Can Anyone Afford to Eat Green?

By Phil Smulian

"Eating green" twenty years ago would have been an empty phrase. "How does one eat the colour green?" we might have asked. But the advent of the organic food industry at the beginning of the century, and its subsequent rise to the shelves of almost every commercial supermarket on the planet is no joke. Never before have supermarket customers, and food buyers in general, spent so much time investigating how their food made its way to their plates. And never before have grocers spent so much time, effort and money convincing customers of their food's purity.

Supermarkets advertise their food as having been grown by loving and friendly local farmers; and that they have been nurtured without harmful insecticides or genetic fiddling. Daily, we are persuaded that the choice cut of beef we are busy preparing has been cut from a cow that had a very happy life in a green and open pasture. That the chicken egg you're frying for breakfast was definitely not from a battery hen tricked into staying awake for days on end in brightly lit factories, so that more eggs will be laid.

At the beginning of the organic trend, some supermarkets foolishly imported choice produce from neighbouring states. But being the alert and investigative consumers that we are, we soon picked up on the fact that this led to food with a very high carbon footprint. If you haven't heard of this notion before, it's time you took notice. Let's look at two farms, both of which sell produce to Cape Town. The one farm is in Hermanus and the other in Upington. The produce from Hermanus has a smaller carbon footprint than that from Upington because it is closer and fewer carbons are emitted during delivery. In addition, the extra distance means that the produce from Upington will burn a bigger hole in your wallet.

Cynicism aside, the truth is that in some regards organic food is more expensive than conventional produce, but in other areas it isn't. It all depends on where you shop and what you want to buy. If you want to buy Woolworths' long-stalked broccoli flown all the way from Botswana (high carbon footprint alert!) then you're going to pay more. On the other hand, there will always be cheap inorganic food available, because some people don't care or can't afford to care about their neighbour's well-being, let alone some chicken's well-being.

Nevertheless, it's important to support your local farmers. We are slowly approaching a post-global age (travel is becoming more and more expensive and communities are becoming increasingly self-subsistent), which means it's better to fork out that extra R2 for a bag of spinach from your community. Most supermarkets or grocers should be able to answer questions about where the food has come from. In Cape Town, you can even join the Ethical Co-op, where every week a group of organic farmers stop off at a predetermined meeting point (you can subscribe to their mailing list) and sell their produce; a worthy effort in a city so far away from most agricultural lands.

Most people should be able to afford eating green. Not only is it ethically and ecologically a better choice, but it's far healthier. Your food will contain fewer preservatives and additives than normal, which, if you're someone who's allergic to sulphur, along with a host of other irritants, is a blessing.