Is Eating Well Only For The Rich?
admin January 30th, 2006
My wife and I made a commitment a while back to eat mostly organic for all the well-known environmental and health reasons. We knew at the time that it would cost more but thought it would be worth it anyway. We also discussed the fact that the majority of the world’s people don’t have the luxury of making that choice. When you’re poor, eating organic usually isn’t an option. We’ve been eating primarily out of local organic food stores and farmer’s markets, and my wife is a wonderful cook who loves to cook fresh foods from scratch, so we have been able to avoid all kinds of additives, unhealthy ingredients, badly processed food, and of course the pesticides that we all have grown to love. But then we finally hit the cumulative ‘organic cost wall’: that point at which you realize the weekly increased cost of eating organically adds up to more money than you have. We are far from poor (although living in the high-cost Washington, D.C. area sometimes makes us feel like it), but also far from rich, unless you ask someone from Bangladesh. But I was blind-sided by the cost difference and was really upset that it looked like we wouldn’t be able to afford to eat so much of the right stuff. I have really grown to love the good stuff. It doesn’t have any of the ‘overs’: over-salted, over-sweetened, over-cooked, and over-processed. When you cook it yourself, all the fresh veggies and whole grains look, smell, and taste wonderful. And we buy as much of it either fair-traded or from local merchants as possible, adding our little bit for economic justice. And now we find that even we, in this very affluent part of the world, can’t afford it. We’ve cut back on as many other expenses as we can, but we still had to go back to the local chain store to buy some of those things we could no longer afford at the food co-op. That’s an ugly experience. The stuff is cheaper, but some of it tastes really bad in comparison. So bad that we sucked it up and went back to the co-op for a few things we thought we’d have to ditch – hmm, maybe we don’t need to pay the mortgage after all. It’s depressing and we’re not quite sure what we’ll do about it in the long run, but here’s the real issue: Once again, is it only the rich who will be allowed to eat what all of us should be able to eat as a birthright? And of course there is the big question: if it costs so much, is it really something we can consider integral to living a simple life? ‘Simple’ implies not extravagant or unnecessarily expensive, but organic food is most certainly not simple in terms of our budget. I don’t think there is really an issue that eating organic should not be in our way of life, but it certainly raises the question for people too poor to afford it in our country today.