During the Eat Local Challenge last year, there was a lot of discussion in the blogosphere about how expensive it is to eat locally produced food. Some people called it elitist, even snobby. This was hard for me to swallow, because the Eat Local Challenge was heartfelt and meaningful for me. But the exaggerated words do contain a grain of truth: a local diet does cost more and is more difficult to come by than the standard American fare. What troubles me most about this grain of truth is how far astray our food system has gone. How could eating locally grown food—something that was once a given—now be so out of reach that it’s called elitist?
One thing I’ve noticed is that it’s not just local food that costs more; it’s fresh, unprocessed, and nutritious food in general. What’s best for your body is worst for your wallet, and vice versa. I found an article by Adam Drewnowski, PhD, that studies the relationship between energy density (calories per pound of food) and energy cost (dollars per calorie). The article observes links between income, diet, and obesity. In short, the study finds that high-calorie, unhealthy foods are cheap, so people with little money to spend on food buy these foods and, paradoxically, they get fat.
The study finds that per calorie, energy-dense foods such as oils, refined flour and sugars are cheaper than fresh foods. “The difference in energy costs [$/calorie] between fats and sweets and lettuce or fresh fruit was at times equal to several thousand percent…Whereas a daily energy ration of…~2400 kcal [calories] from added sugar and fat could be purchased for under $1, the energy cost of lettuce or fresh strawberries…was several hundred times that…in fact, calorie for calorie, fresh spinach is more expensive than luxury chocolates or foie gras.”
An interesting blog post I found shows what 200 calories of various foods looks like, and calculates the price of those 200 calories. The foods are arranged in order from cheapest to priciest, and a quick glance paints a vivid picture of what’s wrong with our food system. The most affordable calories, at the top of the page, are all white and yellow foods. The green, red and orange foods—fruits and vegetables—are all at the very bottom. The cheapest food on the list is canola oil, $0.07; the most expensive is bell peppers, $3.23.
I must admit that I paused for a moment to calculate how many glazed donuts it would take to meet my recommended daily allowance of calories. I noted that I could feed myself for about two dollars a day. Broccoli would cost me closer to twenty. I wondered if I could make donuts out of local ingredients, but decided that was a proposition doomed to fail.
Getting back to the point about elitism, it seems that a healthy diet rich in fresh fruits and vegetables and proteins is expensive no matter where it comes from. Why is our food system so outrageously backwards? Why does fresh food cost more? I’m not sure. But I have a theory: it’s a combination of subsidies and the cost of handling and shipping. The cheapest items per calorie are made of ingredients heavily subsidized by the U.S. government with taxpayer dollars, such as corn and wheat. Also, fresh food has more water weight, is more delicate, and is more perishable, so it costs more to store, handle, and transport.
Cheap, industrially produced food is rarely local. If it were, we’d never know, because there is no traceability in this system, no way of telling where the food is coming from. Local food that is traceable to a specific farm is more expensive because small farms can’t take advantage of economies of scale.
So unless you grow your own, it seems there are only a few ways to eat locally produced, healthy food on the cheap. You can be a good comparison shopper. You can save by doing the cooking yourself. You can work to change the economics of the food system (two words: Farm Bill). As I take on the Penny-Wise Eat Local Challenge, I’ll be doing a little of all of these things.
The truth is that if we really want to eat fresh, sustainable, locally produced food, we need to be willing to spend more on what we eat. Is fresh produce really expensive? Or is processed food just artificially cheap? Americans now spend just under 10% of our household budget on food, which is less than just about any other country in the world. Not everyone can afford to pay more for food. But if a car, a cell phone, and lattes are worth the expense, how can we skimp on food that’s good for our bodies and the planet?
Julie Cummins lives in Oakland, CA and is Director of Education for the Center for Urban Education about Sustainable Agriculture (CUESA).
