The scoop on rising food costs
Global economic factors driving prices of things we need — and love
June 19, 2011|By Megan Woolhouse, Globe Staff
)CAMBRIDGE — Darcy Hutchinson savored her single scoop of mango ice cream on a recent afternoon at Toscanini’s, a gourmet ice cream shop famous for ingenious flavors. The treat cost $4.25 — up 40 cents from March — but the 27-year-old Tufts veterinary school student said she has grown accustomed to high prices.
“When I graduate I’m going to be $200,000 in the hole,’’ Hutchinson said. “What’s another $4?’’
Ice cream may be a deliciously simple combination of milk, butter, and sugar, but the true cost of an ice cream cone is no simple business calculation. Toscanini’s price tag is part of complex and increasingly interconnected world economy, one that links a dairy farm in the tiny Western Massachusetts town of Colrain to the sprawling neighborhoods of Beijing.
The story of this scoop of ice cream, as it moves from raw materials to finished prod uct, captures the myriad forces that are pushing food prices higher and putting pressure on beleaguered US consumers and a tentative economic recovery. Like other commodities, milk, sugar, and gasoline prices have soared because of rising demand, catastrophic weather, and political unrest.
A cyclone in Australia wiped out sugar beet crops. Uprisings in the Middle East have threatened to disrupt oil supplies. Growing demand for milk by Asia’s rising middle class affects the over-the-counter price of an ice cream cone at Toscanini’s.
“In any economic chain, there are winners and losers,’’ said Ricky Volpe, economist at the Department of Agriculture. “But there’s no question that consumers are one of the losers. Specifically American consumers.’’
At Hager Brothers Farm, two hours west of Boston on the Vermont border, paint peels off the farmhouses, barns sag, and broken farm equipment litters the driveway.
“It’s a straight 5-to-9 job,’’ quipped Albert “Chip’’ Hager, the third-generation dairy farmer who owns the farm and runs the milking operation with his son-in-law, Aaron Stevens.
The 700-acre spread, home to 150 cows, mostly Holsteins, is where Toscanini’s ice cream begins. While the prices Hager receives for milk are the highest in more than two years, his costs are increasing faster. Hager supplements the feed he grows — corn and hay — with grain he buys. His grain costs have jumped to $27,000 a month, up $5,000 from a year ago.
Much of the increase is because of the rising price of corn, rooted in soaring crude oil prices and demand for ethanol, the corn-based gasoline additive. Corn exports to China also play a role; US farmers exported about 17 times more corn to China last year than in 2009.
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