The Real Cost of Things

Last year I calculated the cost of the jars of cherry jam I had just made. This after long hours spent harvesting the cherries from a friend’s tree, buying the jars, making the jam. I came to the conclusion that the cost of one jar of jam was about $249, based on labor alone, at the approximate hourly rate of my old job. The cost did not include anything related to the tree, the land, the irrigation, the cherries themselves, the sugar, the jars, the pots and pans, the stove, the construction and maintenance of the kitchen. How, I asked myself, even allowing for the many statistical errors in my tired train of thought, could this thing sell for $2.79 at my old neighborhood market?! Suddenly I understood that the purchasing power of my labor bore no relation to sustainability but was astoundingly inflated.

I had based my calculation solely on my own labor because that is what I spent my life trading, my skilled labor as a professor, psychologist, author, and lecturer, for money to buy stuff. I bought houses, cars, experiences like travel, backpacking, kayaking. I bought bikes, kayaks, backpacks, clothes, dishes, appliances, insurance policies, health and beauty aids, gifts, and lots of things intended to calm and soothe and comfort. My life was an endless round of long hard hours of work traded for relief from those long hard hours of work.

In my early sixties, I moved to a small abandoned farm in southern Italy, where I have worked longer and harder than in all the rest of my life for the privilege of growing fruit and vegetables, making wine and oil, keeping rescued stray cats and dogs. My body gets tired and sore, but I don’t need to buy a gym membership any more. I no longer have time or money to buy a lot of stuff or to use it. I’m still sorting through containers of stuff we brought here. Sometimes it’s a heartwarming revelation to come upon things, boxes of old letters and photos, tools, clothes. Sometimes it feels like dust in my hands. I did that for this?

Sometimes when I stagger into the house, aching, sweating, scratched and bruised, with a basketfull of harvested veggies and the knowledge that now I must preserve this food that I’ve grown, I say to myself, “Anne, you can go to the store and buy some soup or ice cream or wine that is better than what you make, or oil that does not come better than what you make but still is so much easier. And you could buy a condo with a beautiful view instead of this unruly farm. You could learn to paint and play the piano.” But I don’t want to do those things, except the paint and piano parts. After five years of this life, I am still planting seeds, pulling weeds, putting down fertilizer, staking plants, still picking fruit, still making jam.

I keep doing it because this hard life is rich in itself, indescribably full and satisfying. There are so many layers of this very different kind of wealth. Yes, the taste of that cherry jam for sure, and the feeling of connection to it, knowing intimately the tree that made the cherries, remembering the season in which they flourished, feeling the pleasure of fruits coming on in early summer, when my flesh craves the warmth of the sun and my eyes feast on the longer light. That this cherry jam is rich, I think most people can imagine.

But learning the weeds and how they work together? How they cooperate to make networks in the soil and support structures for one another is also rich. I once hated weeds, and now I am in awe of them. I find myself wondering why I’m pulling out amaranth weeds to plant chickpea crop, or spicy wild arugula to plant lettuce. I have learned to allow the insects to live in some of the fruit, stopping to ask what they are doing and why before I figure out how or whether to exterminate them. (Ours is an organic farm and we don’t use chemical pesticides or herbicides.) Those ants are actually eating very little but they’re aerating the soil. And yes, I let the hedgehogs snack in the orto. In fact, we have put a little hedgehog house there for them because their lives have become harder and poorer due to human avarice, and there are fewer of them. And besides we really don’t need to eat everything.

Sometimes I leave the weeds for as long as I can because they retain some flowers, and the bees need those flowers. And it’s not just a theoretical grasp of the fact that bees need flowers: it’s hearing their agitated buzzing when something threatens them, feeling it as fear and as grief. It feels like they’re crying for their flowers. And sometimes I give honey, not just sugar water, back to the bees in the winter because it is theirs first and mine second. I have become rich in knowing the world I live in, not about the world I live in, but knowing it directly from keeping company with the many forms of life that together make a world for all of us to live in.

This is a hard life and I love it more than I have ever loved my life. I realize now that I spent most of my privileged life as many people do, wanting out of a wretched workplace, wanting always to be somewhere else, doing something else. I had worked so hard to get that life, to escape poverty, to secure the basics for my family. And now I needed to travel. I needed to go out to dinner at restaurants that were rated with stars. I no longer feel that way. I’m immersed in community, human community, but also the greater community of soil and weather, plants and animals, and I don’t need anymore. 

I sometimes think of a man I met in a doctor’s waiting room. Someone had brought up the topic of free range eggs and the treatment of farm animals. I said I would only buy free range eggs. He said they cost too much. I said that when the animals live better lives, they made better eggs. He said he didn’t give a damn, that he wanted cheap eggs. He didn’t care that he placed the cost of those eggs on the chickens, that he was willing for them to suffer from birth to death so that he could have cheap eggs. He certainly didn’t care that there were other costs also passed on to others in myriad ways. Did he understand that those chickens were not out eating the insects and the weeds and chatting playfully all the while? Cheap eggs are what he gets, and insects and weeds that require treatment with poisons, and a crappy job, a polluted and impoverished environment, and a lonely heart, and lots of kinds of medicines to treat that lonely heart. I now have—you guessed it—rich eggs, with big yellow yolks made by happy hens who scrabble around, chatting and eating insects and weeds. I get these eggs by trading things I grow for them. The family who keeps the hens are dear friends. My family and theirs help each other out, share tools, celebrate life, mourn death, work the harvests, and play together.

I used to love to buy gifts. It was so important for me because I wanted other people to have the stuff that makes life worthwhile too. Now, in our campagna neighborhood, we routinely give each other gifts: fruits and vegetables, sauces and jams, wine and bread and cheeses. I still love to give gifts. If I ever offer you a jar of my cherry jam, please consider the wonder of it, the value of it.