Comparing Apples and Egg Yolks: Why Organic Food Costs More

As some of you may recall, a few weeks ago I attended the American Public Health Association (APHA) conference in Washington, DC. I attended sections in Food and Nutrition with names like "Farm To School Implementation," "Principles for a Healthy, Sustainable Food System," and "Farmers Markets & Fresh Produce in Urban, Underserved Communities".

Something I realized over the course of the conference was that the word "organic" was scarcely being used.* This surprised me. Given the many public health issues associated with problems like pesticide use and antibiotic resistance, I'd thought that conversation about organic agriculture would definitely be on the table.

I started to get a clue why this was the case when I talked to a woman from The Food Trust, a nonprofit in Philadelphia that works to increase fresh produce availability by creating farmers markets throughout the city. She told me that the farmers are conventional, because organic food would cost too much.

The idea that organic food is prohibitively expensive is a common one. Yes, it does cost more. And no doubt there are farmers out there who over-charge because they have customers in big cities they know will pay those prices. But overall, there are good reasons that organic food is a little more costly.

First of all, quality is an enormous factor. Organic and conventional foods are completely different products in that respect. An organic apple and a conventional apple are not the same, nor is a conventional chicken at all similar to a pastured, free-range chicken. There are fundamental nutritional differences - pastured animals have higher levels of nutrients such as omega 3 fatty acids and beta-carotene. Just compare the yolks of a grocery store egg and an organic, pastured egg - the color difference is astonishing. In his book In Defense of Food, Michael Pollan points out that by selecting produce for larger, higher producing, and more shelf stable specimens, the amount of nutrients in the produce has decreased dramatically. He says, for example, that an apple from the 1940s had three times the amount of iron as a conventionally grown apple today.

The costs of growing organically are also higher than conventional agriculture - it takes more time and more labor to be organic. (Anyone who has spent four hours hand-weeding can tell you that much.) An organic farmer who charged conventional prices would be out of work in short order. Additionally, organic certification is an expensive undertaking - farmers have to pay fees that can add up to thousands of dollars to organic certification agencies, not to mention the time they must spend organizing and filling out paperwork.

There are deeper reasons I think we're unwilling to pay extra for food in this country. Americans only spent on average 10% of their income on food in 2009, compared with 22% in 1949.We have a skewed idea of food cost due to our food production system, which externalizes costs to taxpayers in the forms of health care, workers' rights, and environmental sustainability.

When you break down the costs of organic foods to serving size amounts, it may surprise you. Check out this economic breakdown of a $100 turkey, for example - she estimates a $1.25 serving size cost when all is said and done. A $4 bunch of beets is also about $1.25 per serving. A half pound bag of lettuce mix at $6 a bag? For eight people, that's less than a dollar per serving. A soda, on the other hand, costs $1.50. A Big Mac is $4. Frankly, I call shenanigans on anyone who regularly spends $5 on a latte at Starbucks but says they can't afford fresh, local, organic produce.

Buying local/organic food does not have to cost that much. It can and should be affordable. And the best way to make it affordable is to purchase your food directly from the farmer, either through a CSA or at a farmers market.




*Of course, there are all kinds of issues about the use of the word "organic". Not all organic food is created equal - compare "industrial organic" farms in California to small, local family operations in your area. A lot of farms aren't certified organic because of the expense and the bureaucracy it involves, but if you take the time to talk to your farmers, you will often find that they do grow everything organically.

The Real Cost of Cheap Food

A couple weeks ago, a man who was coming to stay at the cottage with his family asked me, "So why is organic food so much more expensive than regular food?"

I have a hard time trying to decide what I found more jaw-dropping: the incredible scope of the question, or the sheer ignorance of someone coming to stay at our "green B&B".*

After a few seconds of furious thought, I was able to organize my brain somewhat and manage an explanation that didn't make me sound like a complete idiot. But afterwards, I started to think about the encounter. Is it really such a fantastic question? Many people just think of organic food as the "expensive" alternative. If you only compare grocery store prices, then yes, it is. But a lot more goes into it than that. For every "cheap" food item you buy, there are invisible costs somewhere that you are encouraging - costs that are taken out on you, your community, and every tax-payer in the country.

(WARNING: This is a long rant post.)

Health

When you buy a cheeseburger from your favorite fast food place, it probably seems like a good deal. Four bucks for a sandwich, side and drink? Sign me up.

But the hidden costs with cheap food are considerable. The "obesity epidemic" sweeping America is proof of that. One in three adults in the US is considered obese. The number of obese children has tripled since 1980, with 17% of children under the age of 20 considered obese today.

Noticeably, there are considerable racial, ethnic and income-related disparities in obesity. Obesity rates tend to be much higher in low-income neighborhoods. Hispanic children are far more likely than non-Hispanic children to be obese, and African Americans have the highest rates of adult obesity.

