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…

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:

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

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