Just Ask

Enlarge Image Image Gallery If you can’t spend a bushel on organic produce, prioritize by avoiding the conventionally grown ones (such as apples) that are most contaminated by pesticides.

The Price Is Wrong on Organics

Q. Why is it so expensive to go organic? By eating a bare minimum of food, I could swing it by myself, but I’m charged with feeding consume-mass-quantity types. I would be in debt buying just half our family’s monthly food consumption. It seems like you have to be rich to go organic.
-Monikka Marie Jackson
Queen Village, New York

A. The usual answer to your question from organic proponents is: Organic isn’t expensive; conventional is unrealistically cheap. Not that helpful, but it’s true.

In the United States, a very small percentage of a person’s annual income goes toward purchasing food: less than 10 percent in 2004, compared with 23 percent in 1929 (and 24 percent in current-day Mexico). You probably know that the federal and state governments heavily participate in and financially support U.S. agricultural production. I’ve been told this is a legacy of the Depression, a sort of “as God is our witness, we’ll never go hungry again” attitude.

Prices for food are low and consistent because of strong government involvement in the form of subsidies, grants, paying farmers not to produce, buying surplus, supporting technological development and tax incentives. We pay twice for our food: once to the Internal Revenue Service and once at the supermarket. In short, cheap food is a delusion.

Organic agriculture, by and large, does not receive the same amount of governmental support. Organic accounts for about 2 percent of total U.S. food sales. Many organic farms are too small to participate in government programs aimed at huge operations, and their diverse crops don’t qualify for support aimed at monolithic growers of corn and such.

Inherent aspects of organic farming are simply costly: Chemical fertilizers are great on a huge farm, because you can just add them to the irrigation system. With organic, the “inputs”—labor, fertilizer, pest management, seed, baby animals—are usually more expensive than for conventional products. Imagine the difference in cost to the farmer: adding gallons of liquid to the irrigation pipes versus buying and applying tons of compost using human labor.