But what is the actual cost, in dollars? In 2008, medical costs resulting from obesity were estimated at $147 billion.** Also consider that conditions relating to obesity include type 2 diabetes, heart disease, stroke and some types of cancer. That doesn't include what the costs of lost productivity were in that year, or how much of that cost forwarded to the public as part of their tax money.

Environmental


I think everyone got tired of hearing about environmental problems after the Exxon-Valdez Oil Spill, but when the Australian government reports that the Great Barrier Reef is being significantly damaged due to agricultural chemicals, we have a problem.

Conventional agricultural practices result in a variety of long-term environmental problems. Tillage often subjects the land to severe erosion, for example. To wit - a 1950's topsoil survey of Virginia listed what is now Brightwood Vineyard and Farm as having six feet of topsoil. When Dean and Susan moved here ten years ago, the farm had two. And it takes a thousand years to build a foot of soil.

Then there's pest and weed management, which is what everyone thinks about when the question of environmental impact arises. While Monsanto might be engineering corn that can withstand application of Roundup, anyone who uses a product like that isn't thinking a few steps down the line. The GMO corn might be okay, but all the beneficial microbes in the soil are wiped out. Application of fungicides and pesticides do the same, killing everything in its path, and making the soil anaerobic and completely unfit for use for the next ten years. Runoff of these chemicals then has the predicted effect - tainting water sources, killing wildlife and native plants, and so on.

To counter the complete decimation of their soil, conventional farmers use NPK fertilizers that add "the big three" back into the soil - Nitrogen, Phosphorus, and Potassium. Other than the ridiculously over-simplified idea that these three nutrients are all crops need to be healthy (and we wonder why produce today has 40% fewer vitamins and minerals than produce from the 1940s, as Michael Pollan courteously explained in In Defense of Food), the application of fertilizer also has consequences for the surrounding environment.

Example: when I was in high school, back in good ol' Indiana, one summer something interesting happened. The run-off of fertilizers from lawns caused severe algae bloom in the Eagle Creek Reservoir, which happens to also be the primary water source for miles around. The algae killed off all the fish, and made the water taste like the inside of a toilet. The county then had to spend taxpayer money to mitigate the problem by getting rid of the algae and restocking the entire lake with fish.

Human Rights

Think about the rice selection at your local grocery store. At the low end of the selection, you have family-size bags of store-brand rice for maybe $2 or $3. At the other end of the scale are small one-pound bags of "specialty" rice - Arborio, perhaps, or wild rice mixes - at $6 or $7 each.

If you're like most people, you probably go for the $2 bag. It's the better deal, yes? But how is such a large amount so cheap?

The answer is most likely that it's taken out of the wages of the workers who cultivate it. Most large farms pay their workers a pittance - not even a living wage. This has been considered a problem in California for years - anyone who remembers the United Farm Workers strikes in the 1980's, led by Cesar Chavez, has an idea what I'm talking about. Our country, especially the agri-business, has a long and illustrious history of importing illegal workers who will work for a fraction of what American citizens would consider appropriate.***

Something like rice isn't usually grown in the US, though. It's grown instead in countries like India, China, South Korea. Not only do workers there have to contend with low pay, but the working conditions are often atrocious. A lot of pesticides that chemical companies like Monsanto and DOW spent years and millions of dollars developing are no longer legal in the United States; these chemicals are now sold to countries where they aren't illegal, creating hazardous working conditions for agricultural workers there.




The bottom line is if you are buying cheap food, then something is wrong. There is no such thing as "cheap food". With organic food purchased at a local farmer's market, you know that your money is going directly to the farmer, that no chemicals were used in the making of your produce, and that it is the healthy choice.

For a much less righteously angry and considerably shorter post on the topic of the externalized costs of cheap food, check out this post on Marion Nestle's blog.





*Lest I sound like a pretentious ass, let me explain that after observing five months worth of visitors, I can safely say that most of them are familiar with (and often eat lots of) organic food.
**Stats can be found at the CDC website.
***The question of illegal immigration is a large and unwieldy one - for a look at this practice, I suggest checking out the documentary Food, Inc.

Paperwork and the Farm

The concepts of paperwork and bureaucracy seem antithetical to farming, which we tend to think about as practically the most natural activity one can do, short of actually going to the wilderness and living off the land. The farmer pays close attention to her fields and livestock. She touches the earth with her bare hands daily, is far more in tune with the geography and weather than the average person, and depends upon the well-being of her beets and fennel, grass and sheep for her health and livelihood.

And yet... there is paperwork. A hefty amount of it, too. If you are USDA Organic Certified, that is. Which Brightwood Vineyard and Farm happens to be.

