Why Good Food is Often Expensive

Source

It's pretty bad when one of your first posts is a cheater post - just a link to a really fabulous video of Joel Salatin explaining why good food is more expensive than store food, but it really is such a busy time of year for us - so I'll go with the cheater post.

Until recently we had been selling eggs to a local restaurant.  Before commencing to do so, we looked up the regulations...the restaurant looked up the regulations and it looked like a great deal for both of us.  Our local paper ran stories about many other small farmers like us supplying farm fresh eggs to local restaurants and bakeries, so we knew it was being done by many.


 Unfortunately, recently the state inspector told our restaurant that we needed to jump through several more hoops in order for them to be able to buy eggs from us.  Specifically, we needed:

An Egg Handler's Permit
Our water tested
Our septic tested
An egg candling room
An egg washing area with a double sink
A sanitation solution for post washing
Our own cartons (with our ID number)

We sell eggs for $3.00/dozen and the profit margin is quite slim.  Without doing any of these things, we can still sell eggs to individuals and even at Farmer's Markets.  Since we were only selling 6 dozen eggs/week to the restaurant in question, it is obviously not economically feasible for us to upgrade to these regulations in order to sell our eggs.  Unfortunately, this means that the restaurant will either need to go back to selling inferior factory-farmed eggs (the real motive behind the rules), or up their prices considerably to accommodate similar eggs from a farm willing to jump through these hoops.

Unfortunately, this scenario is not uncommon - and in this video, Joel talks about why his pork is $9/lb.