You thought your food prices were high!

[swampwitch]

Check out the cost of eating in Nunavut! Scroll down to the slideshow in the article to see other outrageous prices. 

http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2014/12/14/nunavut-food-crisis_n_6323570.html

slide_231471_1083050_free.jpg

• swampwitch
• Jan 25, 2015

 

[denice]

I know prices in Alaska are high and they become outrageous as you go north away from civilization.  I sometimes watch a show on Nat Geo called Life Below Zero.  A woman there runs a camp almost 200 miles above the Arctic Circle.  She brings in supplies for the very short tourist season and with the extra transportation costs the prices become outrageous.  The one that stuck in my mind was milk working out to $25.00 a glass.  It's against the law to sell wild game it can only be used for personal consumption so she had to bring in all meat as well.

 

[Willowy]

Yeah, everything has to be flown in or shipped in on a boat so you have to factor in that cost :/. I'm sure perishables like fresh veggies are the most expensive. Wages are also higher in those areas, or nobody would stick around (well, those who are born and raised there don't have a lot of good options for leaving but there are some people who move from the lower 48 and choose to stay), but it's still pretty bad.

One of my co-workers has a daughter who lives in Alaska. He's always telling us about stuff like how much things cost or how they got snow in August, and the rest of us always say. . ."well, that's why we don't live in Alaska!" :lol3:

 

[tammat]

Sheesh!!! Wow! That's a real eye opener. I thought we paid a lot for groceries.

 

[Winchester]

Wow! People can't afford to eat!

 

[tabbysia]

Geez! I wonder how much it costs to buy cat food up there, or if people can even afford to have pets.

 

[MoochNNoodles]

The lady quoted said "We grew up hungry, but not starving."  Now that is sad.  Especially considering how most of us live.  It looked like even processed foods that are generally less expensive here are very expensive there!

 

[sivyaleah]

I did notice that it says "packed on 12.6,06".  And the photo is 5 years old.

No wonder it is so expensive  It's vintage

 

[Willowy]

It's also 5 pounds of savoy cabbage, which isn't going to be super cheap anywhere. Who buys 5 pounds at a time? People who make kimchi maybe .

The camera's settings were probably done wrong; I can never get mine to be right :tongue2:. So it was more than 8 years ago; I wonder what the prices are like now? Better? Worse? Same? It's to be expected that things will cost more if they can't be trucked in but there's a reasonable limit. $104 for a case of bottled water that normally costs $3.50 isn't reasonable, LOL. Although bottled water is kind of a luxury and it is really heavy.

 

[cocheezie]

I was visiting a remote northwest location. There was nothing on the shelves in the grocery store, and what little that was on the shelves was expensive. If the ferry was delayed by weather, the grocery store had the right to refuse the entire shipment. Dairy, even at its best, usually arrived a day or two before it's expiry date.

I had a friend who lived for a time on Baffin Island. Her method of eating well was to pack her suitcase full of sprouting seeds and a small grow light. She just couldn't afford fresh (ha!) veg.

 

[tabbysia]

That's sad when you realize how easy it is to get any food that you want in most places. Here, we have Walmart, HEB, Kroger, Aldi, Target, Albertson's, Central Market, Whole Foods, and countless others within a few minutes drive of each other, with lots of food on the shelves, and with most of them competing to have the lowest prices. It makes me feel guilty when I think about all of the food that I buy and throw away.

 

[pushylady]

Geez! I wonder how much it costs to buy cat food up there, or if people can even afford to have pets.

That's what I wonder.

Wow, those prices are astounding. I always knew it was expensive up North, but holy moly that's just jaw dropping!

For comparison, out of that slideshow I took a few photos of stuff I've actually bought recently.

Nunavat chiken.jpg

• pushylady
• Jan 27, 2015

We used to buy a barbeque chicken a couple times a month or so for a weekend treat. We've been watching the price rise over the years to a shocking $10 now!!

bottled water.jpg

• pushylady
• Jan 27, 2015

Yeah, I'm not a big fan of bottled water usually, but when Food Basics had a sale of 24 bottles for $1.50, I bought a case.

cabbage Nunavat.jpg

• pushylady
• Jan 27, 2015

Last week cabbage was on sale for 49c a pound, so I bought one. Of course cabbage are heavy and it ended up costing me $2.76, which I actually grizzled a bit about.


My thinking is that the community should get together and build heated greenhouses and grow some produce for themselves. Surely some of the millions and millions of federal money they get given could make itself useful in a way like that?

 

[catapault]

@pushylady, the summer growing season in Alaska is said to be fantastic - long days, intense sunlight, excellent vegetables. Once winter comes the days become very very short. http://www.alaska.org/advice/shortest-day-in-alaska Barrow has 67 days with no sunlight at all. Elsewhere winter day length might be 3 hours, 5 hours, 6 hours.

