After I finished the book, I passed it on to Hannah, who had almost finished it by the time I arrived to spend Thursday at her house with Melissa and all ten of our respective children. Believe it or not, Hannah and I had a moment to sit down with cups of tea in the comfy chairs in the sitting room and discuss the book. Hannah commented that it had raised some issues regarding "industrial organic" that she had not really considered before. "For example, I never thought about the pre-washed bagged organic spring mix like that before."
I knew what she meant. There’s a detailed description of the pre-washed bagged organic spring mix industry in the book. It involves specially designed harvesting machines and rows of down-coat-clad workers washing leaves in big refrigerated warehouses, not to mention a fleet of (smoke-belching, I’m sure) semi trucks to deliver it all to the grocery store distribution centers so that you can pick it up from the organic section of your local Kroger or Cub Foods, or indeed, the local co-op. Michael Pollan points out that the salad costs 57 times as much energy to produce as it supplies in food calories. Surely that’s one of the worst energy ratios one could possibly be eating.
But is that really a fair point?
The lettuce discussion in Pollan’s book is, to me, emblematic of the complicated nature of the "what to buy" decision, and I said so to Hannah. After all, who eats lettuce for the calories it contains? We eat different foods for different reasons, and it’s probably not good for the average American to try to maximize the number of calories eaten per square inch of carbon footprint. (I have a sneaking suspicion that if we were to try to do that in today’s economic environment we’d still be eating mainly corn! )
Mark and I share the job of nutritional gatekeeper: I write "apples" on the grocery lists, he’s the one who chooses between conventionally grown Fuji apples for $1.99/lb and organic Braeburns for $3.59/lb. Maybe we should switch to some organic produce, I suggested the other day. Since I have no data regarding pesticide residue and health, I cited fertilizer runoff and other ecological-footprint issues. He says, "Look, if you want to tread lighter on the planet, our first priority should be eating less meat." But our meat is grass-fed! "Doesn’t matter."
Yeah, meat is inefficient in terms of calories, I’ll grant you that. And yet… calories aren’t all I am trying to get from meat. Those calories come with different stuff when you eat them as meat than when you eat them as grain, or even grain ‘n’ beans. Lots more protein and fat, for one thing. And heme iron. If the beef is grass-fed, even better — the fatty acid profile is good for you. The more we find out about fat, the more we realize that lipid chemistry is a lot more complicated than "it’s 9 calories per gram so don’t eat too much." Speaking of 9 calories per gram, our family cooks mostly with unrefined coconut oil now. I live in Minnesota. That’s about as far from "eating local" as you can get.
Back to the lettuce — calories aren’t the proper measure here. Let’s think about rational, appropriate substitutions. Let’s say it’s summer, and I put "bag of lettuce" on the grocery list, and Mark comes home with local sweet corn instead. "It’s local!" I imagine him saying. "And it costs less per pound! And it looked better than the lettuce anyway!" I am still going to be supremely annoyed because sweet corn is not a reasonable substitute for lettuce. Not only is it unworkable in recipe substitution, it is nutritionally a starch, not a vegetable, and certainly not a leafy green vegetable. It goes on a different section of the plate. Nope. Not going to fly.
On the other hand, if he comes home with a bunch of kale ("It’s a heck of a lot cheaper than the bag salad"), I can work with that. Lettuce is a green leafy vegetable. Kale is a green leafy vegetable. If it’s young kale, I can make a salad out of it — a different salad from the one I envisioned, but a salad nonetheless. Even if it’s older and I have to cook it, I might grumble a little bit about the extra work, but really I know that the time-saving nature of the bag salad is a luxury I don’t really need, and it’s not that big a deal to steam or saute the kale. The main point is that the kale and the lettuce occupy the same niche in our family’s diet. I may not be able to substitute kale into a lettuce recipe (e.g. Caesar salad), but I can substitute a kale recipe for a lettuce recipe into most family meals.
As I thought about it, I realized that I mentally organize family nutrition into a "food group" model — not the USDA food groups per se, but one of my own construction. Foods come in categories like "starch," "protein," "deep green vegetable," "not-so-deep-green vegetable," "yellow vegetable," abd so on. I can make substitutions within the categories but I don’t want to change the categories for eco-purposes. Even though I do care about global impact, I do not want to make decisions to minimize the single variable of petrochemical-energy-expended-per-calories-consumed. My first duty is to feed my kids the nutrients that help them thrive, and to teach them to make food choices that help them thrive.
I take into account food preferences, too. Right now, for instance, Milo my 4yo is very happy to eat raw green beans. I buy a lot of them and I put them on the table most nights for that reason and no other. Last year it was so-called baby carrots. I am aware that "baby" carrots are more energy-intensive to produce than non-baby organic carrots. You know what? The kids like them and eat more of them than regular raw carrots cut into sticks. That means I buy them and put them on the dinner table. Not every time; they need to learn to eat carrots served many different ways. But I am happy to "indulge" the kids with baby carrots. I want to encourage the habit of eating vegetables cheerfully.
Still, there are probably meaningful substitutions that can be made that do make a real difference. It is hard to tease the meaningful ones apart from the non-meaningful ones. Back to those apples. What really is the difference between the $1.99 conventional apples and the $3.59 "organic" apples? Is that difference worth the cost? Does it matter what you would do with the extra money? I asked Hannah, "If your family chooses the costly organic apples instead of the cheap conventional apples, does that mean that your family eats fewer apples?" She thought about it and answered, no, it means they’ll have less money to spend on other things. For our family, I suspect that the marginal cost of switching to organic produce would simply be to save that much less, for retirement, for our kids’ college costs, etc.
Does it matter? It depends on the substitution. I have no qualms at all about buying grass-fed beef and humanely raised pork from a local farm, or the extra cost of the farm eggs and the raw, whole milk and the pastured chickens. I am certain that the nutritional quality is better, and they taste better too, so the cost translates directly into a tastier and more satisfying meal. But I’m not sure about the produce. (In some cases I think we’d pay more to enjoy it less. All the organic carrots I’ve ever bought have been decidedly woodier than the conventional ones.) Maybe the first question is — how much more expensive could it get?
bearing blog 