Dollars and Sense
January 2008
It’s tax time!
A colleague recently asked why organic food costs so much. She griped about the price ($4) of a pint of strawberries at the farmers’ market, pointing out that she can buy them at a conventional grocery store for a cool buck fifty-nine. Most feel that buying exclusively sustainably raised food is beyond their means. While I argued on the expensive berries’ behalf – citing a taste that wouldn’t be believed – it’s little use. Organic still smacks of elitism.
Since it is January, and the IRS is busy sending its missives around the country, I thought now would be a good time to bring up the $725 grocery bill you don’t know about but you pay every year. Maybe part of the reason why we think we can’t afford high quality food is the tab we are already paying for the industrial food and agriculture model. Each American household is paying about $725 every year to prop up an unfailingly damaging system. This covers the cost of fuel subsidies to agribusiness, Farm Bill subsidies for commodity crops, and the degradation of our environment and public health. To get an idea of the scale of the problem, consider that the nutrients lost to erosion each year are valuated at $20 billion, while the damages caused by pesticides are estimated at $8 billion.[1] Without intervention at both a consumer and a policy level, many of these bills are going to keep going up.
Seven-hundred-and-twenty-five dollars is nothing to sniff at, and as I do my taxes this year, I know it’s a sum I would far rather see injected into my household grocery budget, than perpetuating a destructive model of food production. What would I do with that cash? While my grocery basket is already pretty “green”, I’m fairly sure I would spring for the $6 quarts of yogurt sold at my market. They come in a returnable, reusable mason jar, and the quality far surpasses anything on the grocery store shelves. I would also purchase really nicer meat. This past November, I shelled out for a locally raised heritage breed turkey, which utterly revolutionized that meal for me and may be part of the reason I never tired of the leftovers.
But all of this is just wistful financial fantasizing. In the meantime, my taxes go to the feds, whose support of a profoundly unsustainable system is creating still bigger bills to come.
The economists call them externalities – the unintended costs (or collateral damage) of big agriculture. Externalities resulting from agribusiness can be boiled down to three major categories. First there are costs to our natural resources – the air, soil, and water quality. Second is damage to wildlife and ecosystem biodiversity. And last is the price to our health – sometimes impacted negatively by the first two and sometimes destroyed just as a result of the poor quality food that spews forth. For instance,
▪ Cleaning the agricultural chemicals out of our environment costs $17 billion/year[2]
▪ The annual impact of pesticide use on a single key-pollinator species – the honeybee – is estimated at over $400 million in lost productivity[3]
▪ Seventy percent of antibiotics administered in the
For these and other reasons, the heretofore unassuming Farm Bill unexpectedly became a rallying point for activists and foodies alike. Real reform remained elusive in last year’s bill. But for the first time, politicians are listening to dissenting voices. For the first time, there is a strong chorus of dissenting voices.
So now you are stuck in the unfortunate position of paying over $700 for cheap food you do your best to avoid and you still have to pay a premium for organic. It seems like the only thing this little revelation has brought forth is the knowledge that you are getting socked twice. But here are the other things you’re paying for with organic, especially local, food.
You’re ensuring that there are bills for the environment and your health that won’t come due. You’re not only boosting the biodiversity of the planet, but of what you eat – before organic came along we were all eating iceberg lettuce all the time. No one had heard of a Satsuma mandarin or kabocha squash – superfoods with incredible flavor that make you healthier in the long run. The sustainably spent dollar supports independent, viable farms and farmers. And lastly, recent studies show organic fruits and vegetables have greater nutritional value than their conventional counterparts – that’s in addition to the absence of chemical residues from spraying.
The best choice you currently have, unless you want the IRS banging down your door, is to pay your tab to big farming, and foot a heftier grocery bill. The sad state of affairs is that the primary reason we say we cannot afford organic is that cheap food is a luxury we have grown awfully accustomed to. Like a slow morphine drip, we hardly even know it’s there anymore. But it is a luxury we can no longer afford. Cheap food is propped up by a system that is merciless when it comes to our environment and our health. Paying for the best food you can, will minimize the ugly costs that wait for us down the road and tastes better in the meantime.
posted by Ariane Michas @ 8:05 PM
1 comments
links to this post
