You get what you pay for (Salatin)
December 2nd, 2007 | Published in Agriculture, Economics, Health, Quotes | 1 Comment
When someone drives up to the farm in a BMW and asks me why our eggs cost more, … well, first I try not to get mad. Frankly, any city person who doesn’t think I deserve a white-collar salary as a farmer doesn’t deserve my special food. Let them eat E. coli. But I don’t say that. Instead, I take him outside and point at his car. ‘Sir, you clearly understand quality and are willing to pay for it. Well, food is no different: You get what you pay for.’
–Joel Salatin in Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma (2006), p. 244
December 2nd, 2007 at 8:00 pm (#)
“…any city person who doesn’t think I deserve a white-collar salary as a farmer…”
I had a beekeeper tell me once that his customers were drinking $5 lattes, driving Hummers, etc., and it was therefore entirely appropriate for him to charge his customers $10/lb. for his “sustainable” honey. (He operated up in your part of the country, by the way.) I don’t doubt that those same customers are suckers waiting to be exploited, but any so-called sustainable farmer that wants to keep pace with his BMW-driving customers is a sustainable sham. If a farmer wants to call himself sustainable, let him seek to keep pace with models of sustainability (e.g. traditional Chinese rice farmers, Middle Eastern goat herders, traditional Nordic fishermen), not models of industrialist excess. Exploitation of soils, animals, workers, watersheds, ecosystems, communities, etc. is committed for a reason: to make more money. To insist on making as much money as those who sacrifice all else for the sake of more money is to commit oneself to exploitation. Salatin, I believe, is primarily exploiting the cause he pretends to support.