As their grocery bills rise, Americans should take comfort: the price they're paying for industrially produced food in the supermarket is starting to approach that of artisanally produced food at the farmers' market. And that might make more of them choose healthier, less environmentally destructive diets. At least, that's the message of an article in Wednesday's New York Times titled "Some Good News on Food Prices."
Michael Pollan.
Photo: Ken Light
To make her case, reporter Kim Severson turned to two Berkeley-based icons of the sustainable-food movement, author Michael Pollan and restaurateur Alice Waters. "Higher food prices level the playing field for sustainable food that doesn't rely on fossil fuels," Pollan told Severson.
People struggling with their food bills should "make a sacrifice on the cell phone or the third pair of Nike shoes," Waters advised.
All due respect to Pollan and Waters, but I think they are grossly simplifying matters here. Nationwide, heightened food and gasoline prices, combined with an economy that's shedding jobs, are putting a hard squeeze on consumers. According to The New York Times, applications for food stamps have surged recently, and the program is projected to reach 28 million Americans over the next several months, the most since its inception in the 1960s.
I have a hard time imagining people who are struggling to put food on the table rambling off to the farmers' market on Saturday to fill cloth bags with the sort of fresh, local, organic produce so beloved by Pollan and Waters (and me). Indeed, higher food prices are likely to send many time- and cash-strapped people in quite the opposite direction.
Rising costs may end up increasing the allure of large entities with economies of scale, cutthroat buying practices, and experience in transforming low-quality ag inputs into stuff people like to eat. I'm talking about fast-food companies, which can likely absorb higher input prices and still churn out crap -- and rake in profits. If that's true, prices at the drive-thru won't rise quite as steeply as those in the supermarket line, giving people yet more incentive to abandon their home kitchens and flock to the Golden Arches.
Will high supermarket prices drive consumers to the drive-thru?
Photo: iStockphoto
An informal recent lunchtime survey of fast-food chains in the Chapel Hill area yielded results that would make a Berkeley foodie gag on her omelet of pastured eggs, raw-milk cheese, just-picked kale, and green garlic. At McDonald's, I shouldered my way through a bustling crowd and saw Big Mac combo meals, complete with fries and Coke, going for $4.29. Wendy's, equally crowded, offered a similar package for a bit more than $5. Domino's advertised a one-topping large pizza -- "six foldable slices!" -- for $10. At a Papa John's down the road, $11 will get you a large pie with three toppings. Something tells me these places, not farmers' markets or restaurants like Waters' Chez Panisse, will remain the regular canteen of millions of Americans.
What, then, to do? The answer, it seems to me, is not just to hope that expensive industrial food drives people toward equally expensive sustainable food. It's to make sustainable food more broadly accessible and affordable. And that's happening in a few places -- most recently Washington state -- thanks to farsighted policymakers.
How We Got Here, and How We Can Get Away
Prices of corn and soybean -- lifeblood of the industrial food system, as Pollan has so eloquently shown -- hovered near 30-year lows just two years ago. Then President Bush declared that America was "addicted to oil," and responded by ramping up subsidies for corn-based ethanol and soy-based biodiesel. The effort has done little to ease our oil fetish, but it has resulted in the doubling and then some of corn and soy prices.
Indeed, it's quite likely that the biofuel boom has done more harm than good for the environment. It's led to a surge in agrichemical use and phosphate mining, a dramatic expansion in genetically modified crops, and probably the growth of the infamous agriculture-related dead zone that snuffs out sea life in the Gulf of Mexico each year.
Rather than revaluing food, as Pollan and Waters seem to think, current policy seems bent on puffing up the profits of the very agribusiness giants whose produce Pollan and Waters so deplore.
Of course, there's another way. Just as public policy can be used to consolidate the grip of industrial agriculture, it can also be used to increase the accessibility of sustainable agriculture. Admittedly, the 2007 farm bill, still belatedly knocking around Washington waiting for agreement between the president and Congress, probably can't be counted on for much relief.
But that doesn't mean sustainable-food advocates need to sit on their hands and wait for the masses to discover the pleasures of a real tomato. All over the country, state and local policy is being tweaked to make fresh, local food more accessible.
Just last week, Washington Gov. Chris Gregoire (D) signed sweeping legislation designed to link the state's farmers with folks who normally don't get much access to fresh produce: schoolchildren, food-stamp recipients, and food-bank users.
