The Price of Food

I shop for groceries about every other week. Each time I inevitably pass the meat department in my travels from the produce to the dairy. (And once our milk cow is ready I will be skipping that last step.) Obviously I check out the meat as I wander past, always curious about the quality as well as the prices that day. Ground beef on sale for $2.49/lb. Chicken breasts for $1.79/lb. It’s cheap meat. But looking at it and knowing where it came from I think of the old saying, “You get what you pay for”.

Some argue that meat is meat. Eggs are eggs. What is the big deal? Why would I pay more for this steak when I can get it cheaper at the grocery store? My answer would be the same as Joel Salatin’s, a grass farmer from Polyface Farms in Virginia; “It’s actually the cheapest food you can buy.” In The Omnivore’s Dilemma Michael Pollan quotes Joel as saying,

“With our food all 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 – all of 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.”

For the majority of us, I think what it comes down to is priorities, not necessarily cost. We live in a country where the average citizen spends a small amount of their disposable income on food (one-tenth according to Pollan), less than any other industrialized nation. Michael Pollan continues, “…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 pay for.”  Which means the thirteen year old we see with the cell phone probably eats a lunch every day that consists mainly of Cheetos, CocaCola, and frozen "chicken" nuggets. I argue which is more important? Our health or text messaging?

When you think about it, it’s a little hard to believe we use price to determine what we put into our body, something we only get one of and have for the rest of our life.  Cell phones and TVs can be easily replaced, but our health and well-being can be hard to fix once broken. Not all meat is the same. Not all eggs are equal (we joke that the ones from the store are just “white spheres”). Purchasing your food from a local famer means you get quality food. Animals that are raised the way they were meant to. Meat that is healthier and tastes so much better. Can you put a price on that?