Sitting in one of the few chairs along the wall at Joy’s Place in Kihei, I’m trying to figure out how to get my mouth around a Hummus Avocado Vegetable sandwich. It’s nothing more than lettuce, tomato, onion, grated carrot, clover sprouts and avocado stuffed between two slices of soft herb bread with hummus and veganaise, and yet it’s massive. Everything in it is organic—grown in toxin-free soil without pesticide spraying. I finally succeed, and it tastes wonderful.
Served by itself on a paper plate with no bag of chips or side order of potato-mac salad, the sandwich costs $8.80. Joy’s even more delicious Indo Crunch Wrap, which is either a collard green or rice wrapper concealing baked tempeh slathered in an Asian peanut sauce with cabbage, more grated carrot, red pepper slivers and sprouts, runs $9.60.
Eating healthy seems expensive these days—far more so than a fast food “combo meal” that, while filling, offers much more sugar, salt, fat and calories than a person should consume in, oh, about a month. On the mainland, the grocery store Whole Foods Market, Inc. has turned healthy food into big business, with more than 180 outlets and $1.6 billion in gross profits.
“For the price of the fixings for a modest family dinner at Whole Foods, you could just about afford one share of its stock,” wrote Steven Shapin in the May 15, 2006 New Yorker (Whole Foods stock stood at $62.49 a share when Shapin wrote that sentence—today it hovers around $45). “Given the way the world now is, sustainably grown and locally produced organic food is expensive. Genetically modified, industrially produced monocultural corn is what feeds the victims of an African famine, not the gorgeous organic technicolor Swiss chard from your local farmers’ market.”
After I finished my Hummus Avocado Vegetable sandwich, I asked Joy White, who has run Joy’s Place for the last seven years, why healthy food costs more than unhealthy food. She believes a lot of the reason has to do with quantity.
“Basic [organic] foodstuffs in reality don’t cost that much more,” she said. “But prepared food costs are higher because of the quantities that are produced. They are not made as much as others.”
In other words, a lot more people these days eat food made at McDonald’s—food that’s been “mass-produced,” as White said—than at a small independently owned and operated shop that deals almost exclusively with organically grown vegetables.
White says she gets her carrots, potatoes and onions from the mainland—with their added shipping costs—while the lettuce, sprouts and herbs are locally grown. Overall, she says about 75 percent of her food comes from the mainland, with the rest Maui-grown.
But there is progress. Take the collard green a customer can ask for in their Indo Crunch Wrap. White used to get them on the mainland, but now orders straight from the local company Sweet Kula.
Getting food locally isn’t just a matter of decreased costs, though it is true that shipping processed, preservative-laden food is cheaper and easier than organic vegetables. Thirty years ago, when people really started thinking about healthier diets, “organic” meant understanding where your food comes from.
“The more connections you have with the people supplying you—that will affect the food,” White said. “We do know some of our suppliers, and it does make a contribution to the flavor.
“I think health is much more simple than the market wants us to believe,” she continued. “It’s open minds, open hearts. Thinking positively and feeling love. You don’t need to make it much more complex than that.” MTW
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