The true cost of cheap food
[Music]
it was late june 2020
fresh city the urban farm an organic
grocery company i had founded
had its best sales quarter ever with the
onset of the lockdown
demand for our delivery service went
through the roof
driving through deserted city streets
our drivers delivered thousands of
orders
all over the city grateful customers
scribbled handwritten notes of thanks
and tucked them into ziploc bags we had
persevered during a very challenging
time
yet i felt defeated with the pandemic
still raging on
and protesters in the streets demanding
racial equality
the big grocers all withdrew their
coronavirus premium pay
in my heart i knew what that meant we
would have to withdraw our own
two dollar per hour top up we’d be
paying our staff during the pandemic
i just couldn’t see a way to make the
numbers work
we wouldn’t be able to institute a
higher wage without increasing prices
and then losing customers to the big
guys
i asked myself what was the point of
starting
an impact-focused business if i couldn’t
even pay my staff a living wage during
the greatest public health crisis
of a century but then i realized the
truth
the price of food is not right i cannot
afford to pay all my staff a living wage
with prices where they are you
me us will all need to pay more for food
now you’re probably thinking to yourself
this guy’s a grocery executive
of course he wants me to pay more for
food but hold on hear me out
a decade prior i arrived in new york
city to practice investment law
at the time every person with a pulse in
the united states of america
could get a mortgage bankers and lawyers
made a killing
bundling these mortgages together and
selling them off
until quite suddenly the music stopped
almost overnight 19 trillion dollars of
household wealth evaporated as housing
prices plunged
around that time i started reading about
food
now this may seem obvious to you but the
8 billion of us here on earth
we depend on a few top inches of topsoil
in the right climate in the hands of the
right farmer in order to eat every day
literally half the land on earth is used
for food production
and what i was reading felt eerily
familiar
even though supermarkets boasted a
bounty of food from all over the world
and food conglomerates were raking in
billions
all was not well what you have to
appreciate
is that food today is historically cheap
we spend just eight percent of our
incomes on food
our grandparents spent a quarter
some of the reason food is cheap is
because of great innovations
things like irrigation plant breeding or
mechanization
but some of the reason food is cheap
today is because of reasons are much
harder to swallow
things like poultry wages at the farm
job insecurity
up and down the food chain cruelty to
animals
at an immense level and environmental
degradation
at a planetary scale these innovations
seem cheap in the short run but they’re
going to cost us in the long run
just like the financial crisis the bill
will come due
at the time i thought you can tackle
these issues we just need to care
i an investment lawyer with zero
experience in food
or farming would start an urban farm in
my hometown of toronto
and the truth is the decade since has
shown me caring does make a difference
we’ve done great things like put salads
and meals in glass jars
and deliver them to our customers so
those jars can be reused
we’ve extended health and dental
benefits to all of our staff
we hire staff on payroll rather than
using temp agencies
we source as locally as we possibly can
and we source exclusively 100 grass-fed
beef which is better for the animal
better for the environment and better
for your health
while we’re not perfect we’ve definitely
moved the ball forward now with eight
stores
thousands of deliveries and a humming
commissary kitchen
but what got me on that day in june was
that after all these years of trying
all these years of caring we still
weren’t able to pay all of our staff a
living wage
i felt that i let down my staff and i
let down a lot of the people that were
rooting for us
but the truth is a just food system
cannot be based on cheap food
we’ve entered into an implicit bargain
with a food system
we’ve essentially said hey miss grosser
he missed a big box store
you get us cheap food and as long as it
doesn’t make us sick right away
we’ll just look the other way so you
walk into that store
and you see an eight dollar rotisserie
chicken great deal right
eight dollars and you’re halfway to
dinner for several people
but what was the true cost of that eight
dollar chicken
it means chickens confined to an eight
and a half by eleven space for their
whole lives
chickens debeaked at birth chickens
pumped full of antibiotics
just so they can survive these hostile
conditions
it means paltry wages from that
processing plant
all the way to the checkout counter the
true cost of that chicken
is far more than eight dollars
have you had a tomato this week the
farmer that cokes that tomato out of the
ground
she doesn’t own that land she’s not even
a citizen
of the country on which that land sits
she makes low wages
works long hours and has no job security
at fresh city we have a good sense of
how labor is treated at the farms from
which we
source because they’re local but in the
winter
when we’re buying certified organic
tomatoes from florida
we have much less sense
if we want things like a living wage a
cleaner environment
and humane treatment of animals we’re
all going to have to pay more for food
the tragedy of it is we can afford it
countries not that dissimilar from us
countries like
japan or france or holland spent up to
50 percent more on food than we do
and that’s not even to talk about the
immense amount of food waste in our
system
we canadians are amongst the world’s
worst culprits when it comes to food
waste
your compost bin could essentially be an
atm with the thousands of dollars you
throw away
into it every year what about those less
fortunate
who cannot afford food even at today’s
prices
won’t a higher price of food make it
even worse for them
the sad truth is that today 100 000
people in toronto will go out to work
put in a good day’s work and still not
be able to afford
the basic necessities of life that’s not
a price of food problem
that’s an inequality problem
so what do we do about cheap food first
we can act as consumers
exerting power through the marketplace
you can do things like
buy more local more organic buy less
meat
buy better quality meats but the reality
of it is
we’re not going to end cheap food simply
by shopping in a farmers market
or with fresh city for that matter we
need to make a shift from acting as
consumers
to acting as citizens citizens change
the very
nature of the marketplace by changing
the rules of the game
how do you do that you challenge power
wherever it resides you talk to the most
powerful people you know
politicians school trustees who control
our cafeterias
grocery executives if you’re a kid talk
to your parents
talk to your teacher and tell them two
things
first tell them that we have to increase
minimum wage
and end the shoddy way we treat migrant
laborers in this country
i want to pay my staff a living wage but
i can’t do that
as long as the big grocers and other
retailers don’t match that wage
i’d go out of business pretty quickly
government needs to step
in and set some standards
the second thing we need to tell these
powerful people
is that we have to end the factory
farming of animals
there is simply no nutritional reason
for eating as many animal products and
meat
as we do today government needs to
regulate the humane treatment of animals
animal factory farming is a moral stain
on our country
and our generation
what seems cheap individually is killing
us collectively
we’re not getting value for money
for people and for planet we all need to
pay more for food