My boyfriend and I had a discussion last night about the high cost of healthy organic food. It’s hard to make the right choices especially when you’re working with a limited budget in the first place. It’s also hard for me to reconcile my personal value system with my pocket book and long ago I resigned myself to spending a higher percentage of my income on food. Now that we’re sharing the costs of nutrition, I’m trying to justify my overall food philosophy when sometimes its been based on less-than-analytical research and evaluation.
As I understand it, one of the reason “regular” food is so cheap is the whole economies of scale thing. By growing huge mono-crops, over using fertilizer and pesticides, and paying below cost-of-living wages, major commercial producers can create cheap “regular” food. These are all things that I’m not in support of.
Does anyone know what makes organic food so expensive? Are the costs involved going to go down as the market expands or are they inherent to responsible and ethical food production? Will they only go down as large companies industrialize the process? Can you have sustainable and inexpensive?
