by Joe Kernen
“I think so.”
“Well . . . that’s okay.”
We may make a capitalist out of Blake yet.
CHAPTER 8
August 2010: The $40 Ostrich Egg
August 2010: After avoiding the experience for years, Blake and I visited the country’s most-written-about supermarket chain and survived to tell the tale.
You can’t throw a rock in any parking lot in Short Hills, New Jersey, without hitting a car sporting an “Eat Local” bumper sticker. Whenever I see one, I’m tempted to throw the rock very hard, indeed.
The Kernen family, you see, doesn’t make a point of buying locally grown food. Or organically raised chicken. Our only real encounter with the “slow food” movement is waiting for pizza delivery. We don’t think this is any particular virtue. But neither is it a vice.
We do shop for food, of course. Our local supermarket is very happy to sell us turkey burgers, apples, grapes, butter, chocolate-chip ice cream, Froot Loops, about a hundred different kinds of bread, about a thousand different kinds of cheese (okay, maybe it just looks like a thousand), pet food, paper goods, cleaning products, over-the-counter medicines, and enough prepared foods to feed a regiment a different meal every day for six months. They’ll even sell us wine and beer. When tourists from the less developed parts of the world visit the United States, the most reliable way to overwhelm them is not a trip to Yankee Stadium or the White House but by a simple visit to an ordinary American supermarket.
This is true when these supermarkets are compared not just with their equivalents in other parts of the world but with their equivalents in every other time in human history. And the sheer abundance is only the half of it; food has never been cheaper.
Take the loaf of bread for sale at our local grocery for $1.79 a pound. Two hundred years ago, that bread’s cost, in labor, was more than two hours. Based on the current average U.S. hourly wage—a bit more than $22—the cost today is about five minutes. When I was Blake’s age, the average U.S. family—such as, for example, mine—spent more than eleven cents out of every dollar of disposable income on groceries. Today that family spends only a bit more than five cents—a drop of more than 50 percent.
There are a lot of reasons for this, including higher wages, along with gigantic improvements in agricultural productivity and in the transportation available to move food from farm to table. One is the supermarket itself.
No one reading this book is old enough to remember when the dominant way Americans shopped for food was in over-the-counter markets, essentially unchanged from the general stores that Blake and Scott have only seen in western movies. In the 1920s, that started to change, primarily when the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company—A&P, which at one time was responsible for taking in more than half the entire country’s grocery-shopping dollars—started converting them to self-service groceries. In 1930, Michael “King” Cullen opened America’s first recognizable supermarket in Jamaica, Queens, but it wasn’t until after World War II that supermarkets really took off.
As they did, Americans started spending less and less on food. In 1930, when that first King Kullen opened, grocery shopping took twenty cents of the average American’s disposable income. By 1947, when supermarkets were still a curiosity—depression and war had slowed their growth to a crawl—the number was down to nineteen cents. Ten years later, though, it had fallen to fifteen cents, twenty years later to nine cents, and, well, you know the rest.
By traditional measures, this is a triumph: more food for less labor than at any time in history. The much-debated costs of this particular triumph, obesity and related diseases, are, it seems to me, pretty high-class problems to have, at least in historical terms.
Not everyone agrees. There’s at least one supermarket whose guiding philosophy is that Americans should pay more for their food.
Our local Whole Foods is pretty typical of the chain. Like most supermarkets, the produce is close to the entrance, though I think it’s safe to say that some of the ingredients on offer are, well, unusual. One emu egg, for example, will set you back $29.95, which seems like a lot until you notice that an ostrich egg costs ten dollars more. The fact that it’s supposed to make an omelet that will feed twelve to fourteen people (or a cake the size of a golf cart) might ease the sticker shock for some shoppers, but not me. Or Blake.
“Dad?”
“Yes, Blake?”
“Do people actually eat those?”
“I guess. Probably not very often.”
Blake considered the ostrich egg again.
