We want food to be cheap, abundant, attractive, convenient and available when we want it.
We don’t particularly want insects in it, blemishes on it or vegetables that look as though they grew without consulting a ruler.
We would also quite like fewer pesticides, less environmental damage, less food waste, better returns for farmers and food produced in ways that are better for us and the planet.
What if we can’t always have all of those things at once?
And what if farmers, supermarkets and food producers are, at least partly, giving us exactly what we have taught them we want?
That isn’t about blaming consumers. Most of us don’t stand in the supermarket thinking about agricultural economics or crop-production systems. We look at the apples, compare the prices, choose the bag that looks good and wonder why broccoli costs so much this week.
But millions of ordinary decisions like those send remarkably powerful signals back through the food system.
Perhaps it is worth asking what we have been telling it.
We Say We Want Better Food — But What Do We Actually Buy?
Ask people what they want from food production and the answers are fairly predictable: safe food, sustainable farming, less environmental damage, fewer unnecessary chemicals, good animal welfare and fair returns for farmers.
Then we arrive at the checkout, where another consideration becomes very real: price.
New Zealand’s 2020/21 Organic Sector Market Report found price was a significant obstacle to buying organic food. Among people who did not buy organic products, 68% regarded them as expensive compared with conventional alternatives. Even among organic buyers, almost half said they often or always bought organic when it was on promotion.
Read the New Zealand Organic Sector Market Report
International research tells much the same story. People commonly say they value organic food, environmentally preferable production and reduced pesticide use, but researchers repeatedly encounter what is known as the attitude-behaviour gap: what people say they want and what they actually put into their shopping trolley aren’t necessarily the same thing.
One German study involving more than 8,000 households compared people’s attitudes towards organic food with their actual grocery purchases. Around a quarter expressed strongly favourable attitudes towards organic food, yet only a small proportion actually devoted a substantial share of their grocery spending to it.
Household budgets obviously matter, as do convenience, availability, habit and competing priorities. Wanting something and being willing — or able — to pay for it every week are two quite different propositions.
Perhaps The Question Isn’t Simply What We Can Afford
We often say we can’t afford something when what we really mean is that we don’t think it is worth the price.
There is an important difference, and most of us can probably think of something we happily spend money on that another person would regard as ridiculous: takeaway coffee, a bottle of wine, streaming subscriptions, a better phone, a concert ticket or a new pair of shoes when the old ones weren’t actually worn out.
None of that is wrong. It simply demonstrates that value isn’t the same thing as price.
And that raises an interesting question about food.
Imagine two bags of apples sitting beside each other. One costs $5 and the certified-organic bag costs $8. The additional $3 is impossible to miss, but what exactly does the shopper perceive they are receiving for it?
They cannot see reduced synthetic pesticide use. They cannot see differences in farming practices. They cannot see pesticide residues, if there are any, or environmental costs associated with production. They certainly cannot see whether choosing one production system rather than another might make any difference to their health twenty or thirty years from now.
What they can see very clearly is the extra $3.
Against benefits that are largely invisible, the conventional apples can therefore look like much better value.
So perhaps the question isn’t only “Can I afford the organic apples?”
It is also “Do I believe whatever is different about these apples is worth another $3?”
Those are not the same question.
What Do We Think Food Should Cost?
There is another possibility worth considering.
Perhaps decades of increasingly efficient agricultural production haven’t merely changed the price of food. Perhaps they have also changed our idea of what food is worth.
Mechanisation, synthetic fertilisers, pesticides, improved crop varieties, refrigeration, global supply chains, sophisticated logistics and enormous supermarket purchasing power have helped create a remarkable food system. For much of the year, we walk into a supermarket and simply expect the shelves to be full.
We expect tomatoes outside the traditional tomato season and strawberries for months rather than weeks. We expect apples without codling moth holes, potatoes without obvious disease damage and lettuce without caterpillars. We expect food to travel considerable distances, survive handling, remain attractive and sit on the shelf long enough for us to buy it.
And we have become accustomed to paying particular prices for it.
Once those expectations become normal, food produced under a different system doesn’t necessarily look like this costs more because it was produced differently.
It simply looks expensive.
Perhaps that is one of modern agriculture’s less obvious legacies. It hasn’t just changed how we produce food; it may also have changed what we believe food ought to cost.
And Apparently Some Of Our Food Is “Health Food”
There is a wonderfully odd expression hiding in plain sight in many supermarkets: health food.
We have health-food aisles, health-food sections and entire health-food stores. Which invites the slightly mischievous question: what does that make everything else?
Perhaps we shouldn’t dismiss the question too quickly.
Walk through a modern supermarket and there are certainly plenty of perfectly ordinary, nutritious foods outside the health-food section. But there are also aisles of confectionery, sugary drinks, snack foods and highly processed products that few of us would seriously mistake for health foods.
