True Cost of Bread
Along the lines of my earlier post on packaging, an article on TriplePundit talks about a contest called Our Daily Bread, What Does It REALLY Cost? that’s being run by Sustainable Ventures.
Anyone who can measure the “true cost” of a loaf of bread is eligible for a $10,000 prize. This seemed like an interesting task, but the more I think about it, the more daunting it seems. The biggest question is, where do you stop? If we talk about the cost of transporting the wheat, do we consider the cost of the tire wear on the truck? How about the wear on the road surface? If the road surface is implicated in a traffic accident, does the loaf of bread have some liability?
What about long-term salinization of farmland from inappropriate irrigation methods? Those are long-term concerns, but how does one factor in their true cost? Desertification of farmland is another concern, but again how does one calculate its impact on a loaf of bread? Do we factor in health concerns when dealing with GM crops? Do we consider the manufacturing costs associated with the containers used to ship the wheat? If so, what about the costs associated with manufacturing, such as health concerns regarding smelters, or things like lead contamination?
I tend to over-think problems, but in this situation I don’t think there’s any way to over-think: everything is connected. Oil prices affect the fuel cost for the tractor to plow the fields and transport the harvest and the baker’s cost to bake, transport, and store the bread. Changing weather patterns from global warming impact trade routes and transportation costs as farmland shifts in response to wetter or drier climates. The issues to consider span space and time.
When I stop to think about how far-reaching this question really is, it makes me realize how little we really understand about our economy. I was always a little suspicious of stock charts which proposed constant movement up and to the right, because the implicit assumption is that, theoretically, such movement can continue to infinity. Yet we know there is no such thing as infinity in the everyday world: there is a limit to the amount of space we have available on Earth, there is a limit to the amount of oil we can drill and extract, there is a limit to the rate at which forests can recover from logging. They may be very big limits, but they are limits nonetheless. In contrast, stock charts are unbounded. Yet their fundamental assumptions are bounded, in the form of externalities and to some extent a myopic view of the future.
As the world grows more complicated, mostly by our own doing, it would seem to me that we’d be better off figuring out how the systems we create really function. “See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil” doesn’t seem like a useful strategy. Neither is throwing up our hands and saying “it’s too complicated!”, although that’s certainly how I feel at the moment.
I’m particularly curious as to how they will be communicating this information afterwards. In many ways, this is along the lines of what I originally set out to explore in my thesis…