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livingontheland - [Livingontheland] food cost/ was Livingontheland Digest, Vol 134, Issue 4

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Subject: Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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  • From: "TradingPostPaul" <tradingpost@riseup.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] food cost/ was Livingontheland Digest, Vol 134, Issue 4
  • Date: Fri, 21 Mar 2008 14:04:43 -0600


Absolutely, Dan, the hidden cost of food is much higher than what we pay.
But that's not what people are thinking when they try to grow something to
cut their food bill. My concern is they're spending too much on potting
soil, containers, gadgets, and so forth to save anything by growing. What
else can you do but buy that stuff when all your have is an apartment
balcony or backyard patio? Then they get discouraged and blow it off.
There's an amusing book about how not to do it, called The $64 Tomato. My
constant effort is to show how to make it pay and save doing it. Having an
acre of your own is a good start. My suggestion for the balcony people is
go to the farmers market and get it from those who do have a little land
and know how to grow.

Now let's take another look at the food proportion of our budget. I don't
question your numbers. But the Devil is in the details. To lower that food
proportion, has our food spending declined, or has our income increased?
I'm figuring in real dollars here, inflation adjusted. Probably our real
average income has increased several times over while our spending on food
remained constant in real dollars. In other words, if our income dropped to
pre-WW II levels, then we'd likely be spending 40% of our income on food
again. My own guess is food is actually no cheaper today than back then,
and some of it may be even more expensive (again, adjusting for inflation
and not counting processed value added items or eating out). Certain food
crops however are actually cheaper for us in the USA because of starvation
wages in the exporting countries. Like coffee and tea.

In that website http://www.newworldeconomics.com/archives/2007/021707.htm
they think the "green revolution" has made grains cheaper, but of course
the real numbers show that's a scam. It's ruined much of the land and
hundreds of thousands of third world farmers who can't afford the high
inputs in fertilizer, pesticides, and water those hybrids require. Even in
that chart they show the cost in gold of soybeans, wheat, and corn are
almost unchanged since pre-WW II.

When we no longer control the price and access to oil worldwide through our
trillion-dollar military (full spectrum dominance in the Pentagon's words),
and oil is no longer bought in U.S. dollars and the dollar collapses, we'll
start paying the real price for everything. This could happen months from
now or next week.

paul tradingpost@lobo.net

*********** REPLY SEPARATOR ***********

On 3/21/2008 at 12:02 PM Dan Conine wrote:

>I was looking at it from a different perspective. They said
>"economically not feasible" because they think that the 'norm' is the
>cheap food we currently see in stores. The current system of cheap food
>(yes, organic food is cheap, too) is based on a lot of externalities
>that aren't accounted for, and is basically borrowing from the future
>Peter to pay the present Paul at ADM. Before our lives were filled with
>junk, people used to spend about 40% of their budget on food, while also
>growing gardens. If we assume (for a moment) that that pre-consumerism
>amount was based on a natural reality, then the current average cost of
>food should be compared to the average income of people. Let's say it's
>$40,000, so that the average working person should be spending $10,000
>on food every year (and I don't mean going out to eat). In that light,
>the value of a sustainable garden or a window box starts to look much
>better in relation to the time spent on it.
>
>If you think my numbers are ridiculous, just consider the rate at which
>wheat and corn and soybeans are rising right now, and project that out
>to a time when trucking becomes unavailabe due to bad roads (Re: "The
>Long Emergency" by Kunstler), and you might agree that my numbers are
>actually conservative.
>Here's an interesting page. I don't know how it affects the future, and
>I'd like to see the current year, but it does put food prices in
>perspective:
>
>http://www.newworldeconomics.com/archives/2007/021707.htm
>
>Dan C.
>Belgium,WI
>
>> From: "E. E. Mitchamore Jr" <emitch@att.net>
>>
>> Take a look at this blog - it appears that our concerns are seeping into
>more segments of the society.
>>
>>
>http://arieff.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/03/19/cows-grazing-in-the-rumpus-room/
index.html?th&emc=th
>>
>>
>> Message: 5
>> Date: Thu, 20 Mar 2008 08:31:01 -0600
>> From: "TradingPostPaul" <tradingpost@riseup.net>
>> Subject: Re: [Livingontheland] Interesting blog
>> To: emitch@att.net, livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
>> Message-ID: <200803200831010186.02BC12EE@mail.lobo.net>
>> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="ISO-8859-1"
>>
>>
>> Excellent. Question it leaves unasked is how much of this trend helps
>> people who can least afford it. Now let's take a look at one of the
>> comments on that page:
>>
>> "I have a friend who has been growing organic vegetables in his backyard
>> and in a local community garden plot. He has the time and enjoys it, but
>> even he admits that the time and money he has to put into it probably
>> isn?t worth it in economic terms. The growing season in New Hampshire,
>> where we live, is very short, and his overall yield was not great enough
>to
>> cut significantly into his grocery bill except for during a few peak
>weeks
>> of production. .. If I were in search of a new hobby, I suppose
gardening
>> would be a much better one than say, skiiing or snowmobiling, but I
>daresay
>> there are many Americans like me who would find it hard to figure out
how
>> to fit a garden into their already overburdened lives."
>>
>> There's an answer to that but let's hear others first.
>>
>> paul tradingpost@lobo.net
>>
>
>
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