How much do I pay for my garlic? Well, unless I'm exhausted and harried and desperate just to grab a bulb and be done with it, a lot. Like Sarah Kanowski, I am convinced that spending more on my groceries will be better in the long run: better for our farmers, better for our health, and better for the earth.
Many farming practices worry me. Cousins of mine framed an old photograph of the lake which abuts their property. It's a pretty enough photograph, which is why they framed it; but I find it haunting. The lake is now dead, poisoned by decades of fertiliser run-offs, and the pressure to produce enormous crops is such that the lake continues to be poisoned year after year.
My cousins hoot at alternative farming methods; they cannot see how withholding fertilisers or turning land over to reed beds and indigenous plants in an effort to neutralise the salinity will allow them to produce large enough crops. So they farm the way they always have, degrading their land and making scathing comments about organic farmers and pretentious city folk, and I despair.
Even so, their comments grate. Exactly how much can I spend on groceries before I am, indeed, utterly pretentious, even immoral? Conventionally grown nectarines cost $2 a kilo; local organic nectarines, $8. People in my own city are hungry, people across the world are starving, and here I am buying local organic olive oil, ten times the price of a good oil from Crete. My daughters won't eat a floury apple from a supermarket, nor a tasteless carrot. 'Buy the good apples,' they beg — they mean the heirloom varieties at $7 a kilo.
Yet even as I wince at the register and think of the hungry, I can't be convinced that buying food from farms which degrade soil and water is cost-effective, or that farm workers should be regularly exposed to airborne pesticides and other toxins. In the long run, we will all be hungry if we don't look after the land, or the rivers and lakes which give it life.
And I have to agree with my daughters — the good apples are good. There is a reward for buying local and organic: the food can be magnificent. Fresh in a way rarely experienced in a supermarket, local organic produce can taste like a Platonic ideal of Apple, Peach, Pear. I remember the first