Why does good food cost more?

Why does good food cost more, and why should I pay more?

CAUTION:  I’ma get REAL here.  If you are insulted by cursing, insults to ignorance, or making fun of people who think the world revolves around them, I’ll save you some heartache:  STOP READING NOW!

Ready for the truth?

We get endless variations on the question of why good food costs more than “normal” food.  We also get (and this is the part where I make fun of ignorance) the “If these were closer to [some ridiculously low number] I’d love to buy these.”

Yeah, no shit.  And if Lamborghini offered me a 2019 Aventador for $10,000 I’d take it, but that’s as likely as finding moon dust in a cat’s ass.

Here’s the first part of the problem:  Expectations. If you’re a regular American, MOST of the food you’ve eaten your entire life has been:

A) cheap shit

B) subsidized by the government

To put that into terms a ten year old can understand, it’s as if you go to the store to buy candy and your parents have slipped the store a twenty dollar bill on your behalf.

If you walk in with just a nickel in your pocket, you can still walk out loaded with product; someone else paid your bill and you shopped with your lizard brain. 

The flip side is buying the ingredients for dinner with money you earn from working a paper route.  All of a sudden the pickings get slim, and you realize just how valuable real food is.

Look, damn near everyone who decides to eat healthy food is driven there by one of three reasons:

1. They want to look better. 
2. They want to feel better.
3. Their doctor told them they would die if they kept eating crap.

All three of those groups are generally shocked when they see the price tag on real food.

None of this is easy to hear, I know.  I grew up eating loaves of bread, trays of cookies, and garbage sacks full of candy for months after Halloween.  I know what sugar addiction is, and I know how cheap it is to live on nothing but ramen and Butterfingers and $1.99/lb ground meat.

I also know that for me, that diet leads to intense asthma and allergies to EVERYTHING, a constantly runny nose, farts that could clear out Dodger’s stadium and the kind of armpit stench that has you thinking you’re in the Paris subway. 

A crappy diet also causes unstoppable mid-day napping, the kind of brain fog you’d experience on the top of Everest without oxygen, and the snappy irritation of a muzzled alligator in a chihuahua playground.

While that can be tolerable when you’re 23 and either trying to gross out the world or get in bar fights, it’s a rotten way to live as an actual caring adult.

So.  Why DOES good food cost more?  There are 3 main reasons:

1. It doesn’t get the benefit of “scale”.  There are ZERO actual real food companies* that are operating on a profit with millions of customers.  Thousands of customers (like us)?  Yes.  Millions (which is what scale requires)?  No.  Real food is so goddamn delicate that it takes actual human care to make sure it’s good all the way from the back of the kitchen to in front of your face. 
2. Good food uses very few cheap ingredients.  Yes, there are a few cheaper ingredients in real food, but for the most part, the case of almond flour ($5/lb) vs wheat flour is the norm ($.23/pound).
3. Good food takes time and expertise to make, and those two things cost extra money. 

That’s it.  This shit ain’t complicated, it’s just hard.  Making real food that tastes incredibly good isn’t an easy task, and it shouldn’t be rewarded with the bottom dollar.

There it is.  The reason that real food costs more, what you can avoid by eating real food vs. cheap shit, and why it’s so easy to be surprised when you see the price tag.

You’re welcome.

*There are a TON of companies who slip preservatives into their food, or who use cheap grain based crap, or who are subsidized by investors so they can grab market share while they produce food at a loss.  There are no real food companies that I know of with millions of customers AND high quality food being sold at profitable prices.

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