Why cook and not grow?
January 27th, 2008Self-catering is the cultural norm
You have a kitchen. You buy your food, but you cook your meals. And you know you would not relinquish your kitchen and always eat out or call a caterer or buy instant food because:
- you could not afford it (*)
- you’d lose the pleasure of cooking
- you’d lose on quality
- you would not really know what went in the meals you eat
Why cook and not grow?
Maybe agricultural practices of olden times were inefficient enough that any job at the factory paid more food that one could grow otherwise. I doubt that. I would rather say that the social conditions drove people out of the land and into factories regardless of the economic interest for them. In any case, new techniques and practices (mulching, crop rotations, polyculture, cover crops) have considerably reduced the labour needed to grow food on the garden scale since the time when our society bifurcated from distributed micro-agriculture to the ugly industrial model which is currently ruining our lives, the planet, and our kids’ future.
I say that, just like we can show that the average speed of a car is not much higher than that of a bicycle if we count the time one works to pay for the car, we can show that the time one works to pay for food is not much shorter than the time it would take to grow said food (**).
Obviously, I have taken the real-estate factor out of the computation. Not everybody can afford 300 square meters of vegetable garden + 500 square meters of cereals and another acre of grassland for one ewe. This is another matter and relates to a future post on why we pack people into cities in the era of the internet.
My project for 2008
I wager that personal agriculture can make a new dent in the over-centralized, over-specialized, industrial model, just like personal computers wiped out mainframe systems when nobody expected them. In 2008, I will try to prove something: I will spend one hour per day in my garden (maybe two because I am a beginner; maybe three because one must not forget the pleasure factor) and I will try to feed my family.
I will blog about my endeavour. In French. Soon.
Meanwhile, enjoy this song (by French artist Ridan) which expresses my current state of mind better than I could.
Je préfère être pauvre avec mon âme que vivre riche avec la leur ; si le blé me file du bonheur, je me ferai peut-être agriculteur
I had rather be poor with my own soul than be wealthy with theirs; if [growing] wheat makes me happy, maybe I’ll turn farmer
Footnotes
(*)
- raw ingredients: 2€ per meal per person => 500€ per month
- kitchen real estate: 10 square meters x 10€ => 100€ per month
- kitchen appliances, dishes and cutlery: let us consider 2400€ for ten years - 20€ per month.
- equivalent labour costs of the person who does the cooking: 1 hour per day x 20€/hr x 31 days => 600€
For a family of four, that leads to a total cost of 2×4x2×31 + 120 + 600 ~ 1200€ per month.
If you had to go to the restaurant or call a caterer, the lowest price with the lowest quality would be in the vicinity of 7€ per meal per person, leading to a total cost of 1700€ per month. If you wanted equivalent quality, the price would probably reach 2000€ per month.
This computation has been done considering that the person doing the cooking voluntarily reduces his/her work day and his/her (above-average) wages to get free time for the cooking. For anybody earning less or living in a less expensive neighborhood, the ratio is even more obvious in favor of self-catering. Note that the pleasure factor was never considered.
(**)
- cost of food: 500 € per month (see above)
- hourly rate: 20 €
- total number of hours that can be spent in the garden: 25 h ~ one hour a day, or equivalently one full working day each week.
Your experiment is admirable and I shall try to keep up with how it goes. Good luck!
I agree with Becky — this sounds great, and I’m curious to see how it goes.
I will post a little about it over here, but the bulk of the ‘experiment’ will be documented there, and in French. Somehow, this choice feels like a betrayal to my readers, but I simply have to. I will explain why.
I don’t feel betrayed. I will simply pop over there and see what I can make of the French. I’ll get the gist, I think.