No Such Thing As Cheap Food: The Story Told by a Head of Lettuce
Published: Jun 2026
By: Sofia Caracci
This is the first in a series about the incongruencies and absurdities of our food system.
.v/full.jpg)
By eight in the morning, the market was already hot.
The coffee vendor had settled into the familiar rhythm of pouring milk and calling out orders over the hum of conversation. Children dragged sticky fingers holding baked goods while their parents debated peaches and potatoes. A guitarist somewhere down the row stumbled through the same three chords he played every Sunday, just loud enough to disappear into the soundtrack of the market itself.
The farmers, whose produce was arguably the reason we were all there, had already put in a day’s work. They had harvested before sunrise, while the greens were still cool enough to survive the heat. And driven up to several hours to get to the market. Dirt clung stubbornly to carrots. Basil perfumed the air each time someone brushed past a crate. Tomatoes sat in imperfect piles, some split from too much rain, others sunburned in places that would never make it into a grocery store display but had no bearing on how they tasted.
I watched a woman pick up a head of lettuce and turned it over in her hands. She looked at the sign. Five dollars. She smiled politely, set it back down, and continued down the aisle. A few minutes later, I saw her order a latte that cost nearly twice as much.
I used to think this story was about the coffee. Now I think it’s about the lettuce.
It’s not that the woman made the wrong choice. I have no idea what her budget looked like or what she valued that morning. Maybe she had lettuce at home. Maybe the latte was the one indulgence she had promised herself all week.
What stayed with me was something quieter. Why did the lettuce seem to require justification?
There are many things we pay for without giving it much thought – streaming services, home repairs, pet care, and, yes, lattes. We may complain, but we feel we need or deserve these things; we recognize that labor comes with a price.
But food seems to occupy a different space in our financial imaginations. We scrutinize it. We compare it. We expect it to remain inexpensive even as almost every other part of daily life becomes more costly.
The longer I work in food systems, the less certain I become that this expectation has anything to do with economics. I think it has much more to do with culture.
I worked at a campus food pantry – an unremarkable space with metal shelving, cardboard boxes filled with donations, and student workers rotating canned goods to the front so nothing expired unnoticed. The pantry existed because food insecurity on college campuses is far more common than many people realize. Approximately 30% of U.S. college students experience food insecurity.
What surprised me wasn’t that students needed help. It was what they hoped to find. “Do you have steak?” “Any strawberries today?” “Is there Greek yogurt?”
If I’m honest, I judged those questions at first. We were trying to stretch limited resources across hundreds of students. We worried about running out of staples. We celebrated donations of dried beans and oats because they could feed many people for very little money. Steak felt impossibly far from the reality we were navigating.
Over time, my frustration gave way to curiosity. I came to see the requests weren’t really about steak. They wanted to recreate something they’d had in the past or wished they’d had. They wanted to cook meals they knew from home or pack lunches that looked like everyone else’s. They wanted food that signaled they were doing okay.
In other words, they wanted what most of us want – normalcy and security.
That realization has stayed with me because it echoes conversations I’ve had with farmers, market managers, bakers, and restaurant workers over the years. Again and again, I encounter people apologizing for the cost of their food. A farmer explains why tomatoes are more expensive after weeks of flooding. A baker justifies the price of bread because of a supply chain challenge. A market vendor rehearses explanations before anyone has even objected.
I’ve rarely met people in other professions who feel the same need to defend the value of their labor. Somewhere along the way, we absorbed the idea that food should be beautiful, convenient, and inexpensive all at once. Maybe that’s because, for many of us, it has been.
.v/full.jpg)
For decades, agricultural policy, global supply chains, technological advances, and economies of scale have made it possible to walk into a supermarket in February and buy blueberries, avocados, coffee, asparagus, and shrimp from thousands of miles away. The modern food system has delivered a cornucopia that seems inevitable.
We notice when the shelves are empty. We rarely stop to marvel that they are usually full.
Because we encounter food only at the end of its journey, with most of the cycle invisible to us, we mistake invisibility for effortlessness. We don’t see the crop that failed. We don’t see the farmer who delayed paying themselves another season. We don’t see the farmworker harvesting in oppressive heat or the distributor recalculating routes after a storm washes out a road.
We see the price. Then we decide whether the number feels fair.
Economists often describe these realities in terms of externalized costs: the idea that the true price of something can be shifted onto someone or somewhere else. In food, those costs might appear as exhausted soil, underpaid labor, disappearing small farms, polluted waterways, or public subsidies that quietly support what looks inexpensive at the checkout line.
Those frameworks are useful. But lately, I’ve found myself less interested in spreadsheets than in stories. I still think about that head of lettuce – not because it was expensive but because it made visible something I had stopped noticing. The question that interests me now isn’t: “Why is this lettuce five dollars?” but “What taught me to think it should cost less?”
I don’t think the answer is greed or ignorance. I think it’s familiarity. When something is always available, we stop seeing it as extraordinary. When abundance becomes ordinary, scarcity feels like failure. When grocery stores remain stocked through hurricanes, pandemics, droughts, and supply chain disruptions, we begin to believe that this is simply how the world works.
We are all participating in the same story. A story in which food appears under bright lights, arranged in neat rows, detached from weather and labor and uncertainty. A story in which the miracle has become mundane.
The more I grow, the less convinced I am that there is such a thing as cheap food. There is subsidized food. Discounted food. Food whose costs are deferred, hidden, or borne by someone farther down the supply chain. But cheap? I’m no longer sure that exists. Maybe what we call “cheap food” is simply food whose story has been edited until all that’s left is the price tag.
Sofia Caracci (Farmer Education Specialist, Marbleseed) is a food systems professional, writer, and community organizer with experience spanning farmers markets, food access, agricultural education, and nonprofit communications. Her work has included coordinating farmers' markets, developing recipes with local vendors, leading community engagement initiatives, and supporting programs that connect farmers and communities through equitable food systems. She is passionate about storytelling as a tool for strengthening relationships across the food chain and advancing a more just and resilient agricultural future.