IS LOCAL MAINE FOOD TOO EXPENSIVE?

[Marada Cook]

Before I get slapped upside the head by any number of my food and farming allies, I want to share an email conversation taking place around the Maine Harvest Lunch. One coordinator emailed to ask if I could source 'more affordable' Maine raised beef as the organic beef she'd looked into was too expensive for use in the school cafeteria. I replied I could find ground beef and sell it to the schools for $3.75/#. Her reply was that she could buy the local organic beef for about that much and she'd show my email to the school kitchen manager to demonstrate that all local beef was going to be expensive.

How will we overcome this type of barrier? I drafted a reply and she sent her own. We have come to an understanding that $3.75/# is a VERY reasonable price, but the school still won't go for it. What do you folks tell people who think local food is too expensive? Any stunning successes?

Marada Cook
Crown O'Maine Organic Cooperative

[LisaF]

This is a tough one. Assuming the producers and purveyors of local food are not price gouging (And I firmly do not think they are), then the question should be "Is industrially-produced (or non-local?) food too cheap?" The industrial/national/global food system upon which we rely is very complex and I don't particularly seek to vilify it here. It's just worth noting that it is elaborately subsidized in various ways that allows society to take advantage of lower prices. There are a fair number of externalities that have not [yet] been integrated into the industrial food commodity pricing structures. The problem is that we have become very accustomed to those cheap prices and have an expectation that they will continue into the future.

There's no quick answer that will satisfy the very real question of how to feed x people at a certain standard and within a certain budget ... such as the school departments face. It's an enormous task to reframe this issue - taking months, years, decades - so that we are saying things like "Local Maine food prices are the real, honest and fair prices for food. Period. These prices reflect what it really takes to produce quality food at a local level in ways that steward the land, our communities, our economies and our health." From that perspective, we come to understand that the cheap commodity foods are/were essentially a historical anomaly made possible by the infusion of cheap fossil fuels and other factors. It was great while it lasted but we cannot expect that it will continue indefinitely.

Again, I can't think of how to affect the specific decision-making challenge you describe, but the more we talk about this issue the better because it's not going to go away.

[John Harker]

I will weigh in on a Friday afternoon after a week of AGCOM discussing dairy pricing, a visit to a local greenhouse operation that is struggling to get paid for the cost of growing hydroponic lettuce, and another farmer who isn't complaining at all because they are getting great prices at their farmstand from customers who know their farmer, know his quality and freshness and get great service like " Hi Martha, how did you like those cucumbers last week and would you like to taste our new cantelope" .

In short.....it all depends on the customer, the market, and the perceived value. If you cannot sell to meet your production costs, and your are not regulated like milk, then you have to rethink your marketing strategy. If you rethink your market strategy and cannot afford to sell wholesale, cannot achieve a retail outlet that will meet your price requirements, then you have to look at your production costs. If production costs cannot meet your market outlet price, then you might as well hang it up. Don't expect the market you go for to change their perception or price requirements without adding some perceived value in the relationship.

And I feel you cannot "blame" industrial agriculture, whatever that is. Larger farms do have economies of scale, and the economics of transportation are never going to be much out of whack.....A good apple from New York can get here just as fresh as a Maine one.....and by the semitruck load, sometimes cheaper than a pickup truck load from just 50 miles away.

You have to go with the market flow. Right now we sit on a consumer market that wants local, but is reluctant to pay much more over grocery store prices. And, forget schools. They are constrained by their budgets. The only way to get more produce in schools is to get the school budget committees to add $$$ to the food budget and to convince the local townspeople to spring for the $$$. No easy task.

My opinion for the day.........

[LisaF]

Good points, John! For the record, I'm definitely not blaming industrial agriculture, just noting some facts about it. The only thing you mention that I would expand on is where you say "the economics of transportation are never going to be much out of whack." I would suggest that volatility in the fossil fuel markets could, in fact, wreak a bit of havoc with our transporation system economics, FWIW. Examining the economic feasibility of our 3,000 mile ceasar salad in February from California's Central Valley under various fuel pricing models could, in fact, be an interesting exercise. But as long as fuel stays relatively cheap then our food system holds together. That's a big "but" in my opinion.

[Avery Yale Kamila]

I wrote about the issue of price in this week's Press Herald:

http://pressherald.mainetoday.com/story.php?id=279088&ac=Food

The schools have been trained for years by the USDA that meat should be "cheap." Anyone who's ever raised meat in a humane way knows that "cheap" meat just pushes some of the costs to other parts of the economy. For years, we've been taught to ignore these external costs, such as obesity, E coli outbreaks and pollution. But all of them reflect the true cost of cheap meat.

I'd be curious what is the going price per pound for Maine-grown dried beans? I'd guess it's much lower than $3.75 per pound. The logical answer to a school system that seriously wants to add more local protein to its menu is to look for alternatives that actually cost less to grow, such as beans.