Kimchi Econ 101

...the many kinds of value in DIY food and other things.

Photo Cliff Scholz

Yesterday I finished making a batch of kimchi. I put a fairly large quantity of shredded cabbage, thinly sliced daikon radish and carrots that had been soaking in brine for the last 24 hours into some jars along with minced garlic, grated ginger, green onions and spices. The total cost of the items by my calculation came to about $15. Total yield was about 1-1/2 gallons of kimchi. All the veggies and spices were organic. The salt was unrefined sea salt.

The reason I needed to make some was that I’d finally exhausted the 2-1/2 gallon batch I made last fall with our own homegrown cabbage and winter radishes. I’m the main person in the house to eat these pickles. Eggs, rice, and kimchi is a pretty common lunch for me.

When I looked into the cost of buying ready-made kimchi, one source of locally produced, (not organic) kimchi, was priced at about $14/pint. Looking at the website of a prominent online retailer just now, I found organic kimchi also selling for about $14/pint. With 8 pints in a gallon, that comes to $168 for 1-1/2 gallons of kimchi. Yes, I’m sure I could find kimshi cheaper than $14/pinit somewhere, maybe a lot cheaper — who knows? But at that rate I saved myself $154 by making my own.

But here’s the thing: “saving” $154 — and it would have been worth doing if I only saved half that much or even much less — is not a full representation of the value created by making my own, even in bare-bones monetary terms. We’ll get to the other kinds of value in a bit. But the immediate issue is, how much gross income do I have to earn in order to spend that $154?   Depending on your tax bracket, it could be significantly more than that number.

Point is, the fact that we have to live on net, after-tax income should never be left out of our thinking as we consider the pros and cons of DIY value creation like my ongoing homemade kimchi project. Thanks to income and other taxes, the savings are often much higher because nobody taxes direct value creation like homemade kimchi or homegrown radishes and cabbage. Not yet, anyhow.

Further, there are other costs of employment that might be factored in when considering the true cost of using money versus creating value directly. Think about commuting: vehicle payments, fuel, car maintenance and insurance, for example. Also, professional licensing and certifications, and if you work from home, home office supplies and much more. Depending on how we make our money there are quite a few other costs of employment beyond income tax and FICA and the rest that should also be considered as part of the cost of spending. The way our society is set up, using money is costly.

It’s also unavoidable, in the larger sense. We all must, to quote Jesus in the Bible, render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s. But how does that feel to you, these days? Personally, in the places where such rendering can be lawfully avoided, I would encourage doing so.

But wait, as they say in the advertising business, there’s more! We’re not done tabulating costs yet. One thing about my kimchi: it’s “private label”. That is to say, there is nothing but a piece of masking tape on the jar listing its contents and date of manufacture. It’s not for sale, and I have no advertising budget. We probably don’t think about it much, but when we buy corporate products, we pay for the advertising, too, in effect paying for our own psychological manipulation by the companies we patronize and their media henchmen. Let me say this again, slowly, for emphasis: When we buy heavily advertised products, we are in effect subsidizing our own psychological manipulation by these businesses. Isn’t that lovely? In some cases that seems almost worse — almost worse, I would emphasize — than rendering unto Caesar. It’s kind of like rendering unto Caesar’s sketchy and sometimes abusive brother-in-law. Again, to the extent possible, I think I’ll pass on that.

This week I had the very unusual pleasure of being interviewed about my work promoting local food and a shift toward more community resilience and self-sufficiency. As sometimes happens, I said something that I hadn’t expected to say. I was asked by the interviewer how I got interested in home gardening and I mentioned that I grew up next door to a somewhat recently immigrated Chinese family who, I said, “…saw their backyard as a piece of production capital.”

I hadn’t thought of it that way before, but looking back, this was demonstrably true. Mr. and Mrs. Wu had a garden like nobody’s business. In fact, had it been just a bit bigger, perhaps it could have been somebody’s business. This was in a city neighborhood, but they grew corn, beans, strawberries and much else back there. As a young child, I’d follow Mr. and Mrs. Wu around asking questions to the point that in conversation with my mom, Mrs. Wu described me as “her little gardening friend”. They had a compost pile before that was even, like, cool. They had an operation going back there.

Thing is, Mr. Wu was an engineer at Ford. I’m sure the Wu’s could have bought their own vegetables. But nobody else in the neighborhood grew stuff like they did. And it was beautiful. There were flowers everywhere, too.

