I had a little revelation when I sat down with my niece and nephew to watch I Love Lucy. In the later seasons, Lucy and Ricky move to the country and decide to earn some extra income raising chickens and selling eggs. Lucy went through the financials with Ricky to justify her idea, “We can sell our eggs for seventy-five cents a dozen!”
Wait a minute, $ 0.75/dozen?!?!? I can get a dozen eggs at Winco for less than $1.50! Inflation has been well more than a factor of two since the 1950′s! What’s going on here!
Lucy gets 500 chicks in the mail.
Well, later in the episode Ethel complained about Fred, ever frugal, who wouldn’t “waste three cents on a stamp.” Postage basically matches inflation and the cost to mail a letter has increased by a factor of fourteen! So based on my quick math, if the price of eggs matched inflation Lucy’s eggs today would cost $10.50!
Of course, by today’s standards, Lucy’s eggs would be organic, free-range, and local. After speaking with other farmers in the area, I know that the profit margin is razor thin on organic, local, free-range eggs. And that is completely understandable after watching I Love Lucy, considering that the price at farmer’s markets ranges from $5.00 to $7.00/dozen. How can we expect our small family farmers to survive when we pay so little for our food?
Americans spend less than 10% of their income on food today, but in the 1950′s, we spent 30% of our income on food.
Cheap food is a mixed blessing. The benefits are huge. It raises the standard of living for those who have less income. Cheaper food allows people to spend more time bettering themselves, raising their education level, providing a more skilled workforce, etc. Really, the snowball effect is huge.
This is not what Lucy had in mind!
The dark side is the increasing industrialization of our food. Fossil fuels are cheap right now, but they pollute. Less labor is needed when chickens are in tiny cages in warehouses, but, as we saw recently, eggs can be contaminated with salmonella. There are many more downsides, animal welfare, labor abuses, health concerns, environmental effects, and on and on.
I want to leave you with two thoughts.
- When you go to a market, don’t ask yourself why the market food costs more than the factory food from Winco and Freddie’s, ask yourself how can this small farmer sell his food at historically dirt cheap prices and survive ?
- When our fossil fuels run low, and factory farming becomes too expensive, are there going to be any small farmers left to feed us?
Thank you for this explanation of food costs, and in particular eggs. I’ll admit to feeling a bit shocked & almost insulted the first time I found eggs for $7/dozen at the downtown farmer’s market two years ago. In light of the fact that all the eggs in the store were no more than $4/dozen at the time (and mostly less, including even organic and “free range” eggs), I wondered how and why farmers could charge so much more. And as someone on a somewhat limited budget at the time, I felt like it was unfair: the farm eggs were clearly out of my reach and seemed destined for wealthy people’s homes, making the market feel like a “boutique” shopping experience for the privileged few.
Along with wondering how cutting out the middle man could make things cost more, well, it left a bad taste in my mouth at the time. (It didn’t help that the farmer told me rather unsympathetically that I was “lucky” to get her eggs at that price.) I did find eggs for $5/dozen at another farmer’s market, and gratefully bought those. And continue to. But the disparity between prices of store-bought items from industrial ag practices and the “true cost” of well grown organic food is quite unfortunate.
I agree, farmer’s deserve more. But our “system” is designed to give them less. And poor people are left unable to afford good quality farm fresh food at honest prices. (I know there are some programs now to help, but they are few and far between, and only at one or two markets.) I’m doing fine, but too many others are not, and can not afford the “true” cost of food these days. Nor can all of them access the farmer’s markets easily even if they can afford them.
This is an ongoing problem I continue mulling over. And the best solution I can come up with is for as many people as possible who can afford to buy local, organic and free range, to do so, to increase the market for and ultimately bring the price of those products a bit further down, and in reach of more people. (And conversely reduce the market for the industrially produced eggs/food.) Of course, they’ll never be as low as industrially produced food prices (nor should be), but perhaps we can level the disparity a bit more.
[...] markets, and Zenger Farm Shares. Striving for our financial goals I’ve written about the challenges of low-cost food before, but it’s not hard to do the math: $30,000 can not pay a living wage to a farm crew of [...]