Nutrition Experiment Day Six

I drove into town today to stock up on produce and spent over one hundred dollars. I can’t believe how expensive organic food is, and I’m getting very discouraged. I would like to buy at the farmers’ market and support my local farmer, but my local farmer doesn’t appear to want to support me. They seem to have cut out the middle man without cutting out his markup. They’re charging all the market will bear. 

Last week I was looking at the price of something in my favorite organic food store and it was $1.45 shipped up from California but $2.45 for local grown. Okay, the California produce was probably grown by the big industrial organic growers, but still. Diesel transportation costs would wipe out their competitive advantage. So why was the local stuff so damned expensive?

Like, why is organic asparagus always so expensive? It’s a perennial. How much effort does it really take to care for organic asparagus over conventional? In the peak of the season conventional asparagus can be had for $1.49 a pound, but organic is always at least $5.99 a pound. I won’t pay it. I won’t pay for organic artichokes either.

I’ve read that after a farm converts to organic and has improved the soil that their cost to grow produce isn’t any more expensive than the conventional farmer’s. They don’t have as high a yield, but they also don’t spend a lot of money on inputs such as fertilizer and pesticides. Granted, tax subsidies that help conventional farmers generally aren’t available to organic farmers, so organic produce prices can be closer to actual cost to grow plus reasonable profit, but $5.99 a pound for asparagus?

And there’s no reason an organic grower at a farmers’ market should charge $3.50 per pound for zucchini. When I asked why it was so high I was told it was because it was the beginning of the season. What does that mean? Your zucchini is obviously bearing fruit and you’re going to have a longer growing season because you got them started early. It is July after all. Farmer’s market broccoli is $2.99 a pound but I can get it shipped up by Earthbound organic farm in California for about $1.49 a pound.

A local conventional farmer charges fifty cents a pound if you pick his strawberries but an organic farmer wants $3.50 for a small basket brought to the farmers’ market. The last time I visited the farmer’s market almost half the vendors had strawberries, and they all already had mould growing on them, a sign of poor soil. None of them looked healthy and I didn’t buy any. 

Maybe I just don’t understand farming. I don’t understand why it costs me one hundred dollars to fill two grocery bags with produce. And the real kicker is that while I’m supporting sustainable agricultural practices, my tax dollars are also subsidizing conventional farmers whose product I don’t even consume.

Day Six’s Consumption

09:00 2 cups tea
13:35 16 oz. cup coffee
16:09 1-1/2 pears, 1 plum
16:25 bowl of cherries
21:35 large salad with romaine and red leaf lettuce, 1/2 cucumber, 2 stalks celery, handful of kalamata olives, olive oil and lemon juice
20:20 salmon steak
20:50 bowl of chocolate pudding

Do You Have any Extinct Chinook Today?

I got a late start in the day and drove the half hour into town to shop, so I didn’t eat until late. I stopped by the Fisherman’s Market and asked my favorite fish expert Brian how the salmon were doing. He informs me the Oregon coho is extinct now and the chinook are about wiped out. He told me the wild chinook had been placed on the endangered species list. This means that their river habitat is protected ten miles on either side from logging. So Weyerhaeuser got together with their political buddies and decided to change how they count chinook. They included all farmed and hatchery chinook, which raised the numbers and got them off the endangered species list. Now Weyerhaeuser was free to log near the river, which helped to do the chinook in.

A combination of factors, including rearing and spawning habitat degradation, reduction in summer streamflow, passage impacts at dams, a decrease in productivity of ocean habitat, excessive fishing, and impacts caused by hatchery programs, has been implicated in most of the declines and extinctions of coho salmon populations in Oregon. –Coho Salmon Species Overview

When I speak of the plight of chinook, I’m talking about wild chinook, not hatchery fish. There’s a world of difference genetically. I visited a hatchery a few years back. I saw fish in shallow concrete ponds with fungal infections that had eaten away patches of their flesh. They bashed themselves against the wall. A man I spoke to said the fish sometimes remain in the ponds for several months before breeding and are treated with antibiotics and fed processed foods. These fish with their lowered health are bred and more fish are thus hatched which inherit the poor genetics. I mean a low quality egg and a low quality sperm create a low quality offspring.

Meanwhile, walking along the river I note the number of salmon dashing themselves against the damn that services the hatchery. The damn had a poorly constructed fish ladder (which is a side channel salmon can use to bypass the damn) off to the far side. Not a single fish discovered it while I looked on. The salmon exhausted themselves in their futile attempt to leap over this damned damn. I was disgusted. Man’s stupidity triumphs again. We have replaced wild, thriving, healthy populations with sickly hatchery fish. We have once again degraded our food supply.

I haven’t bought chinook in months since Brian originally told me about their plight. I did buy a wild alaskan chinook steak at $16.99 a pound. Brians says Alaska is very good about managing their numbers and that this year the fishermen are taking only thirty percent of what was available last year, and I believe that number was cut in half by Alaskan fish management because the population has declined so rapidly.

Brian is passionate about fish and told me about some customers who irk him. Like the couple who get two salmon steaks every day and microwave them (an incredible waste) or the man who came in to buy seven and a half pounds of chinook. When Brian tried to explain the plight of the chinook the customer said, “Okay, I’ll take just seven pounds then. And I hope your problem clears up soon.” Braindead. Unthinking. Uncaring. Don’t think about tomorrow. Live for today and take what you want.

When I went to another store to get meat for my cats I noted they were selling wild Oregon chinook. I couldn’t believe it. A woman standing next to me who brought it to my attention was also nonplussed. We can pay an extra fee to get a salmon license plate here and the fee goes to support salmon recovery programs. Salmon are a big deal to Oregonians. But wood is a big deal to Weyerhaeuser.