Freakonomics Radio - 94. The Tale of the $15 Tomato

Episode Date: September 23, 2012

Trying to go rustic by baking, brewing, and knitting at home can be terribly inefficient. And that's a wonderful thing.

Check, check, check, check, check. We want to tell people just where we are right now. We're outside the Wingstop chicken wing store where they have told us we have to wait 45 minutes for chicken wings, but we're so desperate. We're sitting here in the car recording radio. All right. I hear nothing.

Check, check, check, check. Hello. Steven Levitt. Chicken wings. 45 minute wait. What a pain in the ass. From WNYC and APM American Public Media, this is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything. Here's your host, and grape soda. Is that true? I did indeed have that for breakfast.

But to tell you the truth, it sounded better before I ate it than after. Steve Levitt is my Freakonomics friend and co-author. He's an economist at the University of Chicago. Levitt sometimes makes fun of me for caring too much about food. You know what I think? I think he cares just as much, if not more. It's just that he cares differently. My tastes go to things like KFC, beef jerky, chipotle,

grape crush, chicken wings. I love chicken wings. You do love your chicken wings. I had cocoa pebbles for breakfast. Levitt's favorite part of the cocoa pebbles, of course, is drinking the milk at the bottom of the bowl. Most definitely. His dream

meal? Maybe McDonald's or Burger King or something like that. And Levitt's favorite letters in the alphabet? That's big N, little a, big C, little l, N-A-C-L. It's a chemical symbol for salt. Oh, God, I love salt. Some of his other loves, root beer, for instance, have let him down. So there was my thirst, and there was the A&W Rip Beer.

And so I went to the drive-thru and I said, I'd like an A&W Rip Beer, please. And the voice came over the microphone and said, I'm sorry, we don't have any Rip Beer. Is there something else I can get you? Kind of like a bank running out of money? Yeah, or like KFC running out of chicken. Oh, you've had that happen to you?

I know, I've had that happen to me too. So I went to a KFC with my daughter Amanda, and I waited in line for what seemed like an interminable amount of time. But I was truly shocked when I went up to the counter and I asked for a bucket of chicken, and they told me that they were out of chicken. But in the end, true love prevails, and Levitt is a man who knows what he loves.

Pretty much the cheaper the food, the better. There's almost no fast food that I don't adore. So KFC? Yeah, I like KFC, burgers, Chipotle, kill for Chipotle. As you may know, we put out this podcast every week, twice a year. We also put out a series of five one-hour radio specials that air on NPR affiliates across the country. These hour-long shows are primarily reconstituted podcasts, but sometimes they have extra material that we don't want our podcast listeners to miss out on. That's what

today's podcast is. Short and sweet, it's a little story about Steve Levitt's appreciation for food and where that appreciation comes from and what it means. When you hear him talk about his favorite foods... God, I wish I could have gone to McDonald's tonight. It would have been so much better. It might surprise you to learn that he has a somewhat agrarian past. So growing up, one of the most romantic, nostalgic memories I have is that almost every weekend during the summer, my father and I would

drive an hour and a half to a little working farm that my grandparents kept as a hobby. And the memories of us really growing, you know, corn and zucchini and cucumbers, potatoes, it's one of my fondest memories. I've always dreamed of having my own children experience dirt roads and the simple country life of pretend farming. It's never really come to pass. I'm not very good at growing things. We've tried having a garden in the backyard, and the rabbits took care of that pretty quickly. So finally, I hit on a solution that might actually work, which was something I saw in a magazine, which was a hydroponic tomato growing garden. It was a neat little contraption, pricey, about $150. But all you had to do was put in some water, no dirt, and seeds and turn on the special light and voila, fresh cherry tomatoes grown right there in your kitchen. Well, I can't say it worked out so well.

It certainly was a lot of labor, and my kids were interested in it for maybe a day or two, and it sat right in our kitchen, and this ultraviolet light was blasting away. The neighbors even asked us what was going on. I think they thought maybe we were growing pot in our kitchen. We had in the end, I think, about 14 cherry tomatoes total. So let's see. There's the cost of the hydroponic garden and the electricity, the labor.

Even if you take the minimum wage rate, I think we're talking about maybe $15 per cherry tomato, something like that. It was a costly experiment, eventually failing to get my children to have the same love of farming as I have. But it did get Levitt thinking. A lot of things that we do for fun or for entertainment, things like gardening or knitting or baking, these are things that our great grandparents had to do and probably would have loved to not have to do. Yeah. So, you know, the line between work and leisure is a complicated one. Leisure is defined as something you would do for yourself even though you don't get paid. So some people will cut their own yard or they're growing their own cherry tomatoes. But things that you will happily do for yourself, you wouldn't happily do for your neighbors.

If my neighbors who had seen us growing the cherry tomatoes through the window had said, look, could you grow me some cherry tomatoes and I'll pay you the market wage for what it is to grow tomatoes? I'd say, are you crazy? I'm not going to grow your tomatoes. You grow your own tomatoes. And so that's what really gets to be interesting is why is it that we're willing to do things which are completely unpleasant and we would never think of doing them in a market setting, but the romanticism of doing them as leisure somehow takes over. And that's a question I think that really an economist can answer. That's a question for a psychoanalyst, I think. And as Levitt sees it, all these activities we do, growing our own cherry tomatoes, brewing our own beer, baking our own labor and pickling and fancy food stuff that you do at home, I think that is really a sign of how spoiled we've all become. That our basic needs are so well taken care of that we need to seek out some sort of hardship to feel whole, which is a good thing. It's a great thing.

I mean, what could be better than having all of your basic needs met? If you want to hear the full radio hour that this podcast comes from, it's called You Eat What You Are. Our website lists the radio stations across the country that play our show. If your local station is not on that list, you should feel free to give them a call. And if they're not responsive, why don't you look up the home address of their program director and drive by at night and throw some nice rotten tomatoes at their house. Just don't bother to grow them yourself. Freakonomics Radio is produced by WNYC, APM, American Public Media, and Dubner Productions. Our staff includes Susie Lechtenberg, Catherine Wells, David Herman, Beret Lam, and Chris Bannon. Colin Campbell is our executive producer. If you want more Freakonomics Radio, subscribe to our free podcast on iTunes and go to Freakonomics.com

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