You wrote:

"we [consumers] pay very little at the grocery store, but then spend money (now or later) cleaning up the environmental repercussions of our factory farming system."

Not only that, we end up paying more for medical care due to poor nutrition. I watched a documentary yesterday called Forks Over Knives, which advocates a whole-food, plant-based diet. (I don't eat that way, but do enjoy local milk, eggs and beef.) It was eye-opening. There was just one sentence about eating free-range chicken, grass-fed beef, raw milk, and that was "Don't eat anything that had a mother."

I'm not there. But I do believe that processed food leads to poor health, while homegrown vegetables grown in healthy soil can only improve our constitution, ward off illness and increase our life spans.

With regard to taste, setting aside that this is a rather subjective appraisement, isn't there some confirmation bias here? In other words, if someone else were to grow stuff in exactly the same way as you do (insofar as that is possible), would you rate it just as high?

With regard to nutritional value, if your own produce it two to five times more nutricious, you should be able to thrive on proportionally less. Do you find that you actually eat less? If not isn't the point moot?

I'm curious as to the reason for monetary comparison? In my opinion, if you have enough to meet your basic needs, more money is just a way to keep score in a game that isn't very interesting.

Roland --- Taste is totally subjective. I probably would rate someone else's food as high if they grew it the same way I did, and we had a way to get it to my plate within ten minutes of it being picked. That's the real difference, in my opinion, between the taste of homegrown vs. store bought food --- both taste and nutrition decline quickly as soon as plants come out of the ground or off the vine. Storage vegetables (like winter squash, potatoes, etc.) aren't as affected, but salad greens are just lacking if they're more than an hour old, in my opinion.

I have a completely unfounded hypothesis that the obesity epidemic is due to people eating a lot of food because the food they're eating is low in vitamins and minerals, which is what they're really craving. When I eat at home --- meaning homegrown vegetables with high nutrient density --- I don't crave extra food. On the other hand, while we were out of town a couple of weeks ago, eating supermarket and restaurant food, I didn't really feel satisfied and ate more. So, I guess I do eat less food when it's homegrown.

The monetary angle is in response to thinking that the Harvest Table prices are too high. That got me wondering how much real food would cost if you factored everything in. (Also made me wonder if food had its real price tag in the grocery store, how high the prices would have to go before people started growing their own.)

You are awesome as always! Numbers and comparisons are always thought provoking for me, even when it is a difficult thing to compare. Your thoughtful analysis is what most sets your blog apart from the herd.

For me the best comparison is what it would cost you to get the same quality of food purchased from somewhere else. That wouldn't be totally possible anyway since no one would have the exact same crop mix locally with the same quality and you wouldn't be able to get things so quickly from garden to table. Plus, having the garden there is a huge driving force to make better food choices and eat in season. I think the comparison to CSA costs is a good estimation.

As for the restaurant in the original post, I think it is hard to compare food prices to a restaurant experience. We know you usually pay a lot more for something at a restaurant than at a grocery store, even for something as simple as a bottled drink. Sometimes at the restaurant we are paying extra for the staff preparation of the food, sometimes we are paying for the experience itself (e.g. enjoying eating knowing you don't have to clean up after), and sometimes for the ambiance (though I doubt too many of your readers care about hanging out at Starsucks). The prices for the restaurant mentioned in the original post sound comparable to Cheesecake Factory but provides a very different experience. I hope they can find a way to keep the restaurant mentioned in the original post open and make a profit.

There's really no such thing, sorry to say, as "good" or "bad" nutrition, only "adequate" or "inadequate." Our health is not made better by the way we eat. Eating adequately merely allows us to fulfill our genetically determined potential, although eating poorly may prevent that.

It's much more difficult to achieve our protein & calorie requirements than our vitamin & mineral requirements. Vitamins, after all, are needed in only minute quantities and minerals in very small quantities. (Roland's observations were right on the mark.)If you;re getting enough protein & cal, then you're probably getting more than enough vits & mins.

I grow a good deal of my own food and get a great deal of satisfaction in doing so, but I think it doesn't make sense to pay extra at a store for "organic " food somebody else grew. There's no real health benefit. Maybe there's a vicarious thrill possible?

As for the monetary value of growing your own, it's only worth (taste & personal satisfaction factors being incaluable) what you would have spent in the store to replace it. Are you saving $2000 a yr? From the strictly financial standpoint, it may make more sense to get a job in town & buy your food. Of course, there may come a day when there are no jobs town. Then what do we do?

Lisa --- Thanks for enjoying my numbers. Good point about part of the restaurant costs being ambiance, servers, etc.

Lisa and Doc --- I think that most people would agree with you and say that food is only worth what it would cost in the store (or CSA), but to me that thinking is only possible if you don't understand the differences between what you purchase and what you could grow. It also has the unfortunate side effect of vastly underestimating the value of good food, which makes people think they'd be better off getting a job and paying for food someone else grew.

Doc --- I don't think I agree with how easy you say it is to get our vitamins and minerals. Sure, you only need tiny quantities, but I've read several articles explaining that a vitamin pill (for example) doesn't work as well as taking in those vitamins mixed into food. Biological systems are so complex that I don't think it's at all far-fetched to hypothesize that our ability to absorb vitamins and minerals could be linked to the form they come in. No data to back that up, though...

On the other hand, I tend to agree with you about store bought organic food. The term has been muddied so much that "organic" food bought at the grocery store is just another kind of factory farming.

The fact that food prices as a percentage of household income have fallen over the last century have been bandied about for a while. The devil's advocate question, however, is what are the comparative rates of inflation between food prices and income? According to wikipedia:

"Since 1967, the median household income in the United States has risen by 31% (adjusted for inflation), fluctuating several times. The rise in household income is largely the result of an increase in personal income among college graduates, a group that has doubled in size since the 1960s, and women entering the labor force. Today, 42% of all households have two income earners." And these numbers are adjusted for inflation."