She brought Stahl over to one of her favorite local farmers, John Lagier, who uses only eco-friendly, or as Waters would say, “sustainable” methods. That day he was showing off his specialty grapes, Bronx seedless, which he was selling at $4 a pound.

There’s the rub. A common complaint about organic food is that it’s expensive.

“We make decisions everyday about what we’re going to eat,” Waters said. “And some people want to buy Nike shoes – two pairs, and other people want to eat Bronx grapes, and nourish themselves. I pay a little extra, but this is what I want to do.”

It’s kind of funny… this is one of those sentiments that could really come off in very different ways. As stated it’s got a sort of Marie Antoinette quality to it — when told that people don’t want to afford organic food, her response, instead of “Let them eat cake,” is “Let them wear Nikes.”

But Ms. Waters is, I think, more of a visionary than a diplomat. She inspires people wonderfully, but there are occasional hard nuances that don’t come through quite correctly, and this may be one. One reasonable interpretation of that remark would be that, as a society, we should be placing a higher (spending) priority on good, clean, fair, local food and a lower priority on material things like sneakers. I’d guess that’s a sentiment with which few farmers or Slow Food advocates would disagree… but by using $4/lb. Bronx grapes in the comparison, she made it seem as though only the highest-end produce qualifies.

What’s wrong with this country?

I guess I’d have a couple of responses. Part of the goal of sustainable agriculture, actually, is to ensure that food remains available at a reasonable price in the long run. If we can’t continue to produce enough food to feed ourselves, supply and demand dictates that prices go up — exactly what happened from January 2007 to mid-2008 with the world price of wheat (which doubled), corn (up 1.5 times), and rice (nearly tripled). Impoverished people who relied on inexpensive grains to form the bulk of their sustenance were hardest-hit. Food riots and protectionism broke out around the world.

At the supermarket today, Americans might have to pay a little more for sustainable food, it’s true. But some of the cheapness of conventional food comes from government subsidies to big agriculture that small farmers don’t get. And some of the extra price of sustainable food is actually an investment — it can lower your health-care costs later on, and it acts as an insurance policy against catastrophic price increases down the line.

So maybe the price on the label is a little bit lower for conventional food. But is it really meaningful to say that it’s lower, if you’re paying to lower the prices yourself with your taxes and your health care dollars?

And, for what it’s worth, Slow Food Columbus’ Fearless Leader, who also doubles as the manager of the Greener Grocer at the North Market, assures me that they have taken steps to ensure that the winter tomatoes being sold at the Greener Grocer are not from Florida.