The Omnivore's Dilemma - Michael Pollan [124]
“I drive 150 miles one way in order to get clean meat for my family.”
“It’s very simple: I trust the Salatins more than I trust the Wal-Mart. And I like the idea of keeping my money right here in town.”
I was hearing, in other words, the same stew of food fears and food pleasures (and memories) that has driven the growth of the organic food industry over the past twenty years—that and the satisfaction many Polyface customers clearly take in spending a little time on a farm, porch chatting with the Salatins, and taking a beautiful drive in the country to get here. For some people, reconnecting with the source of their food is a powerful idea. For the farmer, these on-farm sales allow him to recapture the ninety-two cents of a consumer’s food dollar that now typically winds up in the pockets of processors, middlemen, and retailers.
LATER THAT AFTERNOON, Joel and I took a long drive down to Moneta, at the southern end of the Shenandoah Valley. He was eager for me to meet Bev Eggleston, whose one-man marketing company, EcoFriendly Foods, is a second route along which Polyface food finds its way to eaters. Eggleston, a former herb and livestock farmer who discovered he had a greater gift for marketing food than producing it, sells Polyface meat and eggs from his booths at farmer’s markets in the Washington, D.C., area. On the drive, Joel and I talk about the growing local-food movement, the challenges it faces, and the whole sticky issue of price. I asked Joel how he answers the charge that because food like his is more expensive it is inherently elitist.
“I don’t accept the premise. First off, those weren’t any elitists you met on the farm this morning. We sell to all kinds of people. Second, whenever I hear people say clean food is expensive, I tell them it’s actually the cheapest food you can buy. That always gets their attention. Then I explain that with our food all of the costs are figured into the price. Society is not bearing the cost of water pollution, of antibiotic resistance, of food-borne illnesses, of crop subsidies, of subsidized oil and water—of all the hidden costs to the environment and the taxpayer that make cheap food seem cheap. No thinking person will tell you they don’t care about all that. I tell them the choice is simple: You can buy honestly priced food or you can buy irresponsibly priced food.”
He reminded me that his meat would be considerably cheaper than it is if not for government regulations and the resulting high cost of processing—at least a dollar cheaper per pound. “If we could just level the playing field—take away the regulations, the subsidies, and factor in the health care and environmental cleanup costs of cheap food—we could compete on price with anyone.”
It’s true that cheap industrial food is heavily subsidized in many ways such that its price in the supermarket does not reflect its real cost. But until the rules that govern our food system change, organic or sustainable food is going to cost more at the register, more than some people can afford. Yet for the great majority of us the story is not quite so simple. As a society we Americans spend only a fraction of our disposable income feeding ourselves—about a tenth, down from a fifth in the 1950s. Americans today spend less on food, as a percentage of disposable income, than any other industrialized nation, and probably less than any people in the history of the world. This suggests that there are many of us who could afford to spend more on food if we chose to. After all, it isn’t only the elite who in recent years have found an extra fifty or one hundred dollars each month to spend on cell phones (now owned by more than half the U. S. population, children included) or television, which close to 90 percent of all U.S. households now pay for. Another formerly free good that more than half of us happily pay for today is water. So is the unwillingness to pay more for food really a matter of affordability or priority?
As things stand, artisanal producers like Joel compete not on price but quality,