As Washington Grows, So Grows the Nation?
The law, which passed with near-unanimous bipartisan support, will put real resources into farm-to-school: It will dedicate two and a half full-time state agriculture-department employees to running the program, and commit $600,000 annually to create a "locally grown fruit and vegetable snack program" in elementary schools with high numbers of low-income students.
It also clears one of the key obstacles that prevent school cafeterias from buying local: the requirement that they accept the lowest-cost bid and not discriminate based on geography.
The legislation has severe limitations. It can't change the National School Lunch Program's minuscule budget, which allots $2.47 to school cafeterias per lunch served to students who qualify for assistance, and $0.23 per meal served to students who pay. Once you account for labor and other overhead costs, schools have about a dollar a day to spend on actual ingredients.
Nor can the new law rebuild the cafeteria-level kitchen infrastructure that has been dismantled nationwide over the past 30 years. As Jennifer Langston wrote in an excellent Seattle Post-Intelligencer piece last year, "Schools have ripped out kitchens and replaced them with closet-sized rewarming centers with no capacity to deal with things such as dirty carrots." But it does move the state's schools in the direction of providing healthy, nutritious food, for students who now access mostly industrial dreck.
I asked Ann Cooper, director of nutrition services for the Berkeley Unified School District and author of Lunch Lessons: Changing the Way We Feed Our Children, how the Washington law might change things for the state's children. She told me that Berkeley rules, like the new Washington code, free her from buying from the lowest bidder. She recently switched from industrial white rice, which she had been buying for $0.46 per pound, to California-produced brown rice for $0.72. "On the plate, that only amounts to a penny difference per kid," she said. "In terms of nutrition and flavor, the difference is huge."
It's these kinds of policies, not the government biofuel scheme, that have real potential to revalue good food in the United States. I wish influential figures like Pollan and Waters would quit pushing to make industrial food more expensive, and ramp up their efforts to make sustainable food more accessible instead -- something they've advocated forcefully in the past.
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Comments
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Colin Wright Posted 6:21 am
04 Apr 2008
I don't know what to make of Pollan's insensitivity, particularly given the vulnerability of the poor here and abroad to high food prices. He seems to be grappling with the issue here:
What do think of converting biofuel -- we have a mandate to convert to biofuel by 2025, is this the new farm economy? Will biofuel be what we grow?
MP: No, I don't think it is what we're going to be growing. Putting food and fuel into competition with one another is going to be a disaster.
We're already finding this. It's driving up the price of land. It's great that farmers are getting a fair price for their corn for the first time in years, but on the other hand, if all our land was converted to ethanol production the entire thing would only meet 7 percent of our fuel needs.
It's not even a solution, and the problem it causes along the way, in terms of driving up food prices, biofuels are going to create a very hungry world population. You'll have a situation where American SUVs are competing in Mexico for land. And who's going to win that battle?
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morganmghee Posted 7:00 am
04 Apr 2008
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Raise More Hell Posted 9:56 am
04 Apr 2008
The whole concept of cheap commodity prices was put in place not for the consumer, and certainly not for the farmer, but for the benefit of the giant corporate processors.
As to the value of Washington's program to put local foods into schools, it's helping to raise awareness. But the dollar amount is miniscule. Especially when you consider that the Washington State Department of Agriculture is dedicated to killing small farmers in the state. Several years back I raised pastured poultry on my small farm north of Spokane. The WSDA put me, and about thirty other producers east of the Cascades (and my guess is more than that on the west side) out of business. They did this by promulgating new regulations which would require us to build a factory to continue to slaughter chickens. Building a factory would adversely affect the cleanliness of the product, and double its price. One producer, raising half the federal limit (10,000 birds) would gross about $125,000. They killed a local ag sector that was putting millions into the economy with the potential for far more. And now you give them credit for the paltry $600,000 subsidy (I've heard that far less will actually be spent). They've gone on to target small dairies, and I understand local egg producers will be in the crosshairs next.
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Roz Cummins Posted 2:32 am
05 Apr 2008
The fact that many people don't get the amount or quality of food that would be best for them is something that we need to keep in mind in all of our own thoughts, statements, and actions about the way food is grown and distributed. This is especially true for those of us whose opinions are made publicly.
I know that most of my friends and I are already making a lot of difficult decisions about which foods we can -- or cannot -- afford to buy organically, and now we are moving into a period when we have to think hard about what foods we can afford to buy at all. Friends have been hitting me up for a lot more new bean and pasta recipes.
