11:35 AM on 22 May 2006

You've got a houseful of mouths to feed and a limited budget, but you want to do right and buy organic. A frustrated reader asks advice maven Umbra Fisk why organic food costs so much more than regular, and Umbra rings up the answer.

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Farm policy

According to Michael Pollan's latest book, the birth of "corn as king" and a cheap food policy occurred in the mid-70s under the Nixon administration. I don't have the book handy and can't find any of his articles on the internet, but my memory is that there was a huge grain deal with the Soviet Union that caused food prices to rise significantly, and protests were starting to pop up around the U.S. So Nixon's Secretary of Agriculture (Earl Butz) changed the structure of the farm subsidies to encourage more production.

The "Farm Bill" is coming up for renewal in 2007, so this will be an opportunity to change some of these subsidies programs so that they encourage organic agriculture (or at least reduce subsidies of the corn industry). The "free traders" and much of the world is outraged by the subsidy programs in the U.S., so it might be possible to make some changes (but with a GOP Congress, the food-processing lobbyists will write the bill, so let's be realistic). Grist Mill had a good discussion of what a Farm Bill should look like a little while ago.

by meander at 12:32 PM on 22 May 2006

The Price can be Less

I have found that if you want to eat organic more cheaply you must be willing to prepare food from scratch. The less processed the food, the less expensive it becomes. Also, see if you cannot take advantage of discount pricing that is available through local natural/organic food stores or co-ops. If you buy in quantity and are willing to put more work into food prep, organic eating can be nearly as inexpensive as conventional diets. For example, purchasing fairly traded, organic, shade grown coffee in my local supermarket costs $8.50 a pound. Purchasing the same coffee in five pound bags through a local natural food store's co-op program costs $5.50 a pound. Fifteen dollars for a five pound bag of coffee beans is an enormous savings!

MJ Graham

by mjgraham at 1:54 PM on 22 May 2006

Paying for both

And here's a seldom-mentioned financial penalty people pay when they choose to support organic agriculture with their food dollars: In addition to voluntarily paying higher prices at the checkout counter, they are unable to opt out of helping to pay for the subsidized costs of conventional agriculture through their tax bill. In other words, you not only pay more directly when buying organic, you're still coerced into subsidizing the hidden costs of conventional food even if you eat very little or even none of it. You help pay for food other people eat, like it or not.

Which is not to discourage anyone from buying organic, particularly small-scale, locally-grown organic. Check out Local Harvest to find farmers near you. But we really need to find a way to end the subsidies to conventional agriculture.

"You can never get enough of what you do not really want." - Huston Smith

by John Fish Kurmann at 7:18 PM on 22 May 2006

the price

You have to break out of the money syndrome. I help (on a volunteer basis) a small dairy farmer. While I expect no reward, he expresses his gratitude by giving me all the milk I can drink, plus often some less than choice cuts of beef and all the heart and liver I can manage. I watch him give away food all the time, on this trade-for-work basis.
I'm sure vegetable farmers are the same. Also you can probably make your own harvest off of fields which have been harvested, a little work, but rewarding. I used to do this to feed pigs.
Another idea: get chickens. Get a cow if you can. Plant a garden, if it's only potatoes [I read once that humans can live fine on only potatoes and (presumably raw) milk].
Last idea: get poor. The income limit for foodstamps is surprisingly high, and my experience there (granted, it was 30 years ago) is that the foodstamp allotment for a family is sufficient to eat luxuriously as long as you are willing to prepare your own food.

by wendy at 6:16 AM on 23 May 2006

The price is wrong because of mega farms.......

that do not include the true cost of the product produced.

We now in America have hundreds of brownfields in every community; a legacy of manufacturing in which the true cost was not covered. Slag and waste was just 'dumped' into the environment or into the water, whichever was cheaper.

Right now, this very minute, mountaintops in Kentucky and West Virginia are being removed and 'dumped' off the mountain side into shady glens where springs that furnish water for the residents of the mountains originate. Sitting on the mountain tops are processing facilities that reduce the coal slurry that currently sits in huge retaining ponds ( 214 in Kentucky out of the over 6oo) to convenient dry waste; they are not used because it would add a dollar ($1.00) to the cost of a ton of coal.

Interesting reads: Raise Less Corn and More Hell, which opens the eyes of the purchaser of 'cheap food. Farmers were led to sign agreements to raise a product for a guaranteed
price but carry all of the costs. The 'egg farmer' scandals were typical of this scam. The individual farmers raising beef and pork were forced into price agreements also; the farmers went bankrupt. And in their place is the factory farm which sells round steak for $1.98 a pound which the same sale price I paid for it at the beginning of my marriage over 25 years ago. Cheap food is the end result of feeding animals animal parts, and antibotizing them due to the cramped pens they lead their short lives in.

Authors of reports critical of mountain top removal have been crippled through assaults and beatings. Residents who complain are harassed and driven off the road to their deaths. Being against the coal mine owners has been a dangerous occupation since the coal was acquired by slick operators who purchased the underground rights of farmers. It does not seem a surprise that the owners of coal properties are out-of-state corporations who use shell corporations to avoid the penalties and who bargain these down to pennies through their powerful connections in government.

Lastly, mega farms of rice and sugar and heavily subdized by the government (read the lable of your product and see that the product contains sugar) which is sold to developing countries at less cost than their farmers can raise it; this destroys the developing economy and allows global corporates to buy the land and set up mega farms of their own. This sad practice is typical of what happens when the world trade agreements are forced on developing nations.

by katesisco at 7:10 AM on 23 May 2006

The CSA option

Hey MonikkaMarie,

You might want to look into buying a farm share from one of the many CSAs serving New York. My Cobble Hill (Brooklyn) CSA, (Bill Walsey/Green Thumb see: http://www.justfood.org/csa/locations/ for this and more) also delivers to Astoria, Queens. A 27-week "subscription" will provide organic, locally grown veggies for 4 (though I think you can also get a larger "pantry share") for as little as $14/week. Check into it!

Jenny Gage

by jennymx at 11:05 AM on 24 May 2006

ADVERTISING POLICY

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