Yesterday I was outside with Mary looking for a couple new places to put in some of the last seed-saved, heirloom tomatoes I’d started but was unable to find homes for, and it occurred to me that industrialists probably don’t like the idea of people using their yards as production capital. Instead, from the industrialist point of view, the ideal is to work for them so they can extract value from your labor, and then tax your income and give that money to their cronies in government, who might then subsidize or otherwise cut favors for their businesses. And then… here’s the kicker for our purposes, seems the goal is to turn your yard not into a piece of production capital but instead into another consumer — a consumer of lawn fertilizer, weed killer, pest control and irrigation systems and lawn mowing services, for example. All of this ensures that the land surrounding a typical home is a net negative on that household. A cost. And people fall for this.

Funny thing about these folks who think of themselves as “capitalists,” a lot of times it seems they don’t want us to see our own stuff as capital. You don’t, for example, see big-time promotion of cast iron pans. From the industrialist perspective, what’s the point? Like land itself, a cast iron pan can be an incredibly durable piece of productive capital. Once you have it, you can make food with it basically forever. For this reason, it’s hard to use slick advertising campaigns to goose up demand for cast iron cookware. Further, well-seasoned cast iron pans have the additional disadvantage in this age of for-profit, industrialized medicine of not poisoning the user. Now what’s the point of that? The industrial model is to poison people with one product and then sell them medicine when they get sick. So for example: maybe one part of a business makes carcinogenic non-stick coatings. Another business entity, maybe a corporate subsidiary or another company on which the CEO also sits on the board or something, makes anti-cancer drugs! Perfect!

So for all these reasons, we are not encouraged to use or even to see our own kitchens or yards as production capital. There’s just not enough profit to be extracted from it. Guess the next step will be to discourage it or make it illegal, as in many places it already is. In my darker moments I suspect that the industrialist mindset even looks with suspicion on the cool, healing hand of a mother placed on the head of her fevered child, simply because they aren’t taking a cut on that sacred transaction. They do try, though. You can see it in advertising for children’s cold and flu remedies. “If you’re a good mom, you’ll buy this!” Tricky devils.

And as for those cast iron pans, from the perspective of industry, it’s better instead to market branded burgers in paper bags and get people in the habit of buying them again and again if possible. In fact, within that mindset it’s best to never — as the old saying goes — “teach a man to fish”. If possible, the goal seems to be to engender total dependency on the market and the money economy, to condition us to be completely at the mercy of a setup where someone takes a cut on our every transaction with the world. Meanwhile, many people only have the vaguest idea where their food even comes from, or what a syrup made from the root of the yellow dock plant growing in their yard might do for someone who is sick. Heaven help us, but instead many people pay their precious after-tax income to have poison sprayed on such a plant by certified professionals, folks who stick a sign in the lawn when they leave implying that it’s safe for our children to walk on when it dries. In fact that’s considered perfectly normal.

And yet, there’s a deeper problem with all of this: monetary transactions tend to be kind of hollow compared with the experiences of direct value creation, such as making my own kimchi. I understand how our fossil-fueled, disposable abundance has brought ordinary people in countries like the US into luxuries that would be the envy of the kings of old. But explain to me then why so many of us are feeling sick, depressed, anxious, frustrated, exhausted, or unfulfilled? I’m not saying there’s one simple answer to that question, but I do think I’ve found a piece of the solution in learning and sharing skills and making things ourselves.

So here we get to the less easily quantifiable layer of the merits of do-it-yourself food and other kinds of direct value creation, as promised earlier in this essay. In some ways, it’s not even about the money. I have a friend who told me she set a goal and to make tacos from scratch.  Basically she grew what she could and did everything possible homemade: she grew peppers, tomatoes and cilantro for salsa. She grew heritage blue corn and nixtamalized it to make her own masa. She didn’t get a dairy cow but she did learn to make cheese. And she got chicken from a local farmer. So basically, she learned to do as many things as she could and negotiated with the money economy for the rest. To me, that seems eminently sensible.

And sure, you could say, why bother when you can just buy a heavily advertised taco through a drive-up window? It’s so convenient! What the heck, buy a half-dozen! Likewise I could just buy a jar of kimchi rather than make my own. But consider, who’s had the richer, more satisfying experience? And what are we really looking for in life, if not that?

Photo Mary Scholz - used by permission