Customers demand things by paying money for them.
Trying to flatten all these problems into the failings of individual customer decisions completely obfuscates the actual cause of these problems. Which is generally an economic system that puts private profits above everything else.
Why are people buying this food that is harming the planet??
It's not like before, when no one knew how things worked and were subsequently duped into doing dumb things. In this era, historians will find the information was openly published on the internet, in music, in newscasts, in movies, etc for all to see, and we still did the dumb thing.
I suspect entire books on everything from history to psychology will be written in an attempt to dissect and figure out what was going on and how this could happen?
That's assuming the money is going to the wealthy, which isn't really compatible with things being cheap.
What really happened is that other things -- like housing -- got more expensive. But most of that money didn't go to Bill Gates, it went to grandma when she retired to Florida and sold her house to a millennial for four times what she paid for it in real dollars, whose huge mortgage payment is in turn now eating more than all of the money saved from having crappy tomatoes.
To get to the numbers like "1% of people own 40% of the wealth" you have to go the 1%, which is to say about three million people, and then you're including a bunch of doctors and software engineers who are clearly not in the same box as the Walton and Mars families.
The fact that rich people have a lot of money is not really a recent development. But it's the focus on the super rich which is missing the thread.
If housing prices go up, people at the 25th percentile lose and people at the 75th percentile gain. We see the loss for the people at the 25th percentile and recognize it as a problem, but then people are pretending like we can just take the money "back" from the Walton family even though that's not where most of it actually went.
It went to home price appreciation for a bunch of middle aged and retired sociologists and car dealership managers and dental hygienists. If you want them to give it back so the poor aren't so poor then you have to recognize that and thereby identify who it is you really have to fight over that money.
We should ignore the people with the most assets, and only pay attention to the people with the most assets?
Not really. The profit on buying for $8 and selling for $11 is about the same as on buying for $9 and selling for $12. You make a little less, because there is lower demand and you have higher initial capital costs for inventory, but it's only a marginal difference.
The reason they don't do it regardless is that if Sam Walton tries selling only the carbon-priced thing for $12 when some competitor is selling the bad thing for $11, the customer chooses the lower price. There is still a Walmart-shaped thing in the economy whether or not it's called Walmart and founded by Sam Walton, because most customers choose that over the thing that costs more.
Because they have instant personal feedback into the price and the taste but not into the long-term health effects of sugar and red meat. But if you can solve that for voters then doesn't the same solution work for customers?
There was at one point (not sure if it's still in effect) a government regulation that you couldn't advertise that you had tested all of your beef for mad cow disease, because people would be inclined to favor beef that could make that claim and cause the market to demand a lot of expensive testing.
The problem is that in order to be effective, you need regulations that voters are paying detailed attention to. But that's almost exactly the same problem as getting consumers to pay detailed attention to what they're buying.
I think this shows how there is some naivete combined with economic need that makes it easy for corporations to drive farmers against their own interests. Commoditization and systemic effects are completely ignored by people who desperately want economic certainty, no matter the precedent. In this free market, one day peppers are scarce and expensive, then the next season peppers are rotting because not enough people buy them. And land continues to steadily degrade under monoculture and animal husbandry.
When the free trade agreement with the US was signed cattle farmers thought they would be exporting meat to the US. Nature be damned. Meat is more expensive, there is meat from the US in the supermarket shelves, drought after drought makes it hard for small cattle farmers to subsist (unless they get into money laundry), and the Darien rain forest is being destroyed.
But listen to the economists. Nordhaus got the Nobel prize telling us how 3.5 degrees by 2100 is OK. Silly physicists and ecologists can't understand the magic of money.
The problem isn't the capitalism that transitioned the US into a powerhouse that feeds the world or provides goods at discounted prices, or ensures that millennials in Minnesota can enjoy avocado dip while complaning about having to much.
This is a failure at the local level. Ever spent time in the grocery isle? Children believe their meat comes from meat packages. Not that it was a living creature at one point. As people have moved into cities, they've lost the connection to the land that provides for them, and life's interconnectedness.
Top this off with the crony capitalism that gives subsidies to farmers for tariffs, or subsides for a myriad of other reasons all of which are asinine(like ethanol or which crops yield most), and prevent groups like Monsanto from any real liability (both civil and criminal) by giving them government/EPA endorsements.. Such endorsements often take years before they recognize a mistake was made or that their data from 1977 is woefully inaccurate.
No this is a horror story of central planning gone horrifically wrong again, and no one can prosecute/sue these terrible companies out of existence because they have the EPA's blue checkmark and some politicians endorsement.
In the absence of the ability for individuals to hold companies liable for their mistakes, it is absolutely incumbent on individuals and parents to make sound choices. Depending on the government to be your saviour simply leads to more tragedy.
If you haven’t tried California dry farm tomatoes do yourself a favor, they’re worlds apart and worth every penny.
