Tuesday 6th of November, 2007: Conclusions, Reflections and Results

Food Consumption Sustainability Index: 85%

Today was the last day of my week-long eco-labelling experiment. Although I intended to buy fair-trade labels wherever they were available, I ended up only buying fair-trade coffee, chocolate and potato chips. I guess this was inevitable as most fair-trade products are of the non-edible variety. Everything else was organic – largely with the KRAV label or the Danish okologisk certification.

The process itself was exciting: particularly for the first few days. I exposed myself to new tastes and products that I hadn’t bought before. The discipline of the project forced me to change my diet, simplifying it further (switching from fruit muesli to porridge oats for example), although it has always been very simple. I also naturally took a much greater interest in articles about organic food in the newspaper and finding definitions about what exactly “organic” means. I was curious to read food labels more closely, however my lack of Swedish language skill soon thwarted that process.

Regrets? I have a few: I later found out that there is organic bread at my supermarket and more sophisticated fair-trade breakfast muesli. I could have reduced my consumption of leftover conventional foods if I had planned more thoroughly and finished the conventional perishables before the start of the week.

The economics of the experiment: I made a table with all the organic/fair trade products I bought during the week. I tried to compare the eco-labelled products with the equivalent conventional product if bought in the same quantity. This gave me a percentage price difference.

As I mentioned earlier, eco-labelled food sometimes seems more expensive than it needs to be since it is not sold in larger quantities which could benefit from economies of scale. There is also generally more effort put into packaging: for example, it is impossible to buy organic instant coffee in a plastic refill bag, you can only buy it in a glass jar. Eco-label foods are apparently aimed at a higher-end consumer, who is not as budget conscious, and favours “quality” in both product and packaging, and the convenience of smaller quantity units.

Nevertheless, the results were interesting. Peanut Butter was significantly cheaper. For milk, biscuits and rice-drink, the price differences were negligible. But at the other end of the ledger, Kiwifruit, avocadoes and tomatoes were 2.5 times (150%) more expensive than their conventional equivalents. Overall, I paid 160SEK more for the products bought during that week than I would have spent if I had bought the conventional foodstuffs. Although, I should note that the coffee, garlic, hazlenut paste and digestive biscuits were bought in quantities that will survive well beyond one week.

The nature of this experiment was two-fold. First of all, I wanted to use a disciplined commitment to changing my food consumption habits for one week to teach myself about organic food and eco-labels. The blog was a means of forcing myself to maintain my discipline through disclosure of the boring details in a transparent forum and avoid the temptation to take short-cuts.

Secondly, I wanted to road-test the “one week lifestyle change experiment” as a tool for self-learning and lifestyle change for skeptics like myself, who struggle with “economic rationality” as a consumer conflicting with the values that they would support politically as a citizen. For example, as a citizen, I would vote for any politician who would propose eco-taxes on polluting agricultural practices such as industrial dairy farming. However, as a consumer I struggle to buy the small package of organic butter while it is considerably more expensive than the conventional butter (but again this is partially an issue of economies of scale that could be fixed if there was greater demand for organic butter – from people like me!).

I was trying to persuade myself about the merits of “full-immersion” lifestyle change experiments, and to that extent, I have exceeded. My enthusiasm for eco-labelled foods is more qualified: ultimately, it still depends on the food being “within range” of the price of the conventional produce. I will continue to regularly buy organic milk, eggs, bananas, biscuits, peanut butter, carrots and lentils. But more importantly, I believe that my awareness has been raised sufficiently to take an educated interest in new products as they continue to appear on the market.

I am unsure of the extent to which I can make people change to eco-labels when my own support remains qualified. However, hopefully my advocacy for people conducting their own one-week long experiments will encourage people to self-educate on other lifestyle issues and make change happen in their own lives, in the areas where they have the vision and potential for improvements.