I gave a library talk last night and had an unsettling conversation afterward with one of the attendees. I’d been trying to show how bigness and cheapness have come to feel natural in our food system (and other relationships of consumption and exchange) and yet how deeply strange it is that we’ve come to relate to our food so very largely through calculations about price points.

A woman told me afterward that she wishes the co-op in their town had some cheaper options for detergent. “The kind I want is $3 more expensive than at the supermarket,” she said.

I did a little shruggie and asked whether $3 made that much of a difference to her in the big scheme of things. She said, “That’s what my husband always says. It won’t break us, and it means I don’t have to drive somewhere else to try to save $3.”

But then she added, “So I guess I’ll buy it at the co-op for $3 more. But not $5. For five I would definitely go elsewhere.”

I could feel two things happening that I never know what to do about: first, the disconnect between people’s desire to support an alternative food venture like a co-op or farmers market and their desire to get the best price they can for groceries, and second, the incredibly finely-parsed sense of where that best price sits.

I get this kind of calculation for those who have to watch their dollars and cents very closely. But that wasn’t the case here, and it’s not the case for a lot of the people we’re currently trying to remotivate at our co-op to do a little more of their shopping with us. I wrote a whole book about this and am trying to have forthright conversations about it with these library talks, but sometimes it feels like what I really need is a battering ram.

Or maybe it’s just time to re-read A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things, to remind me how big and deep-seated these instinctive feelings about price points have become over the past hundred or so years.