Better Accounting for Taste

Food from a supermarket is like a subprime mortgage.

by Bruce Schimmel

Talk about pot-sticker shock. I recently dined at Vetri, the celebrated and pricey Italian bistro on Spruce Street, and for what I spent on my dinner, a family of four could have eaten for a week.

Paying $200 for an evening of grub might seem like a lot of green, until you do a little accounting. If you compare the price of a dinner from Vetri to the real cost of supermarket food, the balance sheet tilts dramatically. When I contemplated my bill over an espresso, I only had to add in the tax and tip. But food bought at supermarkets comes with lots of hidden costs down the line.

At Vetri, I got tender rigatoni with pork ragu and fresh ricotta, striped bass with heirloom tomatoes, and a chocolate polenta souffle. At many supermarkets, consumers get chicken a la antibiotique and potatoes aux organophosphates.

And for dessert, everyone gets a generous serving of the ills that come with chemical-driven factory farming. Buying food from a supermarket is like getting a subprime mortgage: It's cheap at the outset, but very pricey when you add everything up.

Now, it's hardly news that agribusiness boosts profits at the public's expense. But what's heartening lately has been some better accounting of the hidden harms that, perversely, government policies have helped to create.

As part of a series on drinking water, The New York Times recently focused on cow manure from farms in rural Wisconsin. During the Bush era, the Environmental Protection Agency allowed some farms to "self-certify" that they're not polluting. Now the Times reports that parasites and bacteria from cow patties have soaked into the soil, polluted wells, and spread chronic diarrhea, stomach illness and severe ear infection.

If we had some honest accounting here, factory dairy operations would bear the costs of the illness they create. But as food guru Michael Pollan recently wrote, the effects of bad food on the cost of health care have yet to enter the debate.

Still, as much as we need to better account for our toxic tastes, tracking more numbers can be numbing. Which is why in Europe, and increasingly in America, people are adopting the simple and sustainable philosophy of the Slow Food movement.

Slow Foodists eschew all that smacks of agribusiness. If food is quick and easy, says Slow Food, forget it. The better you know your farmer, the less likely his food will return to haunt you.

The beauty of the Slow Food philosophy is that it lets you account for your tastes without needing a calculator. As one local leader put it, Slow Food is based on the pleasure principle. In my experience, it jibes nicely with the miracle of the French diet — where you lose weight, because you eat better and eat less.

These are things I'll be exploringpersonally, when I soon leave for Provence to do some cooking. There, the food is slow and the Internet is slower, and I'll enjoy the blessing of being out of touch while getting to know my taste buds better. Which means this column will be on gastronomic leave till mid-October. Meanwhile, check out the local Slow Food chapter at slowfoodphilly.org. And bon appetit — I'm counting on it.

(bruce@schimmel.com)