Eat Local for Less by Julie Castillo

Author:Julie Castillo
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: local food;cooking;sustainable food;sustainable eating;locavore;farmers market;organic food;food coop;food;recipes;industrial food;agriculture
Publisher: Ruka Press
Published: 2015-08-05T16:00:00+00:00

Why Local Food Is Usually More Expensive—and Should Be

We supermarket foragers have come to expect our groceries to be cheap. We tend to react with outrage whenever we see a higher price tag on an everyday food item. But we only think this way because industrially produced food has become normal for us. We forget that mass-produced food is a historical anomaly.

The impetus behind the local food movement, and behind the writing of this book, is that what seems cheap and convenient on the surface has hidden costs, deferred expenses, and a high price to be paid in many other aspects of our lives.

The true cost of a thing doesn’t go away just because its price is cheap.

In reality, food production has always had a high cost. That’s why our hunter-gatherer ancestors only made the switch from foraging out of sheer necessity. Many of the methods the industrial food system relies on today were first invented in an attempt to deploy the “faster-cheaper-more” efficiency of the factory assembly line to food production. Unfortunately, it didn’t lower the ultimate cost, only the immediate, upfront cost. As we’re finding out now, we will still have to pay the piper.

Often, we suburban consumers aren’t aware of the true costs involved in small-scale food production. The costs for taxes, labor, fuel, quality assurance, and insurance take a deeper bite out of a small farmer’s profit margin than they do out of large-scale producers’. Many small-scale farmers feel that it’s important to get to know their customers and answer their questions. This is part of what they mean by “transparency of method.” But farmers receive no monetary recompense for the time it takes to make themselves available.

Another factor that drives up the price of local food is the cost of complying with federal food safety mandates. Large-scale producers find it easier to command the kinds of profits it takes to invest in the infrastructure and labor costs necessary to achieve compliance. The real irony is that the major outbreaks of food-borne illnesses that have prompted new safety legislation have seldom been linked to small-scale producers.

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