You don’t actually know anything about the strawberries in the bottom left other than their organic.
Generally, the French fruits are more expensive but tastier. But when it is the high season of the fruit, like july/august for melon, then the french one are also cheaper.
When I'm casing a supermarket looking for fruit I tend to start with price and then check the goods.
The flow allows you to have more fresh produce.
I only buy organic when it’s not in some ghetto due to pricing.
Tasteless strawberries are around for a few reasons
1) you can't try before you buy. bigger, redder strawberries look better, so sell better, so are grown more, and so on until that's the expectation. if varieties are cultivated for their looks, that means they're not cultivated for their taste or sugar content
2) bigger strawberries are easier/faster to pick, which means they're cheaper to pick
3) people want strawberries in winter, which means for a lot of us that means we're accustomed to buying strawberries that have been shipped thousands of miles and not picked recently.
https://www.npr.org/2012/05/17/152944880/bigger-means-better...
It doesn't formally mean that, but often it means that in practice.
I think some of the success of organic food is that it can in practice be a marker for attractive features that otherwise have nothing to do with "organic". Consumers learn the association and use it, even if they don't buy into the organic philosophy.
But the best is to find a producer or label that prioritizes flavor.
Organic produce has monopolized the premium section of supermarkets. Without organic, supermarkets would find some other way to sell higher margin produce to less price conscious consumers. That dimension would probably be taste (or locality, which I have another rant about).
For me, "organic" is a marker for "bullshit label that's used to convince people to pay more." If they actually do taste better, I might buy the stuff.
The big issue for consumers (me inc) is shelflife. I want them to last more than 3 days in the fridge.
Seascapes and Rosas have a decent combo of shelflife and taste.
Are you married and if so, do both of you work full time jobs? My hunch is that this is directly related to two-income households
The rest of the meal comes from things that will happily sit for weeks on end in the cupboard without going off. Things like: Pasta, onions, tomato pureé, garlic, stock cubes, kidney beans, lentils, rice, bacon, etc.
This does mean that often the one fresh thing I use is the meat in any given dish.
This is analogous to how people used to cook as well, keeping a large store of long-life ingredients and merely supplimenting them with whatever was fresh.
One tastes better than candy. The other will teach kids not to eat fruit.
A tip: Use your nose to sniff and distinguish between what’s ripe and tasty and what’s merely visually appealing.
The reason we use pesticides is because farmers need to increase yields to meet demand. But what if we didn't demand asparagus in winter. What if we didn't demand apples in spring? What if people in northern climates didn't eat pineapple or coconut or bananas regularly? What if we bought food from the store that had bruises or imperfections?
Modern grocery fruits are not naturally healthy.
I used to absolutely despise eating salad, I never knew why but I always just thought it was boring and I'd rather eat anything else; However, my girlfriend and I wanted to buy produce that wasn't wrapped in plastic so we started to shop at a local market held each week.
There we meet a Tongan farmer who grew everything using traditional methods, the biggest difference he said was that he used absolutely minimal irrigation (unless absolutely required due to drought at planting) and he also said that what made vegetables bitter was pesticides and it turned people off them (so I'm assuming he dind't use them). He said that the lack of pesticides and excessive water is what made his stuff taste so great, and his groups had to be a little tougher to survive so he believed they were healthier crops.
Anyway the guy was legit and he and his wife often held weekends where you could visit his farm and see everything, it was real deal.
The main point I wanted to make was that, while we were being produce from this guy, I noticed that I actually loved eating the salads, like became quite addicted to them, he even sold the flowers from all the vegetables and told us the best nutrients are found in the flours, they were delicious. Ever since we moved away and no longer had access to this guys produce, I went off them immediately again. I really dislike standard supermarket produce.
The produce I grow in my garden does in fact taste much better than the produce in the supermarket. There are good reasons for this. I grow heirloom varieties that were bred for taste and not shelf life. Watermelons and tomatoes in particular really do taste much better when they are under water stress. A watermelon that has been given too much water looks fabulous and has almost no sugar. I pick them when they’re ripe not a week before that.
IDK whether pesticides make produce bitter. But the rest of the post checks out.
The various things that happen to produce destined for a shelf halfway across the country are really just not appetizing.
I must admit I noticed right away the the produce was far more visually appealing then what I was used to, more saturated colors, I put it down to it being washed more thoroughly.
I think it's also important to note that once I stopped receiving the better produce, I tried very hard to continue liking salads, I just couldn't do it.
On a side note, I'd like to say is, it's a shame people miss out on eating the flowers of plants, they're really delicious and a visually impressive addition to salads.
Getting back to the Original story, the Pesticides used in Organic Farming still kill insects.
Here is a link with more information.
Addded: the mindless commoditization is abetted by subsidies, including the subsidy of not having to price in negative externalities.