We know that. We buy them anyway.
The interesting thing is that we have somehow created a special category for food marketed around health, as though healthfulness were an additional attribute rather than something we might reasonably expect from food in the first place. There is something decidedly strange about needing to distinguish “health food” from simply “food”.
Something similar happens with organic food. There are apples, and then there are certified-organic apples. There are carrots, and then there are certified-organic carrots.
Conventionally produced food generally requires no special explanation because it has become the default. The alternative has to identify itself, explain what is different about it and, frequently, justify why it costs more.
That raises an interesting question about what we have come to regard as normal:
How did food produced with fewer synthetic pesticides become the special category rather than food produced using them?
That isn’t the same as claiming conventional food is unhealthy. It is asking why one production system became the baseline against which another has to explain — and price — its differences.
We Also Shop With Our Eyes
Price isn’t the only immediate signal. Appearance matters too.
An apple with a blemish looks inferior beside an unblemished apple. A crooked carrot can somehow appear less valuable than a straight one. Insect damage can make otherwise perfectly edible produce undesirable.
Research confirms that these visual judgements affect both willingness to buy and willingness to pay.
A particularly revealing study compared consumers’ expectations of visually imperfect apples and mandarins with their experiences when tasting the fruit without seeing it. Appearance substantially reduced expected enjoyment, purchase intention and willingness to pay. Once appearance was removed, however, the sensory differences were relatively minor.
In other words, our eyes had already told us something about the food that our taste buds didn’t necessarily confirm.
Read the study in Food Quality and Preference
But there is encouraging evidence too. Consumers will buy imperfect food, particularly when the price and presentation make sense.
Research has found that discounting helps, as does explaining why food looks different. One series of experiments even found that explicitly labelling unattractive produce as “ugly” could increase purchasing compared with offering the same produce without explaining its appearance.
New Zealand shoppers have demonstrated much the same thing in the real world. Woolworths’ Odd Bunch range has sold millions of bags of cosmetically imperfect produce.
Consumer NZ on the Odd Bunch range
Perhaps we aren’t quite as obsessed with perfection as the supermarket shelf sometimes suggests.
But Did We Demand Perfect Food — Or Were We Taught To Expect It?
This is where blaming consumers becomes much too easy, because shoppers can only choose between the food put in front of them. As we explored in Why Does Our Food Have to Look Perfect?, what reaches the supermarket shelf has already passed through commercial specifications and grading systems that can determine what acceptable produce is supposed to look like.
If supermarkets consistently offer straight carrots, similarly sized apples and visually unblemished vegetables, generations of consumers inevitably learn that this is what those foods are supposed to look like.
New Zealand’s Office of the Prime Minister’s Chief Science Advisor examined this issue in its work on food waste [PDF] and found responsibility for cosmetic standards is not nearly as simple as saying consumers demand them.
Retailers impose specifications for characteristics such as size, shape and colour. Those specifications partly reflect what retailers believe consumers will buy. But consumers’ expectations are themselves influenced by what retailers routinely offer them.
It becomes a feedback loop. Retailers supply what consumers appear to prefer, consumers become accustomed to what retailers supply, growers have to meet the resulting specifications, and the produce reaching the shelf reinforces everyone’s expectation of what “normal” food looks like.
Perhaps consumers didn’t simply demand perfect produce.
Perhaps retailers and consumers taught each other to expect it.
Farmers Are Listening To Those Signals Too
This matters because what happens in the supermarket doesn’t necessarily stay in the supermarket.
In our earlier article, Do Farmers Grow Food Differently When They Are Going to Eat It Themselves?, we looked at research showing that, in some farming contexts, crops grown for the household can be managed differently from crops destined for market.
That raised an uncomfortable question. If the same farmer sometimes makes different decisions depending upon who will eventually eat the crop, what is driving the difference? The market matters.
Commercial growers aren’t producing food for an abstract ideal. They are producing something that has to survive pests and disease, meet buyer specifications, withstand handling and transport, remain saleable long enough to reach consumers and return enough money to keep the farm operating.
And ultimately, someone has to buy it.
Our companion article, Does Glyphosate Make Food Cheaper — or Just Cheaper to Produce?, looked at another part of that equation: whether agricultural technologies that reduce production costs necessarily translate into cheaper food for consumers.
Both questions bring us back to the same reality: agricultural practices don’t exist in isolation from the market they serve.
What Happens When We Ask For Fewer Pesticides?
Consumers certainly appear to value reduced pesticide use.
Research has found people are willing to pay a premium for food produced using fewer pesticides. One recent choice experiment involving tomatoes found consumers willing to pay more for a product described as having been grown with 50% less pesticide use.
