“Is it ultimately food for all or just a select few?”
This question recalls a discussion that arose at the young farmer’s panel at Middlebury this spring. Corie Pierce from Bread and Butter Farm spoke with no small amount of passion about the idea of sustainable food being unaffordable. In her experiences at the farmstand and the farmer’s market, she found herself constantly interacting with potential patrons who eyed her products longingly but left empty-handed, saying that they just couldn’t afford it. But these were not people struggling to find decent nutrition on food stamps, nor even people who–like her own family–she knew to be on subsidized healthcare. Many times, she said, these were people she knew to be faculty members at the College. While there are people for whom her food is simply and objectively prohibitively priced, for most people buying food from a place like Bread and Butter is a question of realigning priorities. The “select few,” then, are self-selected. But they are members of a socioeconomic swath that could also elect to prioritize locally-produced raw milk, organic eggs, and heirloom chicken.
There are many obstacles that need to be overcome to make sustainably grown food accessible to people for whom it is simply out of reach, either for economic, cultural, or geographic reasons. The most frustrating thing for me, though, is looking at people who could choose to redistribute their budgets to afford the food at their farmer’s market but who, for reasons that remain opaque to me, choose not to. Unpacking the misconception of un-affordability among people who could technically afford sustainable food seems to be a key step in making the select few into the select many.