It’s not that local, organic is too expensive, it’s that industrial is too cheap
My 2015 New Year’s resolution was to eat as “healthy and ecologically sustainable” a diet as possible. I interpreted this as consuming less industrially produced meat, more vegetables, and sourcing food where possible from local, organic farms. Over the course of the following year, I purchased a share in my local CSA (Lancaster Farm Fresh Cooperative), began increasing the number of plants in my diet, and spent more time cooking. Gradually (and to my delight) my dietary preferences changed. I began to order vegetarian dishes at restaurants, not because I felt morally compelled to, but because I genuinely preferred to, and I felt physically better doing so. The year culminated in a month of eating the whole foods, plant based diet advocated for by the folks behind Forks Over Knives, during which I felt legitimately fantastic despite the great challenge of avoiding cheese, sugar, and processed foods.
Most importantly, I now see healthier food consumption as a journey, not a destination. It is a developmental process of continually learning what works for us, where our food comes from, and how it is grown. This journey of more direct engagement with food in my life led me to examine more closely the relationships between humans, agriculture, and the economic systems that unite the two. Namely, the profound price imbalance between local organic food, grown using ecological farming practices and often sold fresh directly to consumers via CSAs, farm stands, and natural grocery stores, and industrial commodity food, grown at tremendous scale through mechanization and monoculture.
The food system is dominated by industrial processes that achieve economies of scale for the purposes of maximizing financial profit. Tyson, General Mills, and Kellogg’s are public corporations first, and food producers second. Don’t get these two things mixed up. As public corporations, their purpose and behavior is to make money, and agriculture is merely a process through which they produce as much profit as possible for shareholders. Not because they are evil (though there’s certainly bad actors), but because this is the way the system works. Corporate capitalism is how most of us get the food that feeds our bodies.
Anyway, the reason we have to get our hands dirty by mentioning the C word is that the C word has implications for why eating healthy can, or is perceived as, expensive. Capitalism externalizes (i.e. does not include in the cost of manufacturing, and ultimately, the price of what we buy) the social and environmental costs that nonetheless result from the production process.
Here’s a short list of some of these costs, which you can read more about here:
- Water pollution from chemical fertilizer runoff and improperly managed animal manure from Confined Animal Feeding Operations, or CAFOs
- Healthcare costs from antibiotic resistant pathogens created by overuse of antibiotics to treat livestock in CAFOs
- Topsoil loss and the release of Greenhouse Gases into the atmosphere, which contribute to global warming and threaten the well-being of the entire human and natural world
Alternatively, food grown through organic and ecological methods that rely on experienced knowledge (often inter-generational) and the direct, personal interaction of humans with nature tends to include or avoid altogether the above mentioned costs that industrial scale methods do not. When comparing boneless chicken breasts from Farmer Jane and Perdue, for example, we have to keep in mind that Farmer Jane’s poultry is closer to the true cost of food production than the corporate equivalent, and it excludes the externalities of CAFOs, like the healthcare costs from the air pollution and anti-biotic resistant pathogens listed above. Jane’s chickens, ideally, live in an environment where they roam around the land, eating critters from the ground and fertilizing the soil with their manure. Basically, Jane’s chicken represents the true cost of what it takes to produce chicken, and her production methods exclude the significant environmental costs that don’t get factored into conventional production methods.
The story is much the same for vegetables too. An organic, diversified vegetable farm that relies on labour for weed control and harvesting requires more human input to perform the tasks that chemical inputs otherwise would. But in this case, the organic farm avoids the pollution from fertilizer runoff that affects our waterways. So, your vegetable farmer sells you food at the cost that more accurately resembles what it takes for humans to grow the food in a way that aligns with natural systems, while avoiding or mitigating the environmental externalities of industrial processes.
In this way, the price difference between organic and industrial/conventional foods is in reality the failure of our economic system to accurately include the true social and environmental costs of the food we eat. It’s not that food well grown is too expensive, but that food grown en masse is too cheap. The price lies to us. It doesn’t include the social and environmental costs that come with the $2.99 chicken breast, or the giant, flavorless tomato grown in fields creating fertilizer runoff problems in the local watershed and driven across the country on a truck burning fossil fuels.
The food system is one of the most complicated topics I’ve encountered. There are seldom black and white answers. There is, for example, a vast spectrum of farming methods. Organic farming doesn’t necessarily mean the food is produced with an emphasis on soil health and biodiversity, and without proper methods it can also degrade topsoil in the way industrial production would. But I do know clearly that the industrial scale production of food for profit has severed us from our long human relationship to agriculture. It has alienated us from what it actually takes to grow real food, and reduced a primary, intimate interaction with the natural world to a single, quantitative metric. And so it’s not that eating healthy is too expensive, but that eating unhealthy has become too cheap. If we want to re-balance the scales, we need to make industrial agriculture responsible for the true cost of the food produced. Because regardless of whether or not we are the ones that eat it, we all pay.
2021 Update!
Re-reading this piece five years later I would probably make a stronger attempt to frame corporate consolidation in the food system, rather than social and environmental externalities, as the primary driver of food price imbalances between “local organic” and “industrial commodity” production methods — corporations benefit from economies of scale in production and supply chains, as well as federal subsidies, that are impossible to compete with as an independent small business. However, I would still argue that externalities remain a highly problematic hidden cost of our industrial food system that, if accounted for with accurate true cost accounting, would reveal that food grown through regenerative organic practices is clearly a better deal for people and planet.
Check out the following links for more reading on the subject:
- Busting the “Organic is too expensive” Myth, Cornucopia Institute
- Hidden Costs of Agriculture, Union of Concerned Scientists
- Corporate concentration in the US food system makes food more expensive and less accessible for many Americans