Read the study in Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems
Other research has found similar interest in food carrying reduced-pesticide attributes. But something interesting happens when researchers compare what people say they would pay with what they actually pay.
A 2024 meta-analysis examining the economic value people place on reducing pesticide risks found that stated willingness to pay was almost twice the willingness revealed through actual behaviour.
That shouldn’t be particularly surprising. Saying we would happily pay another dollar for something during a survey is rather different from watching that dollar disappear from our bank account every time we shop.
We can sincerely want something without choosing it when the bill arrives.
The Things We Can See Have An Enormous Advantage
Imagine standing in front of those apples again.
You can see the price, whether one apple is bruised, whether another has insect damage, its size, colour and shape. You probably know whether your children will eat it, and you know exactly how much money will disappear from the grocery budget when you put it in the trolley.
Now consider what you cannot see. You cannot see what was sprayed on the crop or how often, what pesticide residues may remain, what happened in the soil or nearby waterways, the effects on insects or biodiversity, or the production pressures faced by the grower. Nor can you see any health consequence that might — or might not — arise from repeated exposure to particular pesticides over many years.
There is a fundamental imbalance here. The costs and benefits we experience today are extraordinarily visible. Many of those we worry about tomorrow aren’t.
And we don’t need a behavioural economist to tell us that immediate costs tend to get our attention. We do it all the time.
What If The Cheapest Food Isn’t Really The Cheapest?
We generally decide whether food is cheap by looking at its price. That’s perfectly understandable; it is the amount we actually have to pay.
But the checkout price isn’t necessarily the full cost associated with producing it.
Environmental damage doesn’t automatically appear on the supermarket receipt. Neither does biodiversity loss, water contamination, soil degradation or other costs that can be borne somewhere else in the system. Economists call costs that aren’t fully reflected in the market price externalities.
And then there is the much more difficult question of health.
The fact that food was conventionally grown does not mean eating it will cause illness. The potential health consequences of pesticide exposure depend on the chemical, dose, timing, frequency and many other factors.
But uncertainty doesn’t make the underlying question disappear.
If there are consequences from repeated low-level exposure to particular pesticides, they are unlikely to present themselves beside the supermarket price tag. There won’t be another little label saying:
Possible cost in 2046: $?.??
Instead, we are asked to weigh a certain cost today against benefits and risks that may be uncertain and years or decades away.
The organic premium is visible. Whatever future cost it might help avoid is not.
For some households, paying more for food simply isn’t realistic. When every dollar matters, telling people they ought to spend more on groceries is neither useful nor fair.
But for those of us who do have choices, perhaps “I can’t afford that” isn’t always the end of the conversation. Sometimes the harder question is whether we have decided that the alternative is worth paying for — and whether what appears cheaper today necessarily remains cheaper when longer-term costs are considered.
And short-term affordability and long-term cost are not necessarily the same thing.
Perhaps Nobody Is To Blame — And Everybody Is Involved
It would be convenient if this story had a villain.
We could tell farmers to stop spraying, supermarkets to accept imperfect produce and consumers to buy organic. Problem solved.
Real food systems aren’t remotely that simple.
Farmers have to grow crops they can sell. Retailers have to stock food people will buy. Consumers have budgets. Organic growers have to recover the costs of producing food under different constraints. Supermarkets have legitimate requirements around quality, shelf life and consistency, and consumers aren’t unreasonable for preferring a beautiful apple to a damaged one when both cost the same.
But put all those perfectly rational decisions together and something larger emerges.
We want cheap, beautiful, abundant food available throughout the year. We want it to last, we don’t want insects in it and we don’t want disease damage. At the same time, many of us also say we want fewer pesticides, lower residues, more environmentally sustainable farming, less food waste and better returns for growers.
Perhaps sometimes we can have all of those things.
But what if sometimes we can’t?
Then the uncomfortable question isn’t simply what farmers should change, or what supermarkets should change. It is also what we might have to change.
Perhaps changing the way our food is produced means becoming more accepting of the occasional blemish, rediscovering seasonality or recognising that a crooked carrot isn’t a defective carrot. Perhaps sometimes it means paying more for something whose additional value we cannot immediately see.
And perhaps it means questioning whether cheap and good value really mean the same thing.
Every time we shop, however insignificant the individual decision may seem, we participate in the market that farmers, food producers and retailers respond to. We aren’t solely responsible for the food system we have, but neither are we standing outside it.
After asking whether farmers grow food differently when they’re going to eat it themselves, whether glyphosate makes food cheaper or merely cheaper to produce, and why our food has to look so perfect, perhaps there is one last uncomfortable place to look.
At ourselves.
What if farmers, supermarkets and food producers are all, at least partly, giving us exactly what we’ve asked for?
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