We must write down everything we do on the farm - and I do mean everything. We write down what we plant, which rows, how many feet. We record every "input" (e.g. compost or fertilizer) that goes on the plants. We meticulously catalog how many pounds of every single piece of produce we harvest, how many feet of each bed we harvested, the quality of the harvest, the seed lot numbers, and where it is going.

This, of course, is nothing compared to the leviathan piles of paperwork that Susan faces whenever her USDA Organic Inspection comes around, which it did last week. Documentation proving that her seeds are organic, and if they aren't, a minimum of two letters proving that she tried to find organic seeds and couldn't. Pictures of cover crops and videos of said cover crops being tilled into the field. Lists of every single seed she has purchased in the last year, if it was planted, where it was planted, and organized by a seed lot number that she assigns it. Maps of the farms, showing how they look in relation to one another, storage facilities marked, vegetable fields marked, livestock areas marked... heck, everything marked.

All this time and effort spent on paperwork appear, to me, completely anathema to the idea of farming. Most of the farmers I know became farmers because they wanted to be linked closely with the land, not so they could sit inside and stare at a computer for hours each week. That's certainly not why I chose this job.

Just how necessary is being USDA Organic certified, anyway? I just finished reading The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan, and he does an excellent investigation of two opposing viewpoints of this topic. On the one side, you have "Industrial Organic": large-scale organic farms that farm hundreds of acres of crops or rear thousands of livestock without pesticides, herbicides, or antibiotics. These include such enterprises as Earthbound Farm, Cascadian Farm, and Horizon Organics - familiar names to anyone who frequents the organic aisle of their local supermarket.

Diametrically opposing these farms is Joel Salatin, the farmer who runs the now infamous (in farming circles, at least) Polyface Farm in Staunton, Virginia. Salatin does organic livestock, but he isn't USDA certified as such. He refuses to be. And Pollan provides plenty of salty quotes to illustrate this point. For example:

We never called ourselves organic - we call ourselves 'beyond organic.' Why dumb down to a lesser level than we are?

And my personal favorite:

Me and the folks who buy my food are like the Indians - we just want to opt out. That's all the Indians ever wanted - to keep their tepees, to give their kids herbs instead of patent medicines and leeches...But the Western mind can't bear an opt-out option. We're going to have to refight the Battle of the Little Bighorn to preserve the right to opt out, or your grandchildren and mine will have no choice but to eat amalgamated, irradiated, genetically prostituted, barcoded, adulterated fecal spam from the centralized processing conglomerate.

So that's how Mister Salatin feels about the subject. And, honestly, I identify with him to a large degree. Big Organic has no soul - it has compromised the spirit of the organic ideal that started in the 60's.

But, if we compare conventional farming and Big Organic farming, there is very clearly a lesser of two evils. Although Big Organic farms may be "free range" in name only, may look exactly like a conventional farm from the outside, they are much more environmentally friendly. They aren't degrading their soil and polluting the land with pesticides. They aren't pumping their broilers or cattle full of hormones. Said chicken may not be living a life full of chicken enjoyment on the open farm, but at least we, the consumer, know that it is the healthier option, for us and the earth.

But honestly...the best option of all is to go to a local farmer's market and purchase food from someone you trust.

These are the farms that fall in the middle of the extremes. And the choice of whether or not to get USDA certification is a highly personal one that each of these farmers must make. Do their consumers care? Are they willing to put in the extra hours, poring over hundreds and hundreds of papers until their eyeballs bleed? (Figuratively speaking.) For some farms, it's a choice they feel is necessary. For others, not so much.

Microgreen Madness

Although the farm's microgreens production is technically not organic - Susan can't get most of the seeds organically, although we obviously raise them without any non-organic inputs - it's still a fun part of what we do.

Microgreens are exactly what they sound like - tiny versions of plants such as basil (above), mizuna, cress (below), mustard, and so on. We sell them to Fresh Link, a local wholesale operation that provides produce for DC-area restaurants. The microgreens are typically used for garnish... and no wonder, for they are lovely.

We start with plain potting soil, which we put into the trays.*

Today, we're going to plant Purple Kohlrabi.

Using our lovely little seeder, we sprinkle the seeds liberally over the dirt.

Then we tamp them down with our handy tamper.

After they germinate inside, which just takes a day or two in summer, we take them out to the nursury to join the other happy little microgreens:

Well, to be perfectly honest, not all of the microgreens are totally happy these days.

That ugly looking splotch is some kind of fungal growth that has been popping up and decimating the beautiful microgreens. Basil, amaranth and purselane all seem especially vulnerable, although it's shown up in some of the other greens too.




*Did I mention that the main reason I really like this job is that I'm allowed to play in the dirt?

My 2011 Goals and Sweet Potato Pecan Pie

As you may or may not remember, I've been hired by an organic farm for the 2011 growing season. First, I must get celebratory impulses out of my system, not unlike Colin Firth the other night.... so, YAY!
 

