originally published in the Moscow-Pullman Daily News November 25-26, 2006
By Judith L. Brown
Thanksgiving dinner has come and gone for another year. Hopefully we’ve shared a delicious meal in the company of family and friends, and taken time to be grateful for life’s many blessings. Now the leftovers are safely stored in the fridge.
I, however, am still thinking about the price of turkey and the quality of spinach. I saw turkey this year that ranged in price from a low of 28 cents a pound to a high of $2.99 a pound, the latter for a free-range organic turkey. This tenfold price range led me to wonder about what you get when you pay a high price versus a low price, and about what makes organic food more costly to produce.
Thinking about organic foods also brought to mind the sad and alarming story earlier this fall of spinach contaminated with a particularly deadly strain of E. coli. More than 100 people were sickened and three died, including 2-year-old Kyle Algood of Chubbuck, Idaho, near Pocatello. Once again we were all reminded: Food purchased at the local grocery store is not always safe to eat. It doesn’t have to be this way, but right now it is.
The contaminated spinach was not organic. However, organic production methods might well have prevented this outbreak. I think it is widely known that producers of organic foods do not use synthetic chemicals. What is perhaps less well known is that the organic certification process also entails a rigorous inspection and quality control process, and this contributes to the higher price of organic foods.
“A chicken in every pot!” promised Herbert Hoover as he was running for president in 1928. Ever since, that phrase has come to symbolize a U.S. food system capable of producing vast quantities of low-cost, affordable food. Farmers increased productivity and lowered costs year after year as we became the “breadbasket of the world.”
There’s a limit, however, to how low costs can be pushed before quality begins to suffer. Less visible costs, costs that are viewed as dispensable, which do not have a lot of political support, begin to be trimmed. And that’s what has happened over the years to food inspections. According to The New York Times, conventional spinach packing plants and the growers they buy from may be inspected as infrequently as once every 10 years. Once a decade. A lot can go wrong in that period of time — and this time it did, with disastrous and heartbreaking consequences.
Could more frequent inspections and better quality control have prevented spinach contaminated with E. coli from reaching the grocery store? Probably. The source of the contamination has been identified as either wild pigs that entered the spinach beds through a broken fence, or runoff from a nearby livestock operation. The broken fence should have been identified, reported and fixed. Likewise sensible quality control should require greater separation between livestock operations and fresh produce beds.
The spinach, once identified as contaminated, should also have been withheld from market. More frequent inspections and stiffer regulations are part of the solution. In addition, there should be incentives for growers to be proactive in withholding a compromised crop. That means a more effective crop insurance system that protects growers from unpredictable and, to some extent, unavoidable mishaps.
Right now, the safety of organic foods is higher than for foods produced with conventional methods. There’s concern within the organic community, however, that the safety of organic foods may be threatened too. As mainline grocery stores and big-box retailers like Wal-Mart carry more and more organic food, there is fear that backward pressure will be exerted on suppliers to lower their costs, and then lower them some more — eroding the safety of organics too.
Is that what we want? Do we want to sacrifice food safety for lower prices? Or are we willing to pony up and support more frequent inspections and better quality control — and somewhat higher prices?
It’s our choice, really. Either way, there’s a cost: an up-front cost for inspections and safer food, or an after-the-fact cost caused by outbreaks of foodborne illness.
As for me, I’d rather pay a higher price for safer food and know that when a toddler has a spinach smoothie he’ll be “good to the finish cuz he ate his spinach.”
* Judith L. Brown is an economist and director of the Idaho Center on Budget and Tax Policy. She lives in Moscow with her family and can be reached at jlbrown@turbonet.com.