“You know what I think?”
“What, Blake?
“I think they’re showing off.”
You bet. According to the folks at Whole Foods, an ostrich egg doesn’t actually taste much different from chicken eggs, so it’s a good bet that anyone who is paying six times what even Whole Foods charges for eggs from organically raised, free-range, and thoroughly contented chickens (and fifteentimes what two dozen eggs cost at a normal supermarket) isn’t doing it for the flavor. A big chunk of the appeal of Whole Foods, and places like it, is the fun of telling someone else about your superior taste.
Blake’s favorite spot in the entire store, in fact, is the rack of weird and wonderful salts from around the world, including Alderwood Smoked Sea Salt and pink Himalayan rock salt, whose magical flavor that justifies a $15.99 per pound price (for salt!) we’re not likely to find out about.
Though it’s easy to make fun of Whole Foods’ high-priced luxury foods, no free-market capitalist should be too fussed about them. After all, almost all luxury products, from Hartmann luggage to Armani ties, depend on some element of status appeal, and while we do our best to teach Blake and Scott that it’s usually a bad idea to spend a lot for a label, free-market means freedom to spend your money any way you want. John Mackey, the supermarket chain’s founder, is probably as well known for his libertarian economic beliefs as for his free-range eggs.
There are, however, some less harmless aspects to the Whole Foods experience, which has evolved a lot from its health-food-store origins. The “health food” audience was—and remains—convinced that food that includes ingredients like the preservatives and stabilizers that make it possible to ship food all over the world without spoiling were, on the scale of healthiness, somewhere between drinking weed killer and chewing razor blades. In fact, simply eliminating the taint of artificial preservatives and flavorings—and especially artificial sweeteners (obesity is the one health issue that Whole Foods completely ignores)—isn’t enough. A typical Whole Foods devotes at least three aisles to nutritional supplements, vitamins, homeopathic medicines, antioxidants, eleuthero (I don’t know what this is, either), and black cohosh (ditto). And as if that weren’t enough, literally dozens of different foods, from yogurt to breakfast cereal, are now fortified with strains of something called “probiotic” bacteria.
You might think that Whole Foods shoppers—and anyone spending serious money on nutritional supplements—would have a problem explaining why, by any measure, the human life span and quality of life have continued to improve at almost the same rate that the food industry has added deadly poisons to the diet. Think again. A true devotee doesn’t care about the lack of any proof that organic food is healthier and sneers at the sort of study done by the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, which reviewed more than 160 papers published over the last fifty years and found that organic food offers no nutritional advantage over conventionally grown food. Despite the safest food supply in human history (the fact that outbreaks of E. coli—whose incidence of contamination in beef has fallen 45 percent since 2000—and salmonella are now front-page news is actually a testament to their rarity; all food-borne illnesses are responsible for only a third as many annual deaths as, say, alcohol-based liver disease), the nutrition-paranoia business is healthier than ever. After all, even if people aren’t keeling over from unclean food and water, they’re still getting cancer—and cancer takes long enough to appear, and is m
ysterious enough in its origins, that preventing it is the number one reason people try to improve their health nutritionally.
Now, I don’t claim to know a whole lot about nutrition. But I spent a good bit of my youthful academic life working at the most prestigious cancer labs in the world, under the supervision of Nobel Prize winners (one of the reasons I now earn my living commenting on the world of finance is the realization that I might be smart—but not that smart), and I can say, with a great deal of confidence, that cancers are so diverse and their causes so varied and complex that the whole notion that organic food is less likely to cause a malignancy is just about as sensible as throwing salt over your shoulder or practicing animal sacrifice.
That salt would be, of course, Alderwood Smoked Sea Salt. And the animals for the sacrifice: only free range and grass fed.
