Slate has an interesting article about whether you’re better off buying certain items at the store or making them yourself. Their primary focus is cost, though the author does address quality to some extent. They leave out plenty of other factors that might come into play – supporting local growers, sustainable farming practices, or various other ethical considerations. But let’s face it: money is on a lot of people’s minds right now.

The article runs into some accounting problems, like apparently including the cost of canning jars in the cost of making preserves. If you’re doing that, what about the canning kettle? Or the stove for that matter? Canning lids I could see, but canning jars are a buy once, use forever item. The author also talks about buying organic strawberries. Were they in season? Were they shipped in from another time zone? Strawberries can vary a lot in cost and quality based on these factors.

Still, the article’s definitely worth a read. It also ties into our current lead article pretty well, and we thought it could make for an interesting discussion topic in The Barnyard. What do you make from scratch? What did you think would be hard but turned out to be easy? What did you try and give up on? What are you thinking about trying? Let us know!

These famous words by Marie Antoinette (although debated as to whether she said it or not) seem to be an actual goal of our government in America. Lower income residents of America have a disproportionately high level of diabetes afflictions, mostly stemming from the massive price differential between fresh healthy foods and the processed aisles of foods that are in the middle of grocery stores. This Alternet article discusses the problem that fresh, healthy organic food is typically priced too high for lower income folks to afford.

It’s true, and it’s a damn shame. This country is just as differentiated based on stature as any of the horrible aristocracies from historical Europe. Here in America if you have money you get healthy food. If you don’t, oops, sorry, you get the scraps.

See this quote from the article:

First off, the group expressed an immediate consensus that fresh, inexpensive food — the food they generally preferred — was unavailable in their neighborhood. Everyone agreed that traveling to a full-line supermarket was a hassle because it required one or two long bus rides or an expensive taxi fare. As a result, they did their major shopping once or twice a month, and when they shopped, price was their most important consideration.

I will burst their bubble that eating organic food, or local produce is cheap even for a non-low income person. But, I do have some ideas on things we could do to make fresh, healthy food affordable for all of us.

Our government could use the Farm Bill to support healthy instead of the commodity crops they already support. This would benefit all citizens. You can contact your Congress person to discuss this.

I too feel the strain of buying organic, so I started a garden. Now I can eat fresh local organic food and it doesn’t cost me a whole lot. Sure it’s some work, not as much as people would have you think, but if you want healthy food, and don’t want to pay super high prices, maybe this is what you should think about doing. (Click the Gardening catagory to the right for all our information on growing your own food)

Other options are to shop farmer’s markets, buy foods in season and in bulk, and get together with other people to buy large amounts of healthy food and share them.

It’s sad that it’s come to this, but it seems that our leadership in America have forced us to do it. In order to get healthy food for ourselves we have to grow it ourselves, and get more involved in the process of acquiring our food.