What a $1.95 Buys

I went into a local supermarket last week and found red and yellow bell peppers on sale for $1.95 each.  Yes, each.  I know that this is November and normally past the pepper season.  Yet I picked fresh bell peppers from my garden not three days ago....

The peppers on sale weren't particularly large (about the size of my fist), they weren't flawless (most had at least one or two bruises), and were already past their prime.  I was reminded of a talk my friend John Caldwell (hey, John!) always gives to potential vegetable gardeners:

"One dollar and ninety five cents, " John begins, "will buy you one red pepper in a store.  One dollar and ninety-five cents can also buy you a pepper ready to transplant at a nursery which will possibly grow 10 peppers so now each pepper costs you 19.5 cents - not a bad deal.  But for the same $1.95 you can also buy a packet of pepper seeds.  With some work and good luck, each seed can become a plant producing ten red peppers, and a packet usually contains 25 to 30 seeds, so for $1.95 you might either buy one red pepper, a pepper transplant that will yield 10 peppers or grow 300!  Not to mention that each one of those peppers is a source for future plantings...."

True, when you buy the pepper in the store you have a ripe pepper right now.  You don't have to plant the seed, tend it, water it, or pick it.  You don't have to wait expectantly for 90 days or more for the peppers to grow and turn from green to red.  You don't have to protect the peppers from insects, birds, and high winds.  Let's be honest: gardening and farming are time intensive, no matter how much labor is saved through technology.  It can also be resource intensive depending on locale, weather and soil.

Some suggest that the high price for a red pepper in the store is really a time tax because the farmer had to leave the pepper on the plant longer to get to the desired color and couldn't plant other crops in the interim.  A good point, except that most of the $1.95 doesn't go to the farmer, it goes to middle men in the agribusiness complex.

But for me, there is another factor to be considered in the costs of growing your own food vs. buying in a store. For me, nothing is sweeter than eating food I've had a hand in growing.  In a time when so many folks make a living by managing information, by abstraction, there is nothing more concrete than tilling soil, planting seed or laying in transplants, cultivating the soil and harvesting produce.  It is a lesson in deferred gratification, in hope and faith, in stewardship, and in mothering the world. 

The $1.95 pepper may be a good deal for some folk, but it is a bad deal for many, including me.