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The Fallacy of Cheap:  Shifting Our Paradigm from Commodity to Community
by Billie Best

Egremont Land Trust Spring Luncheon at The Old Mill, Egremont, Massachusetts, May 20, 2007

Thank you for inviting me to speak before you today.  Thank you to the Egremont Land Trust for the important work you do preserving the natural resources and incredible beauty of our community.  Thanks in particular for conserving that 20-acre field along the Green River. It’s very near our home and it makes a difference to us.  And thank you to Terry Moore and The Old Mill for hosting this lovely affair.

My name is Billie Best, and my husband, Chet Cahill, and I live here in South County where we are learning to farm on land we purchased from the family that bought it in 1885.  We both grew up in the Midwest, and we both have farmers on our family tree, but neither of us ever dreamed we would farm.  It’s the hardest, most humbling work we’ve ever done.  And while it appears on the surface, we are stewarding the land, now that we’ve been doing it for a few years we know the land is stewarding us.  Our farm is teaching us to see the world differently. 

I read the invitation for today’s luncheon when it came in the mail, and I thought, “Shifting Our Paradigm from Commodity to Community—that’s kind of presumptuous of me.” Another title for this talk might be “The Fallacy of Cheap.”  Cheap food is an obstacle to having a vibrant agriculture economy here in the Berkshires, and here in the United States.  Our addiction to cheap is deeply embedded in our culture.  We are socially conditioned to seek cheap.  I am hoping that here today I can launch some ideas that will begin the process of unraveling that social conditioning, and help you to see the fallacy of cheap.   

When I came to the Berkshires, I was a corporate marketing consultant doing strategic planning and new product introduction projects for companies like Citibank and Pepsi.  It was my job to understand how consumers think, how thinking translates into behavior, and how behavior becomes brand loyalty.  All of the work I did had the end goal of getting people to buy stuff.  I was actively cultivating the culture of consumption.  Today, I would like to actively cultivate the culture of conservation.  It is conservation, the idea of preserving the sacredness of creation, that leads me to believe the human race needs a different approach to life on Earth.  We need to start thinking like a species.  In modernity, it’s easy to forget that we are a species.  We are part of nature. We are animals, just another link in the food chain powered by the sun.  Nature is a community of communities.  If we are going to think like a species, we need to recognize our role in the community of Nature.  I would call that Shifting Our Paradigm from Commodity to Community.

What is our paradigm?

Our human paradigm is our way of thinking.  It reflects the way the world is organized around us.  Our thinking has a cascade effect in that it becomes the way we behave, our values, and the way we live.  The way we live becomes the way the world works.  The modern world, led by the United States, is organized for economic growth, which is achieved by spending, spending enabled by debt.  With Western eyes, we see business success as expansion.  Businesses grow.  We see people as consumers.  All of us are consumers.  It’s a simple equation.  Consumers buy stuff to make business grow.  Think how much of the world around you is organized to get you to buy stuff.  

From a systems thinking perspective, “growth and consumption” are a feedback loop.  The more we consume, the more we grow, the more we grow, the more we consume.  That was an OK paradigm for a long time, while the Earth’s resources seemed limitless, and we couldn’t imagine running out of the things we need to live, like clean air, fertile soils, and potable water.  But here we are in 2007, and we are running out of clean air, fertile soils, and potable water, and lots of other natural resources we need to live comfortably.  We, the people, the ones who are supposed to be in charge here, have wantonly consumed the Earth’s resources while our human population has increased exponentially, and now, in a cosmic math moment, we can see the day when there won’t be enough of planet Earth to go around.  They say if the Chinese begin to consume as much as we do here in the United States, they’ll need a planet of their own.  So, in my opinion, we can spend the next millennia in a colossal food fight, or we can find a new paradigm.

A new paradigm?

If we don’t want to be in a perpetual state of defending our food supply, and the other things we deem essential, then we need a system of sharing and managing population growth that enables social stability, without sacrificing liberty and the efficiencies of competitive markets.  But how do you organize people to share without slipping into the quagmire of central planning?  How do you manage population growth without telling people how many babies to have?  How do you have a decentralized free market economy based on equanimity and sharing when it seems to be human nature to hoard resources?  

