Last night I watched a "60 Minutes" interview with Alice Waters, the owner of the famous Chez Panisse restaurant in Berkeley, California and who some consider to be the mother of the sustainable, organic, ‘slow-food’ movement. (To be contrasted with fast food, naturally.)
While I’ve always thought Alice Waters was fabulous and certainly loved the one meal I had at her restaurant about nine years ago, a lot of what she was saying about trying to eat only local, organic food seemed downright unrealistic. For one thing, during a stroll through a farmer’s market she introduced viewers to one of her favorite grape-growers, who showed off his four-dollars-a-pound grapes.
Are you kidding me? Who can actually afford that? While she countered that everything you choose to spend money on is just that, a choice—and some may allot more money for clothes (she mentioned Nike shoes) than for pesticide-free, earth-friendly foods.
But I think that’s oversimplifying the issue and really just not doing the math. You can decide to funnel as much of your funds as possible into the best food available and still not have enough cash to cover a pound of those grapes. Or if you do, it would seem to me that each family member would be doled out approximately 8 of the delicious orbs. For me, I buy certain things organic—milk, some fruits and vegetables, some meats—but pick and choose based on my budget. If every item I put into my cart was organic, free-range, etc, my grocery bill would just be too big.
While year-round farming in a temperate place like Berkeley, California is a delight and a reality, I have to nod in agreement with some comments by other people who watched the broadcast on Chowhound.com, folks who made the point that in places like Minnesota, the ground is pretty much frozen solid from late Fall to late Spring, so it’s a different game entirely.
Waters’ fundamental philosophy that good food should not be a privilege but it should be a right—and that Americans need to place what we put into our bodies at the very top of our agenda, is admirable and in the face of evidence about how food directly affects health, it’s hard to disagree with. But the realities of our economy are another thing—and for so many Americans, fresh vegetables are hard to find at a good price, fast food remains the cheapest option, and schools don’t have the funding to include an "Edible Schoolyard" in their curriculum.
In the end, I guess I just have to commend Waters on her tireless pursuit of what she believes in; some may call her a dreamer (her latest thing is to convince President and Mrs. Obama to replace the White House Rose Garden with a thriving vegetable patch!) but the dream is definitely one worth having and a discussion to keep having.
How do you deal with the choices at the market? What do you choose to buy organic and what do you pinch pennies on?
Photo from Flickr
I’m so glad to see someone else is concerned about this problem! As a college student, I am very concerned about what goes into my body and keeping my diet healthy the rest of my life – but I’m also on a tight budget. I buy organic eggs, yogurt, granola, bananas, salad dressing and cheese, all from Trader Joe’s. I then make another trip to Farm Fresh (which is close, so it’s not wasting gas) to get good, fresh vegetables, but I don’t spend the money to make sure they’re organic. If I can get them locally at our farmer’s market in Colonial Wiliamsburg during the spring, I make a trip Saturday morning, but there are some things, like spinach and grapes, that just aren’t available to me organically.
I think the bigger issue, honestly, is cutting out processed food – food bills will be cheaper (in the long run) for anyone who eats fresher and healthier. Spending the extra money to get food without high fructose corn syrup, even if it isn’t organic, will be very beneficial and worth it in my opinion.
I only buy organic if it is completely on accident. Being a working mother of two children, I feel great if I have the time to get to the local grocery, shop and return home to make something quasi-decent for dinner most days of the week. I love a leisurely stroll through the local farmer’s market a few times each summer but that has to be the exception rather than the norm for the sake of time. Buy organic if you want but don’t look down at me as I throw my bag of salad into my cart!
My husband and I decided when we went down to one income that we would only buy organic products unless there was no alternative.
I know that seems like a crazy decision financially, but one of the side benefits of having just the one income is that I had time to do our cooking from scratch. Our grocery bills went gone down because we don’t buy much prepared food – organic tomatoes (even canned ones) are much more affordable than tomato sauce, for instance. We also economize on meat by buying whole chickens at the farmer’s market and cutting them up so we can use them later (boneless breasts, legs/thighs for braising, and the carcass for making stock). Organic, local, free-range meat is by far our biggest expense, food-wise.
Now that I’ve gone back to work, we’ve been able to maintain our grocery buying/eating habits by doing marathon cooking sessions on Sundays and filling the freezer. We also make two week’s worth of bread dough at a time (from Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day) – the dough’s multi-purpose: we use it for bread, but also rolls and cinnamon buns, too.
It’s all more work than buying frozen pizza, but for us it’s a labor of love. We both like to cook, and switching to buying all whole foods was mostly a natural extension of that.
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I think this is a confusing topic and everyone has their opinion. I wish it were simple enough to just go ‘all organic’ to be safe and done with it but I think very few people have the budget for that. Thank you for the article, I used it as a resource for my own blog post on how to pick and choose organic food, http://www.WithAmyMac.com
It actually IS realistic to buy organic. If you load up on the healthiest items (fruit, veggies, whole grains, beans) and cut down on processed and ‘convenience’ foods, you can buy organic. I go to Whole Foods and get a huge cart full of organic fruit, vegetables, brown rice, beans, etc for less than $150. Americans spend less on food than people in other countries (like Canada, France, Italy) and they also eat less fresh organic food which is why there are more obese people in America than anywhere else. People can complain about prices all they want but if there’s more demand for fresh organic foods, the prices will decrease.