You think it's high now? Wait for the "valued added" tax hits.


^Look at the moronic Bostonian missing the mark. And how awesome is it that the government will "most likely step in"?! Sweet?! They've already fucked up the market, so why wouldn't they be the go-to guy to fix it? Er?!

I had a plumber I hired to fix my sink and now my toilet flushes everytime I run my dishwasher. I think I'll hire him again. [/sarcasm]

Worry, uncertainty, and ignorance about government regulation is a huge barrier to entry for entrepreneurs, which probably keeps prices higher for a lot of things.

One shouldn't need any kind of permit to open a bakery or a restaurant, but if anyone gets sick from eating there or complains about false advertizing, they should be able to seek civil/criminal penalties.

^Possibly, but we have to question why we need these regulations and what are the regulations. And by not knowing them, why are we so afraid of them? As if we should know of them or we're not allowed to enter into the market!

Reminds me of the ridiculous adage "ignorance of the law is no excuse", even though there isn't a single cop in any courtroom in all of the land that knows all the laws. It's a fallacy.

>> ^jwray:
One shouldn't need any kind of permit to open a bakery or a restaurant, but if anyone gets sick from eating there or complains about false advertizing, they should be able to seek civil/criminal penalties.


Yes. You are so right you make me smile.

You should shop at Trader Joes, where eggs and bread are about the same price ($2-$3).

Grow your own food. A 20' x 30' garden can supply enough fruits and vegetables to feed several people throughout most the year. If you're like most people you have a large enough space right in your front yard. Dunno bout you but I find that tomatoes taste better than grass..

Also, chickens are only $5...and then you get an egg every day.

Probably half the population lives in places that are too densely populated to have significant vegetable gardens. Besides, that takes time, and time is money. Division of labour and specialization is efficient.

I don't think theres any basis for these statements.

>> ^jwray:
.
Probably half the population lives in places that are too densely populated to have significant vegetable gardens

68.1% of Americans owned homes in 2007. Of those, almost all of them have at least 600 square feet (0.01377 acres) somewhere in their yards.

Even those living in apartments have enough space. With modern aeroponics, you can acheive 20-30x the yield of traditional agriculture in the same space. 600/30 = 30 feet squared. That is only a 6' x 5' space.

Besides, that takes time, and time is money.

Using aeroponics, a tomato plant can grow from seedling to mature plant with fruit in 10 days. Even with traditional methods, a tomato plant yields fruit in under 50 days. With canning, you can have fresh fruit all year round. Tending to a garden takes less than 30 minutes a day, and a full garden can be planted in a single day. Time is money, but so is food. Tomatoes sell for 2-3$ a lb and a single plant can yield 20-30 lbs of fruit.

Division of labour and specialization is efficient.

Modern, large-scale monocultures are not more efficient, nor will they ever be. The fuel costs alone in transporting them to your house will be larger than the time and money involved in growing them yourself.

Like I said, you can spend $2 for a dozen eggs, or you can buy a chicken for 5$ which will give you 365 eggs a year. 5$ or 182$...thats a difference of 1600%.

To address your original question though...yes the government is to blame for those prices being higher. In terms of raw material costs, grain should be almost 10x cheaper to produce than eggs; as dictated by the laws of biology.

That statistic about people owning their own homes includes people who own condos, lofts, and yard-less houses downtown, which is a large number of people. I don't know how many exactly. Don't assume that that figure is mostly suburbanites.

If I were to spend 30min a day tending my 10 square meters of available indoor garden space, It would have to produce $1800 worth of vegetables per year to be worth the time. I doubt one can produce $180 per year per square meter without growing contraband. Also, the electricity cost of the growing lights would be over a hundred dollars per year for sure. If it were viable to produce most vegetables indoors at a lower cost than producing them outdoors, then large corporations would already be saturating that niche.

Also, with each additional variety comes the overhead cost of figuring out how to best take care of it. There is no way that it would be efficient to grow a plant that I would only use once or twice per year.

Like I said, you can spend $2 for a dozen eggs, or you can buy a chicken for 5$ which will give you 365 eggs a year. 5$ or 182$...thats a difference of 1600%.

That's BS because you also have to pay to feed the chicken (The chicken would consume about 10 times as many calories as it produced in the form of eggs), put up with the smell, the noise, the mess, and the inconvenience of taking care of it, and educating yourself about how best to take care of it, spend time shopping for the food, etc. All of these are things that become more efficient in terms of eggs per man hour with a somewhat larger scale. Also, I can get eggs produced less than 10 miles away for $1.19 a dozen, or national brands of eggs for $1.09 a dozen. And I eat much less than 1 egg per day on average so the annual cost for eggs would be more like $30. Besides, half of the cost of groceries is retailer markup.

^I don't think you have researched this topic enough to make accurate conclusions.

Chickens can eat grass, which if you have a yard which you would otherwise have to mow every week, is a free source of chicken food.

You will never be able to buy produce for cheaper then you can produce it yourself. Even if you have to grow it indoors and pay electricity it would be cheaper.

You say that 10 square meters is impossible to grow $1800 of food a year. If you space, tomato plants for example, so that each takes 0.5 meters squared, you can grow 20 plants in a 10 square meter area. Using aeroponics, each plant matures in approximately 10 days. Mature tomato plants can produce up to 20-30 lbs of fruit, so with this modest setup you could achieve:

20 plants x 36 harvests x 20/30 lbs fruit = 14,400 lbs min/21,600 lbs max of tomatoes per year. Sold at $2 a lb, that would be $28,800-$43,200 a year.

aeroponics recycles both water and fertilizer, so your costs would be very low. Using new LED grow lights, you can cover approximately 1 square meter for only 30 watts. So a 10 meter squared setup would require 300 watts of grow lights running 12 hours a day 365 days a year (just to compare, your computer uses 400-600+ watts).

Energy costs: 300 watts * 12 hours * 365 days / $0.05 per kilowatt hour = $65.70 annual cost.

Yearly profit after startup costs: $28,800 - $65.70 = $28,734.30

To make $1800, you would only have to harvest 3 times a year with all 20 plants, or harvest 10 times a year with only 5 plants (2.5 meters squared). Even with only a single meter squared, you could make $2,880 a year if you harvested all 36 times.

The science is there...you just aren't taking advantage of it

*As an aside, why are you arguing with me over well documented information? Presumably you have the internet, why don't you use it?

^You spend 28k on tomatoes a year?

^mmm, what?