I often shop at a supermarket near me that is located next to a housing project. I can tell how bad the economy is by looking in everyone's carts. These days most families are buying lots of carbs and a lot less protein.
Thanks for a great article, Tom.
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Wolverine Posted 2:48 am
05 Apr 2008
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Delay And Deny Posted 9:07 am
05 Apr 2008
In the 19th century, the average person spent something like 90 percent of income on food.
Now, I think we can all agree, that in the mostly agrarian 19th century United States, the "environment" as a whole was much, much better.
The 20th saw the advent of super cheap food. With this came the ability to afford mass produced goods...goods that came from petroleum for the most part.
Now, as food becomes pricier, I agree...it may spur two things. It may make us go back to "natural foods" and more importantly it may prevent us from littering our pond with cheaply produced goods that provide little or no happiness and end up clogging our landscape.
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RabbitMountain Posted 9:50 pm
05 Apr 2008
I wouldn't have thought it was possible for anyone to be that ignorant of what life is like for people living in lower socioeconomic circumstances. I guess the divide has become so great the concept of 'hardship' doesn't even register in the minds of people like Pollan and Waters.
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spaceshaper Posted 1:01 am
06 Apr 2008
Start with your local food coop - if you don't have one start one - http://www.foodcoop500.coop/. Build on that as a base: network with local farms, CSA's, farmer coops to eliminate the costs of transportation, packaging, advertising and shareholder profits from the price of the foods you eat. You'll be amazed at the difference it makes to be part-owner of your food supply system.
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erickroh Posted 9:11 am
06 Apr 2008
In Chicago, at least, there is great demand for farmers markets in so-called food deserts. There just aren't enough farmers to fulfill this demand. Instead of just assuming that these people don't want healthful and nutritious food, they should be given an opportunity to acquire it. One farmers market in Sioux City, Iowa, accepts food stamps, and a quarter of its sales come from them. This kind of arrangement could benefit local producers and consumers alike.
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Jim Goodman Posted 1:10 pm
06 Apr 2008
As to biofuels or more correctly agrofuels, I am not a fan.
ttp://www.counterpunch.org/goodman12282007.htm
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Wolverine Posted 3:00 pm
06 Apr 2008
This is a completely false assumption, because it is not a legitimate criticism unless your priority is leftist ideology and not the environment. The vast majority of people in the U.S. can easily afford local and organic food, but they choose to spend their money on needless crap instead and complain that local and organic are too expensive. I've heard this totally illegitimate complaint from people making hundreds of thousands of dollars per year!
So enough with the leftist crybaby garbage already! The small minority who truly cannot afford local organic food are already on food stamps. For everyone else, get your priorities straight!
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TheJewAndTheCarrot Posted 11:58 pm
06 Apr 2008
I think you make some excellent points here, Tom, about Pollan and Waters' somewhat embarrassing (and a-typical) oversimplification and A+B=C reasoning.
I wrote a similar post for The Jew & The Carrot, which I thought might add further to the conversation:
http://jcarrot.org/joseph-and-the-amazingly-expensive-com ...
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mtvyfan Posted 7:23 am
07 Apr 2008
We have become "spoiled" by all of this convenience food that even preparing something in the crock pot in the morning to eat in the evening is perceived as "too much time."
Stop and take the time, beans and rice are really cheap to buy, but may take longer to cook than nuking it in the microwave.
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jkratz Posted 12:10 am
08 Apr 2008
The problem is they aren't the ones simplifying matters here: the article is grossly simplifying their message with a few quotes and you bought into it.
The food system in the United States is completely off-kilter and what Pollan has been writing about for years now is finally becoming a bit more obvious to the general public.
And Waters (and some commenters) are completely correct that people are making poor choices in how they spend their money. Good food choices are easily available to everyone. However those people who aren't making wise food choices need to do some research (which is also easily available) and set their priorities. Is it more important to have good food and health and spend more on that or have the newest shiny techno-bauble? People could easily ditch the extra pair of Nikes or the latest $10/month fee for some service they don't really need.
It amazes me how completely clueless most people are to food issues these days and its a shame considering the amount of information out there. The only thing people want to do is bitch and moan about this stuff but they never seem to want to get off their asses and do something about it.