Or maybe I'll just celebrate with some PIE.

Now that I have that out of my system, I find myself wondering what role this blog is going to play in the upcoming year. I originally created it to chronicle my WWOOF-ing adventures, which have somehow morphed into accepting an internship on a family farm. My reasons for having this blog haven't changed much, though. And since I'm starting so soon - March 21st, to be precise - I want to take some time now and reflect on my goals.

Document my adventures, thoughts, experiences, etc. Just like a real diary... only a lot less private. I'll keep my own separate journal for my less public musings. Here, not only do I want to keep track of what I'm doing and learning every day, but I want to write about issues facing small family farms, organic and sustainable agriculture, food culture, and so on. All heavily seasoned with my own personal commentary, of course.

Hone my writing skills. While I love to write and think I'm pretty good at it, I know I have a lot to learn. A blog is as good a platform as any to practice writing regularly. Which brings me to...

Write regularly. When I keep a journal, I'm very good about writing regularly, but something - an inherent need for sleep, perhaps - often causes me to give up on keeping up to date when I get busy. And I'm sure this year is going to be nothing if not busy. So I'm setting a goal for myself to update this blog at least once a week. I'll revisit this after I start work, but I think this is a doable amount, leaving me plenty of wiggle room.

Run out of space on Picasa. What I mean by this hyperbolizing is, I want and need to do a great job of visually documenting this year, despite having a lardball of a digital camera to lug around. Besides, blog entries are so much more interesting when they have pictures accompanying them.... as anyone who compares my last few entries to a month or two ago can attest.



Now that all that seriousness is finished, let's talk about pie.

My grandad is visiting us right now and will be leaving soon, so I decided to make a gigantic dinner tonight, which was received with great acclaim. It consisted of pasta puttanesco and a spinach and fennel salad with strawberries and shitake mushrooms, topped with goat cheese and a floridly-colored homemade dressing that involved pureed strawberries.* And, to wrap up, a Sweet Potato Pecan Pie. Capitalized.


Nothing says "I love you, Grandpa!" like anchovies, garlic and salmon-colored salad dressing.

Here's the back story: last year, I had a Julia Child page-a-day calendar. Since I was living off the AmeriCorps $4.50 per day food budget, I couldn't try very many recipes, so I ended up saving them all. This weekend, I spent many an hour organizing the recipes, gluing them individually onto sheets of paper, cross-referencing them and putting them in a binder. I know it seems strange, but one thing you must understand about me is that I get weirdly excited about organizing things...especially if it involves color coding.
  
As I was putting the recipes in their nice, safe little page protectors, I happened to stumble upon one for Sweet Potato Pecan Pie. I like sweet potatoes, I thought. And I like pecans. And I LOVE pie. And wonder of wonders, I had all the ingredients, including sweet potatoes from the Indy Winter Farmer's Market. Unfortunately, I did have to resort to a frozen pie crust, for time was simply too short. But otherwise, the pie was a resounding success, and was absolutely perfect as a mid-winter dessert. Safe to say, the pie will be reappearing for Thanksgiving 2011.

Sweet Potato Pecan Pie

Ingredients

1 9-inch frozen deep-dish pie crust, thawed and pierced all over with fork

(Again, you can make your own crust. I definitely will next time. But this way is certainly time-saving.)

1 1-lb sweet potato, pierced with fork

1/2 cup packed brown sugar

2 tablespoons melted butter

1 tablespoon vanilla extract

1/2 tsp. cinnamon

1/4 tsp. allspice

1/4 tsp. salt

3/4 cup light corn syrup

(Yes, I know it's the devil - you can substitute honey or sorgham or whatever you want. You can also boil water and sugar and make simple syrup.)

 2 large eggs

1 cup pecan halves

Preheat oven to 400 F and bake crust until pale golden, about 8 minutes. Set aside and reduce oven temp. to 350 F.

Cook potato in microwave on high until tender, about 6 minutes per side. Cut in half and scoop flesh into medium bowl and mash - measure out 1 cup and set rest aside. Whisk brown sugar and next 5 ingredients into mashed potato; spread mixture over pie crust.

Whisk syrup and eggs in bowl to blend, and stir in pecans. Pour over potato mixture.

Bake pie until filling is set, puffed, and brown - about 45 minutes. Let cool before serving.

*No, we did not go out and buy strawberries in February. What a notion. My parents get a co-op sort of deal through Green Bean Delivery, through which they get a box every week full of local, organic produce. At least, it's supposed to be local... they seem to have some difficulties in winter, and I've noticed a lot of items coming from Florida... kiwis, lemons, oranges, and the like. At least it's organic, although it raises questions. Check out the FRESH: The Movie blog for a discussion about what goes into a food mile, Part 1 and Part 2.