The Price of Health

The difficult economic times that we are experiencing have posed a food-shopping dilemma for me.

For years now, I have been buying as much organic food as I can, including milk, produce and meats. This was made easier by the fact that Spencer was attending a Waldorf school that was around the corner from Kimberton Whole Foods, which is, as you would expect, a whole foods store.

I could and probably will write many blog posts on the subject of Waldorf education. At the moment, the salient fact about the school and its culture is that organic, healthy food was definitely the comestible of choice. The Kimberton Waldorf School is located in Kimberton, Pennsylvania on a 500-acre biodynamic dairy farm, the Seven Stars Farm, that produces its own, really delicious yogurt. The school has a lunch program that features healthy, mostly organic, ingredients. Many community members are vegan.

When Spencer started at the school, he was not quite four, and had two life-threatening food allergies to peanuts and eggs. We discovered this horrifying fact when Spence was one, and the impact on our family, and me particularly, was significant. I had to learn to cook most meals from scratch, since in those days, ten or eleven years ago, ingredient lists were hard to come by.

Baked goods were out of the question for him unless I baked them myself, to control for allergens. Even my extended family, sisters-in-law Stacey and Laurie, and my mom, got into the eggless baking business, for birthday cakes.

When your child has food allergies, and entire categories of edibles are literally off the table, you want whatever he can eat to be as healthy as possible. The Kimberton Waldorf School's culture of healthy food appealed to me. Norm and I received an education about food, including knowledge of grains like millet and spelt.

I began to frequent Kimberton Whole Foods, which was popular with the Waldorf community. There I purchased the organic flour, egg subsitute and soy-based ingredients that I used to bake vegan muffins, cookies and cakes. Often I would bring these goodies to school, since many of Spencer's friends at school also had allergies or ate vegan.

I also bought many of our daily meal ingredients at the store.

The one drawback to the organic foods sold at Whole Foods stores was the price. Organic food has always been more expensive than non-organic. But I was willing to pay the additional cost for the benefits that eating organic produce, grains and meats would bring.

Plus, the store was a wonderful place to hang out, redolent of spices and essential oils; just walking in the door made me feel like a better, healthier person.

Food prices are reaching a point, however, that I am struggling to justify paying roughly twice as much for organic milk as for non-organic, especially since Spencer is reaching the end of his formative years. I always worried that the hormones in non-organic milk, or bovine growth hormone in beef, would have the affect of pushing him into early puberty, although in the last few years, attention has shifted from hormones in food to environmental contaminants like phthalates and bisphenol-A.

Spence is now almost fifteen and his voice hasn't changed yet, so early puberty is definitely not a problem. But, I still worry about other effects of these environmental contaminants.

The good news about healthy and organic foods, though, is that supermarket chains are starting to catch on and offer more of this fare, as this article in CNN will attest; this may help to lower the prices a bit. Also, with any luck food prices in general will drop along with the drop in oil and energy prices.

Of course, creating our own garden is also an option. But that is a subject for another day.