In Our Summer 2022 Issue

Inflation! As of writing this in early June, it’s a popular topic of conversation. Fuel costs more, goods cost more (you may have noticed this issue is a little smaller than usual — paper also costs more!), and, of course, food costs more.

As of April, the USDA reported that home food costs had gone up a staggering 10.8% since April 2021, the largest 12-month increase since 1980. That same report suggests we are likely to see food prices continue to rise for the remainder of 2022. That could find Americans paying 14% or 15% more for food than they did in 2021, a blisteringly fast and severe increase.

And yet, in terms of relative household expenditures, that’s not too far off from what our grandparents paid for food their whole lives. In fact, this inflationary period marks one of the few times that food costs have failed to go down since 1960. Historically, Americans have spent a far greater percentage of their income on food than we have in recent decades.

In 1900, Americans spent 43% of their income on food. By 1950, that had shrunk to a still substantial 30% of their total income. By 1960 it was down to 17.5%, and by 2007? A paltry 9.6%. What changed? A lot of things — general, steady inflation was kind to food prices (while raising the cost of most other goods), all the while Americans grew increasingly prosperous as average household incomes steadily climbed. However, it is hard to discount the incredible impact that technology had on farming efficiency. Mechanization (trading the horse for the tractor, for instance) and industrialization (such as shifting from diverse crop growth to monocrop cultures) on farms massively increased yields, resulting in a steady decline in prices.

Today, large-scale industrial farming is more efficient than ever before, hence the historically low pre-inflation food prices. However, this so-called bounty comes at a price. It requires harmful chemical insecticides and pesticides (since single-crop farms are unnatural and subject to intensive pest problems), synthetic soil inputs (because the ground has been sapped of microbiotic life and nutrients by over-farming and chemical use), and unfair wage and labor practices (industrial farms often underpay the most financially vulnerable in our society), to name just a few of industrial farming’s serious impacts.

Worse yet, inflation results in this destructive food now costing more, too. Most Americans are buying industrially-produced food, but they’re paying something closer to the higher costs that Americans once paid for the less efficiently produced, small-scale farm products that had nominal environmental impact. Eventually, of course, things will return to normal. But should they? Should we be excited about paying such a small percentage of our income on food?

Certainly, for many of our country’s lowest income households, putting only a small amount of their income towards food is requisite. It’s the only way they can stay afloat, and recent rises in food cost have led many of these formerly independent households to turn to food pantries and welfare services. I understand and respect their need for low cost food.

But for those with disposable income, I would argue that it is nigh immoral to purchase low cost, environmentally impactful food when there are lower impact options available, even if at a higher price. The long term environmental degradation that industrial farming contributes to has already begun to arrive: desertification, extinction-level reductions in biodiversity, and catastrophic climate change. Depending on your age, you may not see the worst of this. However, your kids might, and your grandkids almost certainly will. The money we save on low cost food today is exchanged for a far more grievous debt that they’ll have to cover for us.

Switching to locally grown, organic, low impact food is easier than you think, and for the time being, at least, probably about as expensive as the industrially-produced food you’d be paying for at a grocery store. Visit ctnofa.org and find an organic farm near you. Next weekend, go visit one! They’re bound to be open — the harvest is up. Ask questions about their growing philosophy; buy delicious food; make new friends. I promise you that it will be worth every penny.

Dana Jackson, Editor & Publisher

Summer 2022 Digital Edition Flipbook