Why is organic food so darn expensive? Plus: Can I keep chickens in the suburbs?
Why is organic food so darn expensive? Plus: Can I keep chickens in the suburbs?
Shouldn’t organic fruit and vegetables be cheaper as they are naturally produced? And free-range eggs cost twice as much as caged. I pay more because I have a conscience, but why do they cost so much?
Organic food may be better for you (it’s clear of pesticide residue and the antibiotics used in meat production) and better for the environment (farmers look after soil so that land stays productive), but it sure is expensive. It can seem like we’re being charged a ‘clean conscience’ premium and if it doesn’t put the cost-conscious off organic food entirely, we certainly pay it rather begrudgingly.
We’re all used to super-cheap non-organic food, but those prices don’t include costs like cleaning up polluted water and land, which are paid by the taxpayer—or the next generation. “We have not been paying the true price of our food for a long time, and have come to expect that it must be cheap,” nutritionist Ingrid Weihmann writes in Organic Pathways (good.net.nz/2/organicpathways). “When food prices are kept artificially low, there has to be collateral damage elsewhere. Grower incomes have been screwed down, and animal welfare, the environment and the quality of our soils have been sacrificed, as indeed have the quality of our foods themselves.”
Although organic farms use fewer ‘inputs’, such as pesticides, growing food without chemicals is more labour-intensive, and organic farmers usually don’t have the same economies of scale as farmers growing huge monoculture crops. On top of this, farmers have to pay to get their produce certified organic, and they face big initial costs to switch from conventional to organic farming. Similarly, free-range animals need more space to roam around in, meaning farmers can hold fewer animals per square metre of land. This lower intensity of production means farmers have to price their products somewhat higher.
How much higher organic and free-range farmers need to price their goods is another matter. Fact is, worrying about the environmental and health impacts of what we eat is generally the preserve of those who don’t have far bigger food worries—like how they’re going to pay for this week’s shopping. Farmers price their goods to meet the market, and if the market for organic food is willing to pay a premium, then it’s just good business sense to charge one. Because organic farmers usually produce goods on a small scale, limiting their potential customers through price may not be a problem.
So, how to manage your conscience and your costs? Good blogger Sarah Jefferies (good.net.nz/sarahj) recently switched to a mostly organic diet, picking up a few budgeting tips along the way: “First of all, you don’t need to rush out in an organic frenzy after emptying the entire contents of your fridge into the bin because all your current food is ‘evil’ and ‘nasty’,” she says. She advises simply replacing items as they run out.
“Secondly, not every item needs to be organic! Think about an avocado; it has a thick skin and grows on a huge tree—so the actual ‘meat’ of the avocado is highly unlikely to have sprays and pesticides on it. By comparison, green leaves like spinach, lettuce and silver beet have no protective layer and probably have had their leaves directly sprayed.” Check out the Safe Food Campaign for the ‘dirty dozen’ foods that tend to be highest in pesticides (www.safefood.org.nz/dirtydoz.htm), and find more smart shopping strategies at good.net.nz/shopsmart.
I would love to keep chickens to get fresh, free-range eggs. Is this possible in the suburbs?
Yes. It’s legal to keep chickens in the city—Wellington included—provided you keep them in manner that’s not dangerous to human health and you lay on sufficient food, water, shelter and space for your chooks to run about. Just as importantly, you need to avoid annoying your neighbours.
The exact rules vary between councils: Auckland City Council has specific guidelines on details such as the construction and location of your chook house. Comply with their rules and you’re allowed to keep up to six hens—but roosters are right out. Christchurch City Council will let you keep a rooster—as long as you can stop him crowing before 7am. Good luck with that!
Wandering out to the garden to collect fresh eggs for breakfast is one of life’s simple pleasures. The eggs taste great—and so do the chickens (see good.net.nz/chooks). Keeping your city chicks happy is mostly common sense; they need perches for safe roosting and dry, dark boxes for laying. They love to forage, but they can murder the garden—I recommend keeping them in an enclosed space and letting them out daily under supervision. Keep flies and smells down by regularly moving their coop, or by raking up droppings and transferring them to your compost bin. Chickens will happily eat kitchen scraps, slugs and snails, weeds and ground eggshell. You may need to supplement their diet with pellets or mash. As a sweetener to your neighbours, suggest a trade of food scraps for fresh eggs.
Who could be offended by that?
Why do they put little stickers on the outside of apples and things? They seem to last forever in the compost heap.
Those little stickers sure are annoying—and sticky! I usually end up with bits of apple under my nail and the sticker somewhere on my sleeve, so my washing machine and my compost heap are full of the wee buggers. There is a point to them, though: the price look-up code (PLU) on each sticker tells checkout operators whether your apple is Royal Gala, Braeburn, Pacific Rose or Fuji (or whether it’s in fact a kiwifruit, banana or pear).
The stickers help speed up the shop’s checkout, but they’re also useful to you: they often tell you a fruit’s country of origin, and the code tells you how it was grown. Conventionally farmed produce gets a four-digit PLU; organic produce has a five-digit code beginning with the number 9; genetically engineered produce gets five digits starting with an 8. For example, a Fuji apple is labelled 4131, while an organic Fuji gets the code 94131.
Less helpfully, the stickers won’t biodegrade, they’re not edible (although the adhesive is food-grade and contains no animal ingredients) and nor can they be recycled. But change is on the way: new ‘Natural Light Labeling System’ technology uses a beam of light to etch logos, PLU codes and other information onto produce.
While the tech’s being perfected, put the stickers to use by collecting them to help a local school fundraise for sports equipment. You’ll need to stick to the ‘Yummy’ brand of apples; download a sticker collection sheet from www.yummyfruit.co.nz/schools.html. If that doesn’t make you feel better, try shopping at your local farmers market, where the stall-owner probably knows their apples well enough not to need any stickers.