I think we need to change our values.  

I think the antidote to growth and consumption is stability and citizenship.  I think we need to value economic stability over cyclical spikes in growth, and we need to value citizenship over consumption.  We need to invest in getting small in the same way we’ve spent the last hundred years investing in getting big. From a systems thinking perspective, we need to consciously institute the feedback loop of stability and citizenship. Maybe that’s it in a nutshell.  We need to become conscious, conscious of the impact of our choices on our community, our homeland, and our planet.  As we become more conscious, more responsive to our surroundings, we become better citizens, which makes our communities more stable. The more stable we become, the stronger our citizen ethic, the stronger our citizen ethic, the more stable we become.  That’s the feedback loop we are looking for.  To achieve it we have to change the way we think, the way we behave, change our status symbols, and change the way we live.  

We live in a commoditized world.  Here at the apex of the Industrial Revolution, we have learned to commoditize everything:  corn, soybeans, meat, milk, textiles, steel, silicon, cement, consumer electronics, lumber, communications, cars, body parts, music, DNA, animals, people.  We are expert in building out bricks-and-mortar infrastructure and information systems to deliver any product to any place any time.  We are brilliant innovators.  We can make the most complex technology—Dick Tracy’s wristwatch—both generic and ubiquitous.  We thought that watch was just a clock and a walkie-talkie.  Now we know it was a speakerphone, a camera, a text messaging system, a photo album, a music player, a calendar, a recording device, a phonebook, a television, and a GPS locator.  In Dick Tracy’s world, his watch was the miracle that made his story a fantasy. In our world his watch is a cheap gadget with a 6-month shelf life.  That’s commoditization.  

No one loves a commodity.  No one loves something that’s generic.  When we love something it becomes special to us.  I love the Berkshires.  I love my farm.  I have deep, emotional feelings about the landscape on which I live.  I dream of conserving our farm as a working landscape for future generations.  I dream of my farm feeding people one hundred years from now.  Being citizens of communities we love, wherever they are, is the common ground we share with people all over the world.   

That love of place is citizenship.  Citizenship is the expression of our shared values, and the commitment to share our wealth.  Citizenship is how we identify and protect our common interests, preserve our shared resources, and steward our shared assets.  Today, our common interests and shared assets are changing.  With globalization and a burgeoning world population, what we used to share among millions of us now needs to be shared among billions of us.  The slice of the pie available to each of us is getting smaller and smaller.  This is not a problem we can “grow” out of.  The more we grow, the smaller our slice of the pie becomes.  We cannot shop our way to sustaining ourselves.  In fact, I think citizenship means we stop shopping.  We need to buy fewer things, buy more of them locally, and generally pay more for what we buy.  

One of the last corporate consulting gigs I did was for a very large software company that was frustrated by their customers’ lack of loyalty.  They were spending millions of dollars a year on advertising, and their website was getting millions of hits a month, but they weren’t seeing the repeat business they wanted from the people who bought their products.  They didn’t actually know any of those people personally, but they wanted them to be loyal just the same.

Our team of consultants pitched the client on a relationship marketing strategy, and I realized we were really teaching them how to transform themselves from commodity to community.  They had the same problem that a lot of conventional dairy farmers have:  the market is over supplied, the product has become both generic and ubiquitous, and the distributors and retailers, who actually have the face-to-face relationships with the customers, are squeezing producers.  Relationship marketing is a technique for moving markets to become communities by creating experiences that make people feel good.  

When is the last time you felt good about buying milk?

Communities come into existence when they serve the common good of community members.  They are the result of grassroots self-organizing.  They evolve organically from the bottom up.  They can be envisioned and enabled from the top down, but they cannot be created by executive fiat.  That’s where we lost our client.  We wanted the software company to create deeper relationships with their employees and their customers as a way of building their business community.  We wanted them to personalize their relationships.  That meant getting to know people and gaining their trust.  But chief executives of global multi-nationals want to get things done by handing down marching orders, not getting friendly with their employees.  That’s the “relationship gap” that causes most employees to care more about their paycheck than the company they work for, which results in the company’s customers caring more about the price they pay than the company they buy from.

