I am slowly but surely (during meager lunch hours, when I can) meandering my way through Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, an investigative book dealing with the food industry today and how it is — and isn’t — something we need to aspire to. He is exploring where our food comes from, why it comes from there (vs. other sources), the methods and reasoning behind them for growing, harvesting, packaging, and marketing the food, and attempts to answer the question, “In this modern world, with so many food choices and choices of where that food comes from, how do we properly choose our food?”
I’d like to share a particularly poignant passage that I read today, as it got me thinking:
As a society we Americans spend only a fraction of our disposable income feeding ourselves — about a tenth, down from a fifth in the 1950s. Americans today spend less on food, as a percentage of disposable income, than any other industrialized nation, and probably less than any people in the history of the world. This suggestion that there are many of us who could afford to spend more on food if we chose to. After all, 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 now pay for. Another formerly free good that more than half of us happily pay for today is water. So is the unwillingness to pay more for food really a matter of affordability or priority?
I have wondered about this for a long time, because the fact is, we DO spend an awful lot more on things other than food, and we get really upset when the price of, say, ground beef goes up 30 cents, even though its been birthed, grown, finished, slaughtered, clean, cut, ground, and shaped into a convenient package for us, all for a few bucks per pound. Bananas are up? Oh lord! Never mind the fact that they just got done traveling a few thousand miles to your grocery store, mostly unharmed.
I think part of it is price habit. As adults, we all have a list of prices in our heads for, say, milk, bananas, meat, bread, and cheese. Deviate much from those defined levels and we get all put out. We like our traditions, in a sense.
I also think that we, as consumers, don’t really know what we should be paying for food — so we pay what the majority of the market says we should pay. Maybe we should be paying $10/lb for good meat, but if the majority of the market says, “We have perfectly fine meat over here and it’s only $3/lb” and everyone ELSE has it for $3/lb, your mind tends to think that $10/lb meat must be exorbitant! Ritzy. Overpriced.
And finally, we look at things like food as constant necessities and, much like toilet paper, we haaaaate paying more than we must for something that we have to buy All. The. Time. Most people feel like they spend the great majority of their time sleeping and eating, let alone having to go into a grocery store and buy food. Paying more than you think is fair, or what everyone else is paying, simply grates on one’s nerves when you have to do it over and over. It’s bad enough paying for $3.60/gallon gas, must we break the bank for food, too?
And yet……YET….we probably have our priorities out of whack, like so many other things. We spend an awful lot of hours in our beds to not be shelling out top dollar for the best mattress money can buy, given that we spend on average almost 122 DAYS out of a year in bed! That’s a full 1/3 of the year in bed and we still think $1000 for a mattress is akin to slavery.
Are we simply just really, really screwed up?
Of course, I’m not advocating spending $30 per person, per meal, 3x a day. But is it the first thing we should skimp on when the budget is tight? Should we be so quick to pass up that organic chicken in favor of the Walmart bulk-pack Trough Pack™ of chicken breasts, just to save a buck or two? Need we feel so guilty when we buy local and pay twice the price?
Instead, should we be focusing on how healthy the food is for us, what chemicals and compounds were used on or in it, how it was raised, what sort of people in what sort of conditions harvested and prepared it, and….god forbid the audacity of it, how it tastes??
Far be it from me to be a food snob, or a tree-hugging environmentalist, or a food industry fear monger, but, at the same time, I wonder: Are we being smart about this?
When someone brings up the price of gas going up, I usually shrug and say… well I have to buy it, and to travel 30 miles to save .30 on a tank of gas seems ridiculous.
And cigarettes… Trav spends probably $30+/week, and he gets the best deals he can find, but what are you going to do? We ‘have’ to have them. (I say ‘we’ because I love him more than life, but I won’t live with him if he doesn’t have them. )
I pay almost $120/month for cable TV and internet and close to the same for two phones, but I feel I “need” those things.
I just checked my bank account, and in the last 4 weeks, I’ve spent $123 on groceries. That’s $30 a week, and that’s when I’m on a tight budget. I can spend $80-100 if you let me, but I can feed the two of us, healthily, on $30/week.
Healthy helps. Portion size and being aware. The three chicken breasts halves in my fridge right now will make six servings, instead of two before we started dieting. And I can justify spending $2.50 for a package of name bright light hot dogs now because we don’t eat an entire package in one meal anymore.
This is a long rambley post of numbers, but numbers are one of the ways I find control over my world. Money, carbs, percentages… I’m kind of a number freak.
But you also know how much I appreciate food. How I’m always wanting to try new flavors, create new things, and experiment with my tongue.(insert leer & eyebrow waggle)
What I wanted to say back at the beginning was that I honestly go grocery shopping with what’s left of my paycheck after everything else has been paid and we’ve eaten a meal out. As much as I appreciate food, love food, am comforted by food, you(or that author) is right in saying that I don’t make paying for it a priority. But maybe it’s because I am confident in my ability to cook and eat well on very little. I’m not worried that a $20 grocery budget means 6 days of ramen noodles. It might mean that I’ll have to get creative with that can of Dinty Moore stuck in the back of my cupboard, but I’m confident it’ll turn out just fine.
I did a thing recently where I fed my family of three for a week on $100, shopping only at the farmers market and buying only sustainable, local, insert-your-self-righteous-adjective-of-choice-here meat. (The link is here.)
We ate very well. We even had some folks over for dinner. We did not eat meat three times a day or even once a day, but people eat far too much meat (a hard sell here in southern California, let alone in Iowa). We did not go out to eat, we did not buy prepared foods, and there was no room for fancy coffee that takes forty seconds to order from places like Fourbucks.
I don’t imagine this would be possible in November in rural Iowa, but on the other hand there’s a reason our grandparents knew how to put up fruits and vegetables.
This discussion reminds me of a few conversations I’ve had over the years. When I recommend naturopathic care to someone, there is always a moment when their thoughts turn to the cost. I’m familiar with that consideration because I do the same things sometimes. I think “can I really afford (fille in the blank supplement or whatever)?” I’ve been trying to wean myself out of that knee-jerk thinking with a reminder that there isn’t a much better way to spend the dollars than on my health. You’re right, food spending does not to be outrageous, but it is funny how we’ll balk at paying for quality ingredients. (Imagine my surprise now that I am a buyer of meat products! I’m not used to costly grocery items!)
Great analogy about the mattress. It’s true! Given how much time we spend in bed and, even more so, how important the quality of that time should be, it’s completely messed that we aren’t willing to invest in that more willingly.
That’s a great passage. This idea was presented in Food Inc as well and it also go me thinking how Americans are not willing to pay more for organic, quality or properly killed food, because we want quick and cheap thanks to all the fast food places, etc.
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That book changed the way I look at food and greatly increased how much we spend, especially on meat. We shell out for farmer’s market meat now whener we can. I know not everyone can afford to, but the food system in our country is so screwed up. We think of cheap ground beef as a right, when the truth is that meat is expensive because animals take a lot of work to grow. Really thought provoking book, although it took me forever to finish (YA fiction is more my bag!).
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