Some real costs of food

Last night, I started to write a story that I had envisioned that I would post to my Sustainability blog. It was supposed to be about finding abundance by creating multiple meals from a single farm-raised animal, in this case, a duck. The story, as it evolved, turned out to be something different and I ended up sharing it not on my Sustainability blog but on my Short Stories blog. The story that I ended up writing was less about finding abundance and more about honoring animals through the meat that we eat. It tried to intervene in the debates over whether being vegetarian was a more proper ethical choice than eating meat. You can read it here: http://guptacarlsonshortstories.blogspot.com/2013/12/honoring-animals-we-eat.html

It struck me later that not acknowledging this story as a story of sustainability was buying into certain perceptions of what constituted sustainability. By categorizing vegetarianism as an ethical or religious preference (a belief I inherited from my parents) and as a practice that would prolong the life of the planet, it seems that I might have been creating an assumption that non-vegetarianism had no ethical or religious grounding and no sustainable value. It also seemed that I defended non-vegetarianism as a practice that could be sustainable if done in certain sustainable terms: eating only as much meat as your body needed and not engaging in greedy overindulgence; doing your best to ensure that the animals you consume have a good life before they are slaughtered; and honoring the life that the animal did live by using as much of the animal as possible and not merely throwing away the leftovers after one meal.

So, I'm not sure I see ethical or religious justifications for eating meat, any more than I understand how abstaining from meat is an ethical or religious stance. I appreciate that abstinence is a moral choice. What makes the choice moral … well, all I really can say is that some people (including my parents) see the choice as a moral one and I honor the right to do so. I especially honor the right of my parents because they are firstly my parents and they secondly extend a reciprocal gesture to their many friends and relatives (including their children) who do not follow their ways.

But, ethics, morality, and religion aside, it seems that the arguments I made for how to eat meat sustainably could be applied just as appropriately to the production and consumption of fruits and vegetables. In other words, one can be vegetarian or vegan, it seems, and still be highly destructive in one's actions in terms of self, community, and the planet if one is not considering the sustainability of the foods one eats.

Let me offer one example. A few years ago, I was part of a dinner gathering for which I had prepared several vegetable dishes. Many of the vegetables went uneaten, and the hosts, instead of packing up the vegetables to be consumed later as leftovers as they did with the leftover meats, breads, and beverages, simply threw them away. I cringed as I realized too late what had happened because I knew those vegetables alone could have made at least one -- if not two or three -- light, nutritionally balanced, wonderfully tasteful meals. I also knew that the loss of the vegetables was a bit of an economic loss: about one-third to one-half of what I was spending back then on groceries (before beginning to grow my own food) was on fresh produce. The example also reminded me of other parties and dinner gatherings that I'd been to in the past where beans, carrots, shreds of corn, salads, and other highly wholesome foods end up in the refuse bin from guest plates uneaten.

Growing my own vegetables now alerts me to the use-value of most of what I eat. Or, to get away from the language of Marx, I know what it costs in terms of labor to raise a single vegetable from seed to harvest.

Let me offer the example of garlic. I am choosing garlic because I currently am preparing a few hundred cloves of garlic my husband and I raised last year for dehydrating and ultimate grinding into a powder. My husband and I bought nine pounds of garlic last year through a cooperative arranged by a local farmer for $90. We broke the garlic bulbs into cloves and planted 400 of them. After that planting, we had probably another extra 100 or so cloves, some of which we used in our own cooking and some of which we gave to a friend who was interested in planting her own garlic. Sticking just with the figures of $90 and 400 cloves, each clove -- or "seed", if you will -- cost about 22.5 cents. We had a great harvest, which yielded about 400 bulbs of garlic, as well as some 400 garlic scapes, some of which we enjoyed for severals months in sautés, stir fries, and pestos, and some of which we distributed to our garlic scape-loving friends. So, perhaps, we can assume from these statistics that each bulb of garlic that we grew cost us about 15 cents, especially since the success of the crop meant that we didn't need to invest an additional $90 this year in garlic for seed.

A single garlic bulb sells for between $1 and $3 at our local farmers market. Based on these figures, the fact that our own garlic cost us just 15 cents seems like a great deal.

Except for the labor, soil, and fertilizer costs.

I personally am not at a point yet where I can figure the per-plant costs of soil, water, and fertilizer. But I can speak a bit about labor: It took me about four hours to prepare the bulbs for planting. It took my husband about sixteen hours to turn the soil and prepare the section of our garden where we decided we would plant garlic. It then took the two of us about six hours to plant the cloves. Cutting scapes in July took me about eight hours. Harvesting the garlic took the two of us about twenty-hours. After harvesting, the garlic bulbs needed to cure for about six weeks before I could snap the bulbs from the stalks and store them away. The post-curing snapping and storing took about six hours. Part of that process also required separating the bulbs into ones that we wanted to use for fresh eating, for drying, and for the seeding of the next crop. And, as noted, the process of dehydrating has only begun. So looking at our labor hours, totals up to 60 hours -- spread over a time period of about nine months.

Labor analysts estimate that a current living wage for our economy should be about $15 an hour. I'll be frugal and use the minimum wage of $8 an hour, which is set to go into effect in New York State in 2014. Our labor costs for the 400 bulbs of garlic we raised were $480, or just a little over $1 per bulb, the low end of the going rate at the farmers market. So if we look at the seed cost of 15 cents per clove and figure that an average bulb of garlic has six cloves, we can see that growing one bulb of garlic cost about $1.90.

Before this discussion gets too "economic," I want to reiterate that growing garlic is a joy. It's typically planted in the late fall between the time of the first frost and the point where the ground freezes. It lies dormant under soil and snow and begins to sprout its first leaves in about mid-March, one of the first plants to grow. Growers can savor the particularly pungent flavor of "green garlic" by pulling a few stalks as early as mid-May, before the scapes start coming into full bloom in June. The first mature stalks that we pull have a robust, creamy flavor that when roasted lightly on an outdoor grill are unparalleled in taste. Garlic retains its freshness for several months, so reminders of the previous years' harvest can stay with you through the emergence of the new leaves in the following spring.

With this in mind, imagine what happens when we do not honor our produce and let it go to waste: to rot in fields, to go uneaten on plates, to be thrown away after a meal instead of saved for another? Garlic is just one example of the costs that growing food entails. It seems that like meat it is most ethical and most sustainable to grow it and share it and to make sure the whole plant is consumed.

I should mention the stalks on which garlic grows, as well as the papery skins that surround each raw clove. They generally dry until they are brittle, and broken up in a compost pile, they decompose quickly, forming an excellent component of the topsoil in which all of our plants grow.