When we make the shift from commodity to community, we close the relationship gap.  Commodities are faceless and placeless, loyal to price, not to people.  When we buy commodities, cheap is the goal.  But who wants to live in a cheap community?  

It wasn’t until I started studying agriculture that I came to view cheap suspiciously.  I looked at our cost of production for the food we could grow on our farm and compared it to the prices in the grocery store.  We realized the food we produced would seem really expensive if we charged what it actually cost to produce it.  It didn’t stop there.  I started looking at the price of lots of different things—clothes, furniture, tools, machines, electronics.  How can the price of all these things keep getting lower when the cost of living is going up, the population is increasing, and the resource base is shrinking?  Shouldn’t the cost of goods reflect the cost of the labor it took to produce them?  Shouldn’t the cost of labor reflect the cost of living?  Who is making this cheap stuff and how are they living?  Is there a relationship between increasing cheapness and increasing poverty?

Every time we spend a dime we are voting for the world that made the thing we purchase.  I’m sure you are all aware that we have an import economy—that is we buy more stuff from other nations than they buy from us.  That’s nice for them, but what about us?  What about the United States of America?  What about the Berkshires?  How will we preserve the quality and character of our homeland if we refuse to buy the things we make here? How will we preserve the quality and character of the Berkshires if we don’t buy the things that are grown here?  How can we be secure if the things we depend upon for every day living—food, energy and shelter—come from the other side of the world?  Do we really care more about getting a deal, and having lots of cheap things around us, than we do about our homeland?  When was the last time you went out of your way to buy something made in America?  

When was the last time you felt good about buying American?  

I think the answer to the conscious shopper’s dilemma is right here at home.  Like Dorothy, trekking off to see the Wal-Mart Wizard, I clicked my ruby slippers and woke up.  There are other values than price.  Home.  There’s no place like home.  Everything I need is right here in my own backyard.  We have the capacity to produce everything we need for every day living right here.  I lived in Boston for twenty years.  My city self didn’t care where I shopped because I didn’t see the impact of my purchases.  Here in the Berkshires I see and feel the impact of my purchases.  I pay more for the things that are made here because I know what it costs to live here, and I want my fellow citizens to make a living wage.  Paying more for things made in our homeland is sharing.  Buying American is an expression of citizenship.  Buying things made in the Berkshires is a way of creating homeland security.  Buying food grown in the Berkshires is a way of ensuring our food security while we conserve our resources and maintain our agricultural heritage.  

It’s not that commodities or imports are a bad thing.  Commodities and imports play an important role in our economy. It’s about restoring balance to the economy.  It’s about balancing the economy, society and the environment.

When we make the shift from commodity to community we restore the balance between global and local.  Instead of seeing the world as one monolithic development, we see our species living in unique communities.  Instead of standardizing our solutions and homogenizing our differences, we plan for constant change and harmonize our differences.  When we shift our economy from commodity to community, instead of using consolidation to crush competition, we employ diversity to foster fair trade.  When we shift our society from commodity to community, instead of building out massive technocratic bureaucracies, we empower small-scale, nimble, human-to-human solutions.  When we shift our environment from commodity to community, instead of rewarding global plunder and pollution with unfettered access to the world’s resources, we allocate resources to people first, and we conserve the resources we depend upon for the survival of our species.

Here in the Berkshires we have a chance to be a model of community self-reliance and self-sufficiency.  We have the intellectual capital to develop a community-based economy.  We have the land base, soils and water supply to have a community-based food system.  Our environment provides all of the natural resources we need to sustain ourselves.  And we have the civic and cultural institutions to provide a rich social life for everyone who lives here.  Everything we need to have a good life is right here in our own backyard.  We only need to shift our values from commodity to community.