Despite all of my convictions about how we need to shift our thinking about food prices, it's hard for me to walk by a case of nice looking tomatoes for under $10. I saw this stack of lovely specimens at the Cash and Carry the other day, and went to investigate.
I was surprised to see the phrase "sustainable farming" on the box. I'd just spend the weekend at the Sustainable Ballard Festival surrounded by green marketing, some sincere, some less than sincere.
I went ahead and bought a case of tomatoes, and later checked the company's website, which listed the farm's conscientious practices, speaking of ongoing "self assessments." Despite the fact that they didn't mention working with any certification agency, I liked their approach, which focused on keeping chemical pesticides and fertilizers to a minimum, and improving their practices over time.
I think that this kind of sincere, thoughtful, transitional approach is going to be a very important component in changing the way we eat, in some ways maybe more so than even the "all organic" label. We live in a transitional world, and we need transitional foods.
Still, I wonder how they managed to ship those tomatoes from California cheaply enough to wholesale them for under $10. I hope there were no middlemen, and they just found themselves with a surplus of tomatoes: it is that time of year, after all. I'll probably never know the whole story.
No comments:
Post a Comment