COST OF LIVING

Farmer Joe was part of a local food web in the upper Midwest, selling at a farmers market, through a CSA (community-supported agriculture), and to co-op stores in the Twin Cities. But the partners, Jack and Jill, who began in 1995, were having a tough time economically and realized they would have to boost sales if they were to become viable. The farm earned about $22,000 a year -- split between the two partners -- so they had to take on debt to keep going; this, after 60- to 70-hour workweeks.

Speaking with the farmers, he made some calls and eventually landed a deal with Whole Foods to supply the natural-foods chain with organic heirloom tomatoes. When I visited, they were in year two of the contract, picking the tomatoes before their peak ripeness, then shipping them to Chicago for stores in the Midwest. The deal had become the biggest sales channel for their farm; while still "local," they were not as local as when they sold in their backyard.

There was a lesson here, one that often gets lost in the debate about which is better, local or organic? Too often this is understood as a zero-sum game -- that the money you spend on organic food at the supermarket will mean less for local farmers. After all, the food you buy is being shipped from who knows where and then often ends up in a processed food product. I've heard the argument that if all the money spent on organic food (around $14 billion) were actually channeled to local food, then a lot more small farms would survive and local food networks could expand. Well, Featherstone was doing precisely the opposite: it had entered the organic wholesale marketplace and then sent its tomatoes hundreds of miles away to survive as a small and, yes, local farm.

How we shop. Venues like Whole Foods are not fully organic because people are often unwilling to spend more than a small portion of their grocery budget on organic foods. It's too expensive. This is one reason why organic food accounts for just 2 percent of food sales -- 1 percent if you include eating out. Similarly, local foods, though important, total 1 to 2 percent. So arguing over local or organic is a bit like two people in a room of 100 fighting over who has the more righteous alternative to what the other 98 people are doing. It doesn't really matter, because the bigger issue is swaying the majority.
When I shop, visiting the Dupont Circle farmers' market, when living in DC, on Sunday morning, or going to Fremont Market here in Seattle, and then going to the supermarket, I make choices too. I buy local, organic, and conventional foods too, because each meets a need. Is the local product better than the organic one? No. Both are good choices because they move the food market in a small way. In choosing them, I can insert my values into an equation that for too long has been determined only by volume, convenience, and price. While I have nothing against low prices and convenient shopping, the blind pursuit of these two values can wreak a lot of damage -- damage that we ultimately pay for in water pollution, toxic pesticide exposure, unhealthy livestock, the quality of food, and the loss of small farms. The total bill may not show up at the cash register, but it's one we pay nonetheless.
So what's my advice? Think about what you're buying. If you want local food, buy local. If you want organic, buy organic. The point is to make a conscious choice, because as we insert our values into the market, businesses respond and things change. There's power in what we do collectively, so is there any reason to limit it unnecessarily?


Bellow is some emails i have been having with people about the Local V Organic... and even being a meat eater!

It has to start somewhere
Local and organic are often not mutually exclusive. Farmer's markets here often sell what's at least claimed to be organic produce, and the PCC co-ops do their best to provide items that are both local and organic.
As for cost - I don't shop for food by cost. Any price differential between conventional and organic food is going to be dwarfed by other expenses and decisions - and of course how do we measure the cost of eating heavy metals and pesticides?
If you truly care about "better food", why do you mistake animals for it? If you abuse your body with corpses it's not designed to digest, the benefits of conventional vs. organic are moot.

We're omnivores
With all due respect, human physiology proves you to be mistaken when you claim we're not "designed to digest" animals. We are neither herbivores nor carnivores, but omnivores, with teeth, saliva, stomachs, intestines--an entire digestive system--capable of extracting the nutrients we need from both plants and animals. That's one of the fascinating features of human beings that distinguishes us from many other species: our capacity to digest an enormous range of foods, including other animals. This extravagant omnivorousness is one of the features which has enabled us to spread throughout the world, into most kinds of ecosystems, for good and ill.
The anthropological evidence isn't in your favor, either. As European conquerors marched around the world, they found people eating widely varied diets, but they found only a small number of people eating vegetarian diets and a number of cultures in high latitude climates eating an essentially a carnivorous diet and, apparently, thriving. Even among the people of the land we now know as India, the percentage of true vegetarians is much lower than commonly assumed. Now, if we were truly not "designed to digest" animals, why would the eating of animals be nearly universal among the thousands of human cultures that have existed?

Even if it is more expensive, so what?
Americans spend far less on their food than any other country in percentage of income. Maybe instead of buying that extra TV you could just buy better food.
Although I do follow the rule of local first, local Organice second, non-local organic third. But then I'm actually lucky enough to live in a state where local organic is cheaper and available even in meats as long as I'm willing to invest in a CSA or buy 1/4 of a cow.

Do you walk to school or carry your lunch?
Speaking of false choices...Fromartz places these two trends in oppostion to each other, as if local and organic were somehow mutually exclusive. But this is not really the case, at least not in most regions. Depending on where you live, there's usually an abundance of locally grown organic produce...even throughout the winter. All in all, given this, his very trendy argument of local v. organic is mostly one of false tension.