Idiot Wind

Wow.

I have a periodic habit of going to mysupermarket.com and putting in the contents of our veg box or the meat we buy in bulk and being pleasantly surprised that the meat works out about half the price of buying each joint individually and that the veg box works out invariably cheaper than buying organic produce from any supermarket, roughly comparable to the non-organic produce in Waitrose or Sainsbury's and only a pound or so more expensive (depending on what we get - tomatoes and courgettes compare more favourably than cabbage or turnips) than non-organic produce at Tesco or Asda; and frankly, even at the worst estimate, £50 a year is not much to pay (especially when you're saving well over £100 a year on meat) for the convenience of having it delivered to you and the fact that it actually tastes of something and hence probably has some nutritional value too (crazy hippy ideas about it being rather counter-intuitive to render the planet unusable while trying to eke a living from it notwithstanding).

But today is the first time I have gone and put in the contents of this week's veg box and had it come out unequivocally cheaper than Tesco non-organic stuff. It's the exact opposite of how I felt when I went into M&S the other week and bought bread for the first time in about a year. ('How much? I could buy 3kg of flour for that!')

Could it be that the cracks are beginning to show in a food system that is overly dependent on cheap, abundant oil? Might we be slowly starting to see that, really, growing things properly and not covering them in plastic and trucking them halfway around the country is, really, a far more sensible way to feed ourselves?

Or is it just that the veg box are worried that if they put their prices up in the current economic climate they'll lose customers, so they're swallowing the price increases (i.e. actually swallowing it, not just hiding it by charging more for DVDs) and narrowing their margins and eventually going to go out of business?



I refer you to the inimitable Homer Simpson at the end of Homer the Vigilante when several townspeople are stuck in a rather deep hole they've dug:

"I know, we'll dig our way out!"