I published my previous blog in two places online in addition to this one, and I submitted it to a couple of people for an opinion. Overall consensus seems to be I failed to make my point. It received very few comments (I am taking the silence to mean “You’re full of shit but I’m too polite to say so”), and the comments that were made suggested the same reaction with the caveat “I’m not so polite as not to say anything, but I’m not saying a lot.”
Only one comment really helped me in determining whether or not I made my point. The writer agreed that many people spend a lot of money on things important to them, then claim poverty when someone suggests they spend money on something they do not regard as important.
She added that when she says she cannot afford to buy local produce or cage-free eggs, she means it, and she refuses to feel guilty about. I should have consulted her before I wrote my blog as she basically made the point I was trying to:
We all spend money on what is important to us. As someone who chooses to continue to use a three-year-old MP3 player that only cost $70 to begin with, does not have a DVR, and buys sunglasses that cost roughly the same as a Venti soy milk latte, I refuse to feel guilty about eating a nectarine that cost me fifty cents because it was grown within a hundred miles of my house and without pesticides.
I guess I should have said that to begin with. Live and learn.
PS. As an aside, when I shop at the farmers market the majority of the sellers I buy from are not Certified Organic; they grow their produce without pesticides and synthetic fertilizers, but cannot call themselves an organic grower since doing so legally is expensive.
Frankly that kind of bothers me. Big companies can label products as organic even if that is not quite true because the penalty for doing so is small potatoes to them, but a small grower who is earnest cannot call their product organic unless they pay for the privilege.
PPS. I paid $18 for razor blades today—I’m beginning to think the yeti look isn’t such a bad idea after all.
4 responses so far ↓
Shan // Thursday, June 25, 2009 at 2:55 pm
I love shopping @ the farmers markets.
I too will spend ridiculous amounts of $ on fresh, local goods.
I also hear you on the razor blades!
I’m only shaving if I get a date.
apremerson // Thursday, June 25, 2009 at 4:03 pm
Smart move, Shan.
flurrious // Saturday, June 27, 2009 at 1:01 pm
I’m just tardy, but not necessarily polite. I think you may have hit on something when you talked about big companies producing organic food. Since I do almost all my food shopping in grocery stores, even produce that gets sold with an organic label is something that’s grown on a large scale and shipped a fair distance (and thus harvested way too early). That seems to me to have much more of an impact on quality than whether pesticides or other chemicals are used. I am still a little annoyed that two weeks ago, I paid almost $5 for a pint of organic cherry tomatoes that were mealy and tasteless.
The other thing is that many people don’t have particularly sensitive palates, and so even when there is a big taste difference in organic vs. conventional, they don’t notice, and thus it’s not worth the additional cost to them (barring any other objections to other non-organic farming).
Point the third: for that price, those better be magic razor blades.
apremerson // Saturday, June 27, 2009 at 2:55 pm
Gilette Mach 3- 8 pack of blades which will last me for months. But even so, it kills me they cost that much.
Like gas stations in rural Texas after 10 pm, comments are closed.