TD 1
DIGESTED DIGEST WORDS Gerry Godley PHOTO Alan Bet
son / The Irish Times THE PRICE OF A LOAF “The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.” – Henry David Thoreau, 1854 Back in the mists of time, the price of cabbage! was a childhood refrain. I hazily recall it as a dig at adults, especially those from beyond the pale, given to a tut tutting, head shaking, what’s the world coming to disposition, the price of cabbage! being a proxy for all of its inflationary woes. It was the seventies after all, and the grownups mostly talked about inflation. What’s new! I constantly reflect on the price of bread; mine and everyone else’s. By everyone else I mean bakers both artisanal and industrial, chi-chi grocers in swanky neighbourhoods, discount retailers in the barrio, late night convenience joints, petrol stations, and anywhere else bread is sold. By bread I mean anything recognisable as bread in appearance, nutritional value and taste, though I appreciate that there are many bread products out there that will struggle to meet two of these criteria. The wise food thinker Michael Pollan might classify these as ‘bread like substances’, but in the eyes of current laws around food standards and definitions, however flawed, they nonetheless conform to the characteristics of the thing we consensually call bread. But what do I mean by price? The amount of money, that bread in your pocket that you are happy to exchange for actual bread, that’s a given. But when it comes to food, we are all thinking anew about the costs hidden within the sticker price - the carbon it took to produce it, the health consequences for the people who eat it, and the welfare of the people who make it. That’s going 34 to make life quite messy, and at odds with a global food system that works hard to create the illusion of simplicity. How we will navigate this complex food landscape as consumers is up for grabs, but concepts like True Cost Accounting, which look beyond a company’s financial performance to the holistic human and environmental impacts of what it does up and down the supply chain, are things we should really start demanding. As a baker, I too must navigate this vast food nebula, and am attracted to Leah Hager Cohen when she states in Glass, Paper, Beans: Revolutions on the Nature and Value of Ordinary Things, “every commodity, beneath the mantle of its price tag, is a hieroglyph ripe for deciphering, a riddle whose solution lies in the story of the worker who made it and the conditions under which it was made.” Bread has many such riddles, not least its unenviable status as a Giffen good, which, you of course remember from the leaving cert past paper, is a lowincome, staple product for which, paradoxically, demand increases as the price goes up. Granted, Giffen was a Victorian, and the social stratification of bread back then was obvious, unlike today, where there is a loaf to suit every price point, every aspiration, every rung on the precarious social ladder from the 99% at the bottom to the 1% at the top. Of course the top .1%, the super elite, gave up bread years ago, the stupid gobshites. But old habits die hard, and when economists and other members of the commentariat invoke bread as an economic proxy, they are not talking about blowins like me with my beloved sourdough. They are referring to the functional stuff. The people’s bread, the ubiquitous sliced pan, industrially produced in their thousands around the clock then despatched by the truckload to every remote corner of the four green fields. The sliced pan might be the ultimate convenience food. Like Ed Sheeran songs, you are never far from one, whether you want it or not. As with politicians in a debate being tested on their common touch with the tricky question about the price of a litre of milk, I invite you now to reflect on the current average price for our ‘control’ loaf, the 800gm white sliced pan. Whatever number you’ve come up, you will undoubtedly have factored the current megapolyomnicrisis into your computations. Soaring input costs like energy and transport, shortages in everything from labour to fertiliser, the war in Ukraine and its impact on commodity wheat prices, stuff that makes your head spin and puts the 1970s price of cabbage! in the ha’penny place. On average, bread prices across the Eurozone have risen 18% in the last year. Some citizens are shouldering extraordinary burdens, like Lithuanians and Hungarians, now paying 33% and 66% more for their loaves. Our bread loving economist would tell us that the price of a loaf is very sensitive to political and economic fluctuations beyond its control. The wheat that makes all those sliced pans is a globally traded commodity, and together Russia and Ukraine produce around 25% of global wheat exports. We’d be forgiven for assuming that makes them the world’s largest producer, but that would be China, harvesting a whopping 136 million tonnes last year. That’s a lot of wheat, but still not enough for the world’s most populous country, and China is also the world’s third largest grain importer. Increasingly, China is buying the extra wheat it needs from Russia, a small but illuminating footnote to Xi Jinping’s non-committal position on Putin’s belligerence towards Ukraine. Wherever the great game of geopolitics and war has unfolded, bread has had a part to play, often forc