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Bobbi Katsanis Posted 12:41 am
08 Apr 2008
The point Waters and Pollan were trying to make - AND THEY'RE RIGHT ON - is that the McDonald's and microwave food culture is predicated on an endless supply of cheap oil, as it takes oceans of the stuff to grow and transport the raw materials of Big Macs all over the planet. As the world seems to have noticed, oil is a fossil fuel and will not last forever. Thus, any market system predicated on the falsehood of its endless supply will ultimately collapse.
Local food, however, mostly doesn't depend on petrochemicals. So what is happening is that your in-season, locally-grown produce (including, not just fruits and veggies, but dairy products, honey, meats and fish, and here in Berkeley, brown rice) lately has a more stable price than comparable items trucked from Chile to the supermarket. This point WAS made in the Times article, but Philpott et al. chose to overlook it.
People, you cannot hear this often or loudly enough: READ THE ORIGINAL MATERIAL BEFORE YOU COMMENT. Sometimes even that's not too great so you have to learn to think critically. Our mental environment seems to me just as threatened as our natural one. FIGHT GLOBAL DUMBING.
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Storm Dragon Posted 3:33 am
09 Apr 2008
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amc89 Posted 12:10 pm
09 Apr 2008
So contrary to those who like to classify vegetarians as "elitist," a vegetarian or vegan diet based largely on whole foods is typically much cheaper than a meat, egg and dairy heavy diet, especially as the price of animal products rises in comparison to fresh fruit, veggies and other vegetarian staples.
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Tricia Sexton Posted 5:02 am
10 Apr 2008
The $600,000 for WA Grown Fruits and Vegetables is a mini-grant program to be administered by the Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction. Approximately $570,000 will go directly to schools with a high percentage of low-income students, to buy Washington Grown produce and to pay for necessary equipment for light processing (chopping, etc.) and labor. The remaining $30,000 will go to pay for administering the grant program--not an unreasonable split of funds.
Of the $1.49 million allocated in the bill, only $250,000 goes to WSDA. The rest is to schools, food banks,and farmers market and farm shop programs to provide access to local fresh food and invest in our state's farm economy. The program has lots of room for small farm participation in these programs--it's one of my favorite things about it!
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MikeB Posted 8:02 am
10 Apr 2008
And of course these are the sort of food the poorest are able to afford/access. Reading Nickel and Dimed, you quickly realise that the people using hamburger helper will still be using it if the price of beef was 10% lower - the cost of food is not too high for them, its that they simply cannot make enough money to live on in a way we would all like.
Preparing cheaper foods is often time-consuming (which if your working three jobs is simply a non-starter), and requires a certain level of knowledge of cookery. Over the years, we have gradually become de-skilled in the sort of areas which allowed our grandparents to live on relatively little (cheap cuts of meat, combining leftovers, etc), and supermarkets now seldom sell the sort of basic cheap ingredients which you can use. My local supermarket only sells prime cuts of beef; to buy cuts such as shin or skirt I have to go to the farmers market, which is gradually dying in part because most people would prefer to simply drive to the supermarket once a week, load up and drive away again.
Far from the farmers market being for elitist liberals with cash, I find that eggs, butter, cheese, and meat are no more expensive, and often cheaper than the supermarket, and mostly better quality too. There is a better profit margin for the seller, and I know where my food comes from.
We have become used to cheap food, so cheap that in the UK we can waste up to 40% of what we buy in simply throwing it out because we bought too much, left it in the fridge too long, etc. If you add to that the wastage from the long buying, processing and shipping chains we now see with supermarkets, there is a huge amount which is simply written off as the cost of doing business.
The price of food is rising, and the price of oil will push that far higher still. Cheap food is over, but that does not mean we need to starve, instead we need to rediscover what good local, seasonal food is, and treat it as something to be bought and eaten with pleasure and respect.
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todbrilliant Posted 4:43 am
11 Apr 2008
What does this tell you? The bulk-shopping mentality has been revved up, due to increasing scarcity. We're going in the exact opposite of what P/W predict.
Should it be surprising that two people who have zero connection with the unwashed masses have made a poor prediction? No. 98% of US citizens have never heard of either of 'em.
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karenpj Posted 7:06 am
11 Apr 2008
Tom - give us, and Pollan and Waters, a little credit. These two people are not "pushing to make industrial food more expensive" and you know it. They were commenting, in the face of rising prices for industrial food, that there may be a silver lining if that makes whole, local, organic or sustainable food more competitive or appealing. As one of the other commenters said, "We know who the bad guys are..." and Pollan and Waters are not them.
