W. Eric Martin: You Pay For What You Get

Age and its degrading effects on the body must be weighing on my mind because over the past two years I’ve been paying more attention to what I eat, how much I eat, and where the food originates. My diet has evolved to include more whole grains, more organic foods, and less soda.

Practically the day that I hit forty, I could stand sweets only in small portions. I used to wolf down these awesome rocky road brownies that my wife Linda makes, but suddenly I could take no more than a couple of bites before I felt sick, so I eat fruit instead.

Linda and I have gone through periods of vegetarianism in the past – with a family lobster fest that showered everyone with warm salty water kicking off one six-month-long period of meatlessness – but we’ve always reverted back to a diet with chicken and bacon before too long. Over the past twelve months, though, I’ve weaned myself off this meat as well, eating it only once a week.

While I feel better physically and have lost a bit of my middle-age pudge, our food budget has practically doubled. As Michael Pollan points out in In Defense of Food, “The American food system has for more than a century devoted its energies to quantity and price rather than to quality. Turning out vast quantities of so-so food sold in tremendous packages at a terrific price is what we do well.” When you choose high-fiber cereal over corn flakes, raspberries over cookies, and fresh food over frozen, you will pay more. Throw in eggs from cage-free, vegetarian-fed hens and locally-produced sausages over those made on factory farms, and the bill jumps again. We looked into buying an organically raised whole chicken the other day and practically fell over when we saw the $17 pricetag!

While that cost might seem outrageous, you can justify it by realizing that you’ll get at least two meals out of the chicken, while paying less than you would in a restaurant.

Another way to look at the cost, though, is to recognize that I’m paying a local farmer for his or her time in raising this animal in a more humane way and feeding it grain, not other items that I won’t go into here. ("Humane" is an odd term to use since the animal is still killed, but that’s a different issue.) I’m buying real food instead of a product that’s pushed through an assembly line as quickly as possible. As Bee Wilson wrote in ”The Last Bite,” a New Yorker article reviewing three recent books on the food industry, “In the nineteen-seventies, it took ten weeks to raise a broiler; now it takes forty days in a dark and crowded shed, because farmers are under constant pressure to cut costs and increase productivity.... The average U.S. consumer eats eighty-seven pounds of chicken a year – twice as much as in 1980 – but this generates a profit of only two cents per pound for the farmer.”

My best way to protest this system is to opt out of it, to buy items that support a healthy way of living for both me and those who produce the food I eat. This change in buying habits has been tough, and you can easily overthink each purchase. Do I buy the organic raspberries produced in the U.S. that sell for $5.70 or the $4 non-organic raspberries produced in Mexico? That 42 percent price difference pays for a reduced use of pesticides, U.S.-based labor rather than foreign, and perhaps a smaller carbon footprint since the food travels less – but should I even be buying raspberries now? Shouldn’t I wait until they’re in season in New England? No answer is right for everyone; you can decide only what’s best for yourself.

Games aren’t equivalent to food – I don’t have to play one three times a day in order to stay healthy – but their production does involve some of the same issues: How much is being paid to those who produce the games? Are the raw materials harvested or created in a sustainable manner? What’s the carbon footprint of a game produced in the U.S. versus one made in Europe or China? Who am I supporting when I purchase a game?

Maybe you don’t think about these issues, but they’re all present behind the scenes, coming to the surface in our arguments over quality vs. price, or over production in Europe vs. China. After the sour response to the China-made Ticket to Ride: Switzerland expansion in late 2007, for example, Days of Wonder had Ticket to Ride: The Card Game, which I recently reviewed for BGN, produced in Germany. The cards match the quality of earlier TtR games, and they feel great in your hands compared to the odd slickness of the Switzerland tickets.

Another difference between games and food is that you can opt for one producer over another only some of the time. With chicken, you’ll find a range of producers in almost every market, but if you don’t want, say, a China-made Pandemic, then you might be out of luck. (I say “might” because Filosofia Games is producing a French version of the game, Pandémie, later in 2008, and I don’t know where it will be made.) You can opt for a co-operative game made in Europe, e.g. Shadows Over Camelot, but that’s hardly the same thing as what you originally wanted.

