Too Long For Just A Comment

Sharon posed this question

If organic food is so darn unprocessed, straight from the proverbial cow, why in the hell is it so damned expensive? It seems to me it would cost more money to"process" it and add shit to it then to just get it and throw it on a store shelf.

Anyone?

I wrote an entire post in her comments, which I thought I’d add life to and get more thoughts on by duplicating here:

I’d venture that it’s a combination of supply and marketing.

To get truly organic ingredients, you have to arrange for pure suppliers, who do it because more money can be made, and might be growing smaller, more intensive quantities, which also may require greater hand work or incur greater losses due to not using things like pesticides.  Supplies that can be assured are more limited and iffy than mass produced, efficient versions of the same things.  Agreeing to be an organics supplier is a great strategy for small farmers who need to boost their cash flow and not be just one of the herd.

On the marketing side, there’s perception in pricing.  In general, higher = better in most people’s minds, especially if they haven’t thought a lot about it.  All the more so if they are on a mission to encourage a particular product or line.  If you are hot enough for organics, price will be less of an object than simply for someone who wants to take advantage of modern efficiency and mass production to feed their family well and affordably.  Plus things like organics are more likely to be a “thing” among people with more money to burn, who are also surprisingly likely to lean far left and have a particularly strong anticapitalist, radically environmentalist streak and limited appreciation of economic reality.

So the combination of a willing market that will bear inflated prices as a matter of satisfying a perceived added benefit or emotional need, and genuinely higher costs in many cases (for instance, most corn grown in the US has been genetically modified and it takes real effort to get corn that isn’t) adds up to higher retail prices.  Usually.  I used to get the organic mini peeled carrots on sale at Shaw’s frequently for less than the other brand.

As for processing… If you are making, say, pasta, it still has to be processed into pasta.  It’s just that the ingredients will be organic.  Tortilla chips are still corn processed into chips, whether it’s cheap corn or organic corn.  Maybe that doesn’t apply to a sack of whole wheat or rice that are organic, but most stuff is going to be similarly processed if it is an analog to a non-organic.

1. I think it’s much simpler actually.  Pesticides and chemical fertilizers make it cheaper to product non-organic ingredients.  Take away preservatives, and organic ngredientys suddenly become vastly more expensive due to spoilage.

   Posted by sama  on  12/29  at  03:50 PM

2. Yup, that too.  I’d thought of the spoilage angle and not included it, except at the farm level where I specified more effort required, if you count getting eaten off the proverbial vine by insects as part of the spoilage, and trying to handle it manually as part of the effort.

   It reminds me of the hippy farm in Lucifer’s Hammer, where they found they didn’t produce much and had to be out working their asses off picking off the potato bugs by hand.

   But yeah, no preservatives mean more spoilage.  Some things are acidic or whatnot and keep regardless, but other things…

   Posted by Jay  on  12/29  at  03:56 PM

3. Yea, part of it is marketing, part of it is volume, part of it is production cost.

   Tell me why unbleached flour costs more than bleached flour. Or why “bread” flour or cake flour have to cost so much more than alol purpose flour.

   Posted by  on  12/29  at  06:20 PM

Commenting is not available in this weblog entry.

<< Back to main

Powered by ExpressionEngine