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Galia Posted 2:45 am
16 Apr 2008
I used to go to the local farmers markets until 2 months ago. Then I quit. I went to the 99 cents store and the local supermarkets. People do know how to buy and cook economically.
Phillpott's heart is in the right place, but his idea that the choice in American foods is local organic farmer's market or fast food is a silly either or fallacy. But worse is Pollan or Waters. Waters charges over $70/dinner in her restaurant
when over 28 million need food stamps. For her or
anyone else to say that Americans need to not
buy the Nike or cellphone so they can afford organic food or that Americans are too rich shows off tremendous ignorance about lives of Americans.
Waters is blaming the victim for the faults of the wider system.
I think we need to focus on changing both national agricultural policy--the 2007 food bill in Congress--as well as state agricultural policy--to favor small local farmers, but stopping blaming individuals or the poor, stop accepting the rise of food prices, and act like citizens to change food policy and make sure no one is hungry in this country.
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Biodiversivist Posted 8:10 am
16 Apr 2008
http://gristmill.grist.org/images/admin/crayon2.JPG
Make that 70,000 square miles of savanna and rainforeset carbons sinks if the farmers around the world scrambling to fill that 35,000 square miles in the human food chain are half as efficient at producing food per acre than American farmers.
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el mono Posted 10:15 am
16 Apr 2008
The rising middle class in China and India is consuming a greater amount of meat and - if we all think back to ecology class - it takes a lot of energy from the lower trophic level (grains) to raise those cows and chickens. This is pushing both grain and meat prices higher.
More corn is being used for ethanol, and more land is being used for corn.
The economy is bad, and so investors have been increasingly investing in commodities (i.e. corn, wheat, soybeans, rice, oil, etc.) - they were considered the safe fall-back option when the credit crunch hit. Now we have a bubble in these markets and prices have gone sky-high. Oil is the same way - there is actually no reason from a production/capacity/reserve standpoint why we should have oil prices this high. It is just that investors have gone crazy for the commodities. (For more on this: the "Marketplace" program on public radio did a great story on the bubble in the rice market a few weeks ago.)
The high price of oil raises costs for both production and distribution of food.
I really don't want to be a Negative Nancy, but it just irks me when we only hear a one-sentence explanation of why food prices are high. Seriously, other than that, I really did appreciate the article. Environmentalists need keep access and affordability foremost in their minds when it comes to sustainable food and green technologies.
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Biodiversivist Posted 1:00 am
17 Apr 2008
Which of the following would be the most prudent?
Control what the poor can eat
End government mandates for biofuels
Control the economy
Control the cost of oil
Control the weather
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el mono Posted 9:41 am
17 Apr 2008
No question that a change in biofuel policy would be the low-hanging fruit, but that doesn't change the fact that we ought not misrepresent the situation when it comes to high food prices.
And ... we may not be able to control the weather, but we can do something about our climate (and the drought in Australia is likely climate-change induced).
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Laurel from Simple Spoonful Posted 12:48 pm
15 Nov 2008
Tom picks an "omelet of pastured eggs, raw-milk cheese, just-picked kale, and green garlic" to compare to one-person fast food lunches going at $4.29, and just over $5.
I cooked a 3-egg omelet a couple weeks ago. It contained organic cheddar, pastured eggs, pastured butter, and organic apple. It cost all of about $3.25, and it fed two people. Grist itself recently published an article by Kurt Michael Friese in which he proved he could make a complete fried chicken dinner at home for less than it cost to buy it at KFC. While it's not health food, it stands to reason that cooking at home saves money. So why would people choose fast food fare?
I agree that rising food prices are a problem for people in an economic crunch. I disagree that it will force people into fast food meals, especially if they have access to information and take some time to do the math. Maybe it will push them into eating less meat, dairy, or other more high-cost items, but rice, beans, pasta, eggs, potatoes, carrots, and, yes, kale, remain both healthy and affordable options for families on a budget. I think the problem facing lower-income folks in this situation is more likely to be a perceived lack of time to prepare these types of meals. Many of them may work more than one job, and meals from scratch do require some prep time. Most of all, they require planning ahead. We've been doing it long enough that we now manage to do most of our cooking 2 days of the week so we just reheat on the other days. We're doing ok, but it is a transition.
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