The true cost of food, and the story your price tells

This month, the FAO published The State of Food and Agriculture 2024, which builds on last year's attempt to count what the supermarket receipt leaves out. I read it as someone who runs businesses and buys food from small farms, and one idea stayed with me: cheap food is not cheap. Someone pays the rest of the bill.

Cheap food hides a bill

True cost accounting adds to the shelf price what the market does not count: damage to soil and water, emissions, illness linked to what we eat, the conditions of the people who produce our food. The report puts these hidden costs at 11.6 trillion dollars, in 2020 purchasing power parity, for 156 countries; the FAO rounds it to about 12 trillion a year. Around 70 percent come from unhealthy dietary patterns linked to heart disease, stroke and diabetes, and the FAO says the health figure is a lower bound.

Meanwhile, the farm gets a thin slice of what the customer does pay. The USDA's Food Dollar Series shows that in 2023, U.S. farms received 15.9 cents per dollar spent on domestically produced food. A low price at the checkout is paid twice: once by the shopper, and once later, by everybody.

Be proud of what you do right

The FAO also reminds us who grows the food: farms under 2 hectares make up 84 percent of all farms worldwide but operate only around 12 percent of agricultural land, and small farms produce roughly 35 percent of the world's food. When you grow in living soil, without synthetic pesticides, sell within a few miles of your field and grow dozens of crops instead of one, you leave much less of that hidden bill behind you. That is worth being proud of, and worth saying out loud.

Telling it at the market stand

Every grower has heard it: your basket is expensive next to the supermarket. You will not win that conversation with a trillion-dollar figure, and not every customer wants to hear it. That is fine. Storytelling is part of the job of a small farm owner, just like growing, and it comes down to two things.

• The right words. Say what is in your price, in your own terms and only what is true of your farm: the soil you feed, what you do not spray, the carrots pulled this morning, the people who harvested them.
• The right audience. Tell it first to the customers who already ask questions: your CSA members, the chefs you deliver to, the regulars at your stand. Put it on the chalkboard, in the newsletter, in a note in the basket. They will repeat it for you.

A margin keeps the mission alive

As small entrepreneurs, growers need margins, like any entrepreneur. Nobody expects a bakery or a café to lose money because it is small and cares about quality; we expect it to be good and to last. A viable margin is what lets your mission last. So your price should reflect all the good you do, and the harm you do not do.

That is what we build Heirloom for: to keep your margin alive, season after season, so your mission can last too. Be proud of your price. It tells the true cost of food.