Animal, Vegetable, Miracle_ A Year of Food Life - Barbara Kingsolver [60]
That information doesn’t fit in a five-syllable jingle. And those growers will never win a price war either. The best they can hope for is a marketing tactic known as friendship, or something like it. Their task is to communicate the consumer value of their care, and how it benefits the neighborhood. This may seem like a losing battle. But the “Buy Cheap Eats” crusade is assisting the deaths of our compatriots at the rate of about 820 a day; somebody’s bound to notice that. We are a social animal. The cost-benefit ratios of neighborliness are as old as our species, and probably inescapable in the end.
Paying the Price of Low Prices
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A common complaint about organic and local foods is that they’re more expensive than “conventional” (industrially grown) foods. Most consumers don’t realize how much we’re already paying for the conventional foods, before we even get to the supermarket. Our tax dollars subsidize the petroleum used in growing, processing, and shipping these products. We also pay direct subsidies to the large-scale, chemical-dependent brand of farming. And we’re being forced to pay more each year for the environmental and health costs of that method of food production.
Here’s an exercise: add up the portion of agricultural fuel use that is paid for with our taxes ($22 billion), direct Farm Bill subsidies for corn and wheat ($3 billion), treatment of food-related illnesses ($10 billion), agricultural chemical cleanup costs ($17 billion), collateral costs of pesticide use ($8 billion), and costs of nutrients lost to erosion ($20 billion). At minimum, that’s a national subsidy of at least $80 billion, about $725 per household each year. That plus the sticker price buys our “inexpensive” conventional food.
Organic practices build rather than deplete the soil, using manure and cover crops. They eliminate pesticides and herbicides, instead using biological pest controls and some old-fashioned weeding with a hoe. They maintain and apply knowledge of many different crops. All this requires extra time and labor. Smaller farms also bear relatively higher costs for packaging, marketing, and distribution. But the main difference is that organic growers aren’t forcing us to pay expenses they’ve shifted into other domains, such as environmental and health damage. As they’re allowed to play a larger role in the U.S. agricultural economy, our subsidy costs to industrial agriculture will decrease. For a few dollars up front, it’s a blue-chip investment.
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STEVEN L. HOPP
Ashfield, Massachusetts, is as cute as it gets, even by the standards of small-town New England. Downtown is anchored by a hardware store with rocking chairs on the front porch. The big local social event where folks catch up with their neighbors is the weekly farmers’ market.
I didn’t know this when we arrived there to stay at a friend’s house. We brought our cooler in with the luggage, planning to give our hostess some of our little fist-sized tomatoes. These carefully June-ripened treasures would wow the New Englanders, I thought. Oops. As I started to pull them out of the cooler I spied half a dozen huge red tomatoes, languidly sunning their shapely shoulders in our friend’s kitchen window. These bodacious babes made our Early Siberians look like Miss Congeniality. I pulled out some blackheart cherries instead, presenting them along with an offhand question: Um, so, where did those tomatoes come from?
“Oh, from Amy at the farmers’ market,” she said. “Aren’t they nice?”
Nice, I thought. In the third week of June, in western Mass, if they taste as good as they look they’re a doggone miracle. I was extremely curious. Our host promised that during our visit she would take us to see Amy, the tomato magician.