It’s probably a little unfair to hammer Whole Foods for what is a much more widespread set of delusions. The fetish of the moment is for food that is “organic, local, and slow”—food that is grown or raised without anything artificial, as (mostly) protection against cancer; grown or raised within fifty miles (or so) from the kitchen table where it is eaten, to protect the planet against climate change from the burning of fossil fuels; and grown, raised, and especially prepared in the slowest, least industrialized way possible, to restore a lost golden age when Ma made pies from scratch and Pa picked the corn fresh for dinner. It’s practically an article of faith to Progressives and, sad to say, to a lot of other folks who should know better.
And as I mentioned above, we Kernens don’t really have a huge problem with people deciding to spend their money on organic food or pink Himalayan sea salt; free markets are free. If Michael Pollan, professor of journalism at UC Berkeley and author of local-organicand-slow classics like The Omnivore’s Dilemma, wants to eat paté made from a wild boar he killed, gutted, and dressed in the Berkeley hills, then good for him. At the very least he’s probably helping to defend Berkeley from wild boar attacks. The problem with Pollan and other gurus of the movement, like Alice Waters of Chez Panisse restaurant in—wait for it—Berkeley or Michelle Obama and her White House kitchen garden, is that they aren’t satisfied just to wallow in their own virtue—to argue, as Pollan did in an interview with the Wall Street Journal, that eggs should cost $8 a dozen. Like most Progressives, they are determined to make everyone else just as virtuous as they are. This is always done for our own good, which is the same thing I said when we had our dog neutered.
Even this kind of self-righteousness would be easier to take if it weren’t expressed with such confident ignorance. Attacking modern farmers for applying “industrial” science to their soil, for testing it chemically for nutrients and acidity, for correcting levels of nitrogen and phosphorus, and especially for the specialization that permits fewer than 2 percent of the U. S. population to feed the other 98 percent (this is one-tenth the number of only sixty years ago) is a bit like demanding that we go back to copying books by hand, which would at least cut down on the number of Michael Pollan books. Eliminate herbicides? If so, better be prepared to eliminate no-till farming, which decreases soil erosion by millions of tons a year. Say no to factory-made nitrogen fertilizers? Okay, but Norman Borlaug,32 the Nobel laureate, agronomist, and father of the Green Revolution, which freed nations like India and Mexico from famine, estimated that the planet can support only four billion people using purely natural sources. If Europe tried to feed itself organically, it would need to put under cultivation an amount of land equal to the remaining forests of France, Germany, Britain, and Denmark combined.
Even on environmental grounds, organic food is a solution in search of a problem—one that industrial food production is already solving. Food production in the industrial world increased 5 percent between 1990 and 2004—on 4 percent less land, producing 4 percent less greenhouse gas emissions, and using 17 percent less synthetic nitrogen. The reasons are largely an infusion of technology: drip irrigation on fields leveled with lasers to reduce runoff and GPS-equipped tractors that automatically keep equipment on straighter paths and plot location down to the meter, allowing them to use chemicals only where needed. Infrared sensors are now used to identify the color of crops, calculating where fertilizer is needed and where it isn’t. It’s not the sort of technology that was used back in the days when the average farm was less than one hundred acres. And farms weren’t that small because of farmers’ desire to live closer to the land; that was the amount of land that could be cultivated by animal power alone.
Of course, a significant number of Whole Foods shoppers are sort of down on animal power, as well. In fact, they’re sort of down on animal anything. They’re called vegans.
Vegans are, of course, what happens when vegetarians feel a need for even more self-righteousness and make a point of avoiding not only meat but also milk, eggs, and any other product derived from what they call the “subjugation” of animals, like gelatin, leather, or wool. How they resolve this with the thousands of insects they “subjugate” in the course of driving their electric cars (or riding their bicycles) or the billions of bacteria they destroy every time they brush their teeth is a complete mystery.
And anyway, the nonvegan organic-food activists probably want to return to animal power as well, since the internal-combustion engines at the heart of both farm machinery and the trucks that deliver farm produce to market are, to the same Progressive mind-set, modern farming’s most dangerous aspect of all.
