Zombie Apocalypse II: The Revenge of the Economists

I've started this blog four times! While we can probably produce enough food in Easton to feed everyone here, the question of why we don't is much more complex. Master of the Grange Lee Williams is a staunch believer in the capitalist system, but he uses a phrase "capitalism with reins on" that is an effective analogy. Capitalism is all about letting free markets decide. Adam Smith believed that the interplay of buyers and sellers would produce the best possible product at the lowest possible price. It doesn't always work out that way, but it does so more often than any other economic system we have so far devised. When it does work, it's like the old grey mare trotting along and reliably getting you where you want to go. However, there are flaws in capitalism that let it stampede off in the wrong direction sometimes. Hence the need for reins in the form of some level of regulation to keep the mare trotting along.

The crisis that set off the Great Recession was a clear example of lack of reins that allowed banks and investment houses to run amok, but there are many factors in our agricultural system that have pushed us in the wrong direction. Some are inherent in capitalism itself and some are corruptions of the system caused by human nature. For example, capitalism predicts that the marketplace is always seeking a balance between quality and price. The best way to get the lowest price is to produce something in a place where the best raw materials are available. Easton no longer has a large iron/shovel industry because, despite having a supply of bog iron, the coal of Pennsylvania was closer to the rich iron ore of Minnesota. The same thing began to happen to Easton farmers when the deep rich soil of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois first came into production. Today, you can buy tomatoes year round at a relatively low price because they can be grown cheaply in California and shipped here. The problem California farmers had to solve was that tomatoes are a highly perishable crop. They solved the problem by engineering a tomato that ships well at the cost of flavor. Until recently American consumers were happy with year-round, cheap, tasteless tomatoes.

As an aside, you can now get sweet corn in most months of the year. This is a triumph of agricultural science. The sugar in sweet corn begins to convert to starch as soon as the crop is picked. In the old days local corn was always going to be sweeter than corn that had been trucked in from places as close as New jersey. Shipping fresh sweet corn from California or Mexico was impossible so corn became one of the first vegetables to be canned and frozen. Unfortunately, the corn season around here only lasts a few months. The demand was year round. Enter the development of "supersweet" corn varieties that were created to have a much higher initial sugar content. If a little bit of that turns to starch in shipping, the supersweet corn is still edible when it arrives at your local supermarket during winter. The folks at Gerry's farmstand in Brockton really know their corn, and they, and I, believe that while the supersweet varieties taste sweet, older varieties like "butter and sugar" have more corn on the cob flavor. Ironically, butter and sugar is actually one of the very first supersweets-it just doesn't taste that way in comparison with today's varieties.

I undertook my study of whether Easton could feed itself because I thought it couldn't. I was looking for a percentage, small I thought, that we could produce as a goal for the Agricultural Commission. I certainly didn't want to bash supermarkets. I like the quality of year round apples for example. Unfortunately, apples show up another flaw in capitalism-externalization of costs. A cost is externalized if the account books of a business don't write it down. I used to teach near an adhesive factory that pumped industrial waste into a stream that ultimately flowed into the town's water supply. The cost of safely disposing of this waste was externalized among all the citizens of the town whose water was potentially degraded.

Ever hear of the tragedy of the commons? Once upon a time there was a common pasture that had the capacity for grazing 100 sheep who would be fat and happy. The common was used by 10 farmers who grazed 10 sheep each. The smart farmer figured out that sheep look very much alike and that no one would notice if he added one sheep to his flock. The 101st sheep and all the others would all be a little bit less fat, but the smart farmer would have one more sheep to take to market. Unfortunately, his fellow farmers soon caught on and began adding sheep themselves. Rationally, the benefit of adding additional sheep to sell outweighed the loss of weight which was distributed among all the farmers' sheep. Until the day the grass didn't come up in the spring due to overgrazing. Modern apple growers in places like Oregon and Washington externalize costs. While they do count shipping costs, they don't count the carbon dioxide produced in sending the apples to market. Consumers buy more shiny, perfect apples so farmers externalize the cost of the pesticides, "only a minimal chance" of being carcinogenic, onto the one in a million person who actually gets cancer. They also externalize the number of illegal alien apple pickers who die on the way to the fields-I saw a documentary on that. All of these externalizations could be internalized (and perhaps stopped) with the right amount of "reins." Or we could just start eating stuff produced closer to home where we could keep an eye on it despite higher costs and seasonality.