One of my colleagues, call him X, is trying my patience. He’s smart, observant, and possessed of newfound eagerness to be green. The last is not unexpected for a new arrival to Santa Cruz, a city where folks strive mightily to out-green each other, but it’s such a contrast to his mindset in a prior life that sometimes it takes me aback. I can handle that, though.
What bugs me is the bright line he seems to have drawn in the green sand: for X, it all comes down to cost. He’s willing to do the right thing, and tell everyone he’s doing it, as long as it doesn’t cost him extra….or not too much extra, anyway. But make a bit more of a demand on his wallet, and the shutters come crashing down.
The example that comes most readily to mind is eggs. I buy eggs from a local farmer, whose hens are never caged and seem pretty darn happy with their chicken lives. Not only do they taste better, recent studies have proven eggs from pastured hens have a better nutritional profile than those from caged hens, typical of factory egg farms. They have: 1/3 less cholesterol, ¼ less saturated fat, 2 times more omega-3 fatty acids, 3 times more vitamin E, 4-6 times as much vitamin D, and 7 times more beta carotene—all fantastic. And there’s no guilt involved: cruelty-free, as I’ve seen for myself. Since he’s worried about heart disease, you’d think the nutrition stuff would hit home—but you’d be wrong.
The catch, of course, is price. These eggs cost $5.00 a dozen (another local farmer charges $6.00 per dozen for eggs from similarly indulged hens)—and X’s response is simply, flatly, that he can get a dozen eggs at Costco for under $2.00. End of discussion—what more could there be to consider? Costco.
This infuriates me because he is intelligent enough to grasp the concept of downstream or ‘external’ costs—things that go into production of a commodity and aren’t included in its price but have to be paid for somehow, by someone. In the case of eggs, that’s everything from pollution and marine dead zones caused by waste from factory farms to antibiotic resistance resulting from profligate dosing of confined animals with powerful drugs also used to treat human disease. The degree of animal suffering is nontrivial as well. Finally, he understands the need to support small local farms if we want to have fresh, quality food going forward. These things, however, do not move him. He acknowledges their validity, but just doesn’t seem to care.
If he had limited means, I wouldn’t blame him for focusing so much on price. But he makes a more than decent living, better than the vast majority of Americans, and can absolutely afford $5 for a dozen eggs. I worry that if X, a highly educated, intelligent, well-meaning person in the top tier of earners in the US, isn’t willing to spend an extra 30 cents per egg, we are all doomed.
What will it take to get us to realize we’re being penny wise and pound foolish? Why do Americans have such a perverse relationship with food, preferring quantity over quality at every turn? Is there any hope for a return to sanity, to appreciation of food and what goes into its creation, to a bone-deep belief that in truth ‘you are what you eat’? I wonder. In the meantime I’ll keep pounding away at X, like water against sandstone, hoping that persistence will eventually be rewarded.
[…] comes to shove, we still buy organic food from Wal-Mart or eggs at Costco (see my earlier post, The Price of Eggs), because they’re cheaper….and we ask for, and expect to see, asparagus in October, […]