So in addition to heat you would need to run high intensity grow lights. And the difficulty with both heat and lighting is that fuel also has to be imported. Currently in the lower 48 states fuel prices are averaging under $2 / gallon for regular gasoline. Current average price in Alaska is $2.80 / gallon.

So grow-your-own greenhouses that produce sufficient food for a village would be also be expensive.

Another choice is to return to what our ancestors did - grow as much as you can in the growing season, then can, freeze, dry, pickle (sauerkraut, anyone) for the hunger days of winter.

I find it ludicrous that I can walk into the store in January and buy fresh asparagus, strawberries, and pineapple. But it is nice to have more than green cabbage available.

By the bye - due to the freeze in Arizona, California, etc the price of fresh lettuce has gone through the roof. Just a few weeks ago I could buy a big package of 6 romaine lettuce hearts for about $4. When I was at the store last week 3 romaine lettuce hearts were $5.

 

[pushylady]

C catapault that's a good point about the expensive of running a greenhouse in winter. It's hard to imagine months without sunshine!! Surely a spring-fall greenhouse could be feasible for a village to run though and stock up for the winter months? It would give people a measure of self-sufficiency which is really necessary if you're living in such inhospitable places.

 

[pushylady]

Saw this article yesterday and thought it was pretty cool. Obviously people up there are interested in growing their own fresh produce if they can. I hope this idea turns out to be feasible as a lot of people could really benefit.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/yukon-inventor-opens-the-door-to-year-round-growing-1.3009597

 

[MoochNNoodles]

Saw this article yesterday and thought it was pretty cool. Obviously people up there are interested in growing their own fresh produce if they can. I hope this idea turns out to be feasible as a lot of people could really benefit.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/yukon-inventor-opens-the-door-to-year-round-growing-1.3009597

That is really neat looking!!  I was just talking with my Grandfather about putting in a small greenhouse of some sort to extend my own growing season and I'm in a decent climate.  To have something like this where you can grow year round in that climate; that is life changing!!  

 

[Winchester]

Saw this article yesterday and thought it was pretty cool. Obviously people up there are interested in growing their own fresh produce if they can. I hope this idea turns out to be feasible as a lot of people could really benefit.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/yukon-inventor-opens-the-door-to-year-round-growing-1.3009597

That is way cool! I'd love to have a small greenhouse for growing some things from seed and for trying to keep things growing through colder months.

 

[jtbo]

Usually more I read about Alaska, better it sounds, but not so with this shop issue.

Our country is about 745 miles long, climate is very similar to Alaska, but in Alaska there are colder north.

Big difference is that in Alaska road system is very undeveloped, here is actually no place where you could not drive as logging roads have been built so much and major road network is kept drivable around the year and it does cover every village, even smallest ones.

That is perhaps one of the things that makes Alaska interesting, it is kind of last frontier, where you can't count on getting services, you are the one that has to make services.

There was one farm on sale, 50 miles to nearest road, such would make great retirement home if I ever win in lottery


At old days when we did not have so many roads and logging camps were build, logging companies did transport food and supplies to camp, there was even a cook, so men did not need to worry about groceries.
That was after WW2, it took tens of years until roads did reach to each village, but that was how in our country road system did develop.
We also had and still have horse breed that is adapted to working in forest and when there is snow, that was also important during those times. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnhorse


Old time shops did buy fresh food items locally much more, some even did have small garden, not much compared to today's huge supermarkets, but shop keeping was very different back then, these days shops buy everything and for example oranges come from thousands of miles away to central warehouses where those are transported by trucks to each shop, there is two major shop 'brands' that have largest warehouses.


We get here about 4 hours of sunlight during winter, but in our north there is days that they don't get sunlight at all. On those areas there is different kind of potato that grows during summer without nights, taste is lot better than any other potato at least for me

One problem in Alaska might be that even greenhouse must come by plane or boat as many place has no roads. Surely there would be farms growing vegetables if greenhouse could be built with sensible amount of money.

Hopefully that small greenhouse could be easier (cheaper) to transport so that they could grow veggies there.

What is amazing to me is that drug users seem to be able to grow drugs, but shops don't have vegetables to sell, but that is one thing in world I never get, happens so often and everywhere, like movies, somewhere there is hundreds of millions that people spend to see 2 hours of moving picture, but there is no 1 million to build roads/greenhouses/etc. useful to where it would really be needed, but that is how it goes.

 

[catapault]

Still interested? Here, a year later - I rather like the cargo container type hydroponic growing that might be installed in a restaurant basement, parking lot, or remote off-the-road villages.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/04/u...on=inside-nyt-region&WT.nav=inside-nyt-region

 

[pushylady]

It's just great that there are so many people interested in this, and they're creating real solutions. People living there may soon have fresh produce available at reasonable prices. These kind of systems will probably become much more common in urban areas in the future too.