"Isn't local & organic food too expensive?"
This article is reproduced from a blog. It makes so much sense to us, we had to include it on our site. It's reproduced exactly (except one paragraph) as we couldn't really put it much better ourselves. It is American but the principles are the same. It should not even be about value but about what we value.
Much of our food system depends on our not knowing much about it, beyond the price disclosed by the checkout scanner; cheapness and ignorance are mutually reinforcing. And it's a short way from not knowing who's at the other end of your food chain to not caring—to the carelessness of both producers and consumers that characterizes our economy today. Of course, the global economy couldn't very well function without this wall of ignorance and the indifference it breeds. This is why the American food industry and its international counterparts fight to keep their products from telling even the simplest stories—"dolphin safe," "humanely slaughtered," etc.—about how they were produced.
The more knowledge people have about the way their food is produced, the more likely it is that their values—and not just "value"—will inform their purchasing decisions.
...there are many of us who could afford to spend more on food if we choose to. After all, it isn't only the elite who in recent years have found an extra fifty or one hundred dollars each month to spend on cell phones or television, which close to 90 percent of households now pay for. Another formerly free good that more than half of us happily pay for today is water. So is the unwillingness to pay more for food really a matter of affordability or priority?