It’s a common enough scene: you’re in a health foods store like Whole Foods or Trader Joes or even a normal supermarket like Stop - and - Shop or Wegman’s. You find a fruit or vegetable that looks good and has been granted the "Holy and Most Honorable" title of Organic. You feel good about yourself for putting this well sourced and sustainably produced item in your cart and give your consciousness a high five as you feel your eco foot print shrink a little. Your riding this high until you reach the check out counter and see that that zucchini from a farm 25 miles away is $6. For a brief moment you are positively horrified, but then this sudden storm of torrid emotions is tamped down by the thought that no, this is good for the environment and yourself.
If you are like me, you are lucky enough to be able to spend this kind of money on food that, just a hundred years ago, would have been the norm in every kitchen around the country. Food that, before the Godzilla of Industrial Farming was discovered at the bottom of the Capitalist ocean and emerged from the crashing waves to stomp out the wills of small farmers with its promise of money that never materialized, was seen on every table, rich or poor.
Before you mark this article off as the ravings of another hippie dippy farmer girl, just listen. Does it really make sense that there were 90 million acres of corn planted in the US in 2015? People are not eating 90 million acres of corn in one year. This land that could be used to produce affordable food for everyone, including low-income families -- many of whom opt to eat at fast food joints over buying fresh vegetables because it is cheaper, is being used to produce corn to feed cattle at factory farms. 51% of land in the US is used for agriculture and most of this is used to produce corn or soy beans while the rest of the country is eating produce shipped in from another coast or countries hundreds of miles away.
That local and organic food in your Whole Foods is being sold at such ridiculously expensive prices because it doesn’t really make sense economically anymore for farmers to not be apart of the factory farm conglomerate. Most of the local produce, at least where I live in Massachusetts, comes from small time farms that make most of their revenue on Community Supported Agriculture shares and farmers markets, relying on mostly white and upper middle class patrons to keep their crazy idea of eating something that hasn’t been shipped from half way across the world alive. It is also because eating organic and locally sourced veggies has gone the way of luxury cars and handbags, a status symbol to be toted around and flaunted by those who can afford it.
Why is it that eating how humans ate for the 4,000 odd years since we domesticated plants has become a fad? Does it really signify progress that only the wealthy can eat what comes from our own backyards?What does it say that it is cheaper to eat a bag of potato chips than a bag of carrots?
There are many things that need to be done to lessen the increasingly widening gap between the wealthy and poor in this country, but making healthy and sustainably produced food affordable and available to everyone shouldn’t have to be one of them.