Unlike most ten-year-olds, Blake has already developed a taste for coffee, which is not so wonderful, since her energy level is already at the point where the caffeine in a single Coca-Cola works a lot like turbocharging a Corvette. On the other hand, I wish I got a similar jolt from my morning cup of coffee—no surprise when you remember my work day starts well before 5 A.M.
The coffee I drink every morning isn’t anything special. I neither need nor want the various specialty coffees that have made Starbucks into a billion-dollar brand (and certainly don’t need the calories in their lattes or Frappuccinos). Even so, I am impressed with the sheer range of coffees for sale in even a normal supermarket. There’s French roast. Special morning blend. Hawaiian Kona. Jamaican Blue Mountain. Ethiopian harrar. Low acid. Espresso ground. Fair trade.
Fair trade?
“Dad?”
“Yes, Blake?”
“Is this spelled right? Is it the same as ‘free trade’?”
Not much.
The first time I saw the term, I was as confused as Blake and had to do a little digging to find out just what the noble-sounding term “fair trade” actually meant. As usual with the sort of feel-good economics so beloved of Progressives, there’s a lot less here than meets the eye. Fair trade, in one form or another, has been around for nearly fifty years, but until the late 1980s it was mostly a way for Western liberals to assuage their guilt about their own prosperity by paying a higher price for handicrafts like jute shopping bags, straw hats, and rope sandals in the belief that some of their money would find its way back to the rural villages where the stuff was made. For the last twenty years or so, “fair trade” labeling organizations—there are at least four—have certified that the chain of transactions that leads back to commodities like cocoa, sugar, and especially coffee wasn’t enriching “middlemen” at the expense of farmers.
Middlemen are a favorite villain of Progressives, because—in Progressive World—they don’t add anything of value to a transaction. Never mind that without trucks, warehouses, shipping companies, more warehouses, more trucks, packaging companies, more warehouses, more trucks, and, of course, supermarkets—or even farmers’ markets—it’s pretty hard to get coffee or anything else into even a Progressive pantry.
The people pushing Fair Trade—by now it’s always capitalized and sometimes made into a single word, “Fairtrade”—say they support free trade but spend a lot more time on its failures than on its successes. Even so, labeling coffee Fair Trade and charging an additional four or five bucks
a pound for the stuff shouldn’t be a huge problem for a free-market guy like me. If people want to pay a premium, why not?
There, are, it turns out, several reasons for a free-market purist to object to the fair-trade concept—and only one of them is that it sounds so patronizing.
“Blake, what would you call something that wasn’t a fair trade?”
“An unfair one?”
Exactly. But the sneering attempt of fair-trade coffee (or fair-trade anything) to stigmatize any other sort is the least of its problems. More important is that it replaces the enormous power of the market to allocate resources efficiently with a bunch of good intentions—and everyone knows where they lead. Fair trade, by setting a floor price on coffee beans, certainly offers an incentive to farmers to grow them. But the difference between the fair-trade price and the market price is nothing more than charity; and worse, it is charity offered only to farmers who agree to continue producing the same stuff, in the same way, that made them poor—and eligible for charity—in the first place. This isn’t just theory. Every one of the fair-trade licensing organizations discourages diversification and mechanization, pesticides, fertilizers—you name it. Coffee farms, to qualify as fair-trade suppliers, have to be smaller than twelve acres, and they’re not permitted to employ any full-time staff.
And even as charity, it’s not exactly a success story. Only about 5 percent—5 percent—of the fair-trade price actually makes it back to the producers anyway. Partly this is because the raw commodity is only part of the final product. And partly it’s because of the cost of fair trade itself. An executive at the biggest fair-trade coffee cooperative in Guatemala is on record saying that “after paying for the cooperative’s employees and programs, nothing remained of the Fairtrade premiums to be passed on to the individual farmers.”