Choices, choices…

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Bonus puzzle: New Hampshire has the second highest percentage of vanity license plates among all U.S. states, according to the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators, with 14% of its vehicles saying something special about their owners. (Virginia tops the nation with 16%, while Texas is last at .5%.) This means that driving through Concord and on the NH highways presents me with non-stop mini-logic puzzles, and while I can suss out most meanings within a few seconds, the following plate took a bit longer:

PONLK8A

Any guesses? If you need a hint, highlight the section below:

President Bush’s new approach to winning the War on Terror?

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Comments:

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I respect your attempts at the healthier lifestyle and wish I had the money to make the wiser and more kind decisions in regards to the food I eat. In regards to games, I only buy what I want to play. I can’t afford to get too picky as I cannot afford more than 3-4 games a year right now. The market for board games is pretty small, so until a publisher is established, I cannot see them making the decision to go green. What I think would be nice to see is the advancement of POD printing to the point of making a few “collectible” type copies made in a green manner. That may not solve the issue of the mass producer, but it would somewhat relieve the conscience of a few buyers with the means to pay more. Posted by William Baldwin on May 24, 2008 at 10:09 PM | #

"We looked into buying an organically raised whole chicken the other day and practically fell over when we saw the $17 pricetag!” This - speaking as a Brit - is a terribly chilling comment.  Just how much do you usually pay for a chicken (a dish we grew up regarding as a great luxury)?!! During the five years our daughter and family lived in N.Carolina I was appalled at the poor quality of the food on sale.  In fact, to my daughter’s horror and the supermarket’s grudging surprise I took a whole load back.  But there certainly was good food to be bought from specialist outlets - excellent food, in fact - but the Americans I spoke to (and wealthy ones by our standard) always made the same reply - “But who can afford to shop there?” to which I replied “YOU can!” But I’m not being smug.  We in the UK went through this same ‘cheap food’ attitude in the 60’s, so I’ve seen it all before.  The fact that nothing tasted of anything at all seemed not to matter as long as it was cheap!  Everything was awful.  I’m now pleased to say that for most Britons the wish to get food tasting as it should again and the interest in organic production and animal welfare has resulted in a major turn around. And returning to those chickens, my wife and I(like most others) would never think of buying a chicken that has been ‘factory’ produced.  For the last two nights we have been enjoying a superbly tasting farm raised one (it’ll finally end up in a stir-fry tonight).  And the price? - $22.  (But that pales in comparison with a good Bresse chicken in France that would set you back around $50!) Good food doesn’t (and shouldn’t) come cheaply.  But I’m pleased to say that in the UK we are no longer right at the bottom of the European league table when it comes to the percentage of our income we spend on food (as we most certainly were 40 years ago). And hopefully in the States those specialist shops (Wellsprings supermarket and a truly wonderful store in Chappel Hill) that the IBM executives “couldn’t afford to shop at” will become the norm rather than the exception. - Derek Posted by Derek Carver on May 25, 2008 at 04:48 AM | #

Thanks for the history, Derek! One other stat from the Michael Pollan book: In 1960, Americans spent 17.5 percent of their income on food; in modern times we spend 9.9 percent. At the same time, the percentage of income we spend on health care has flipped from 5.2 percent to 16 percent, so perhaps that’s where all of our food money has been spent! Eric Posted by W. Eric Martin on May 25, 2008 at 05:46 AM | #

Nope, I’ll take the $5 chicken over the $17 one (almost) every time, confident that $12 spent elsewhere can make up whatever marginal utility the difference in quality costs me. Posted by Jay Bloodworth on May 25, 2008 at 07:30 AM | #

Isn’t it cheapest just to raise the chickens in your own backyard? There’s the cool but grossly overpriced eglu: http://www.omlet.us/homepage/homepage.php and then there’s economy sites like: http://www.backyardchickens.com Which is all doomed by NIMBY neighbors who don’t want local food raised by people near them: http://www.cbc.ca/consumer/story/2007/12/12/chicago-chickens.html Posted by Stanley Bourgeois on May 27, 2008 at 12:04 PM | #

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