The (Hidden) High Cost of Cheap Food
by Leonard Mercado
Tanque Verde Gardens Grower

Most of us lucky enough to have been born in the United States within the past 70 years or so have been blessed with an abundance of inexpensive and readily available food.  An accompanying increase in leisure time and discretionary income has made the idea of knowing how all this cheap and apparently easy food arrived at our grocery stores and dinner tables an abstract concept at best.  We were the beneficiaries of the “green revolution” with a very non-green footprint; a feast of fertilizers, insecticides, herbicides, and hybridized genetic mutations served with a petroleum gravy to feed our wildly consumptive gastronomic and economic desires- but to starve our conscience.  While enjoying our mixed salad of social inequity and environmental unsustainability did we take the time to appreciate exactly who were the people and where was the land that ultimately subsidized our sumptuous spread, or were we just happy for the 89 cent a head lettuce?   

Now, with the upsurge in oil prices and transportation costs, nationwide food contamination, and a growing global food crisis, we are being forced to face the high cost of the cheap food whose real price has been hidden for many decades.  The time of ignoring the importance of our food and the quality and condition of the land and people that provide it is over.  It is my opinion that we should be thankful for the end of cheap food so that we can begin to cultivate a more sustainable means of feeding our future and achieve what Cesar Chavez, founder of The United Farm Workers Union (UFW), termed “a safe and just food supply”.  

In the early 1970s, my father was assigned by the AFL-CIO to work as a union representative in helping support Cesar Chavez in his organizing the then fledgling UFW.  Many of my childhood summers were spent on picket lines in grape vineyards and lettuce fields and in evening unity rallies and prayer services.  My father and Cesar were very involved in the plight of the poor and disenfranchised who worked tirelessly under difficult conditions to make sure that the produce reached the market on time.  In those days just making a living wage and staying alive were tall orders for a new and politically unpopular people’s union but after the initial contractual demands were settled, further worker inequities that weren’t of the strictly black and white, sign on the dotted line type remained.  Chief among these were the health and safety issues, including congenital birth defects amongst children of farm workers, which were suspected to be due to the use and abuse of pesticides and other toxic agents inevitably paired with modern agricultural industry combined with poor living conditions and minimal or non-existent health care.  The unintended consequences of the green revolution were beginning to show in the faces of the workers all around me.  Those images have stayed with me and have flavored my passion for growing food, albeit on a small scale, with a minimum of petro-based modernization yet a maximum of goodness.  

Until recently, the idea of small scale or family farming has been considered something of an organic pipe dream, not able to compete with the economic powerhouse of mass-produced, cheap food.   A small farmer would be pained to see the sales advertisements of mega-grocers whose ultra-cheap prices could not be replicated on a family farm scale.  Federal subsidies for commodity type foods such as milk and corn further eroded the ability for small, regional producers to be able achieve market viability without the incurrence of massive debt for machinery and petrochemicals in order to run with the big dogs of food production.  Our illegal immigration predicament has been largely fueled by the need for cheap labor to provide our cheap meals.  And as if to extinguish the last embers of real, local people growing real, local food, trade pacts such as NAFTA have opened our borders to a global influx of ultra cheap food grown on the backs of the worlds most underprivileged classes without any of the benefits of a “safe and just” food supply which had only begun to germinate within our own borders.

Let’s face it folks, the time of buying cheap, globally homogenized food, even “organic” global food is over.  What price are we really willing to pay to for the fruits and vegetables of a foreign land to be shipped and refrigerated while it makes its way to our plate?  How much are we willing to know about the wages and working conditions of the people involved in its production and the health of the land whence it came?   In other words, if you think that those “organic” goji berries grown in China are pricey, stop and think about the real cost in terms of human dignity and all things petroleum.  When you think that you are paying top dollar for organic and local-grown tomatoes, think about the people that you are providing with the opportunity to provide you with the opportunity to enjoy the most nutritious, safe, and just food available.  You are now paying the price of one less gallon of oil, one ounce less of insecticide to NOT be purchased by the grower.  You are paying the real cost of yesterday’s cheap food today and there’s some catch up time before this account is balanced.   

And if you can’t visualize the amount of petroleum and human injustice saved by paying a real price for real food, think of the amount of work that these local farmers saved you from by growing what you didn’t have the time, energy, or ability to grow yourself.  Better yet, growing and picking your own is probably the best way get a realistic and informed opinion on how much energy and attention touching on devotion actually goes into growing food.   

It’s time to re-budget our food awareness and be aware that one of the hidden costs of cheap food has been the near extinction of the ethical farmer.  The cost of cheap food in terms of human suffering has long been conveniently overlooked because we undervalued the human dignity of those who provided such abundance.  Let us welcome the change and the challenge of the new food economy as one of the positive results of the end of cheap food will be to provide fertile ground for the seeds of ethical farming to grow in the newly evened economic playing field.

When you think that you are paying top dollar for organic and local-grown tomatoes, think about the people that you are providing with the opportunity to provide you with the opportunity to enjoy the most nutritious, safe, and just food available.  You are now paying the price of one less gallon of oil, one ounce less of insecticide to NOT be purchased by the grower. You are paying the real cost of yesterday’s cheap food today and there’s some catch up time before this account is balanced.