This article proposes reframing how we think of our food economy: not as a products-based economy, but a services-based one.

Imagine a world where you’re not paying for tomatoes, but instead for someone to take care of a plot of land so as to coax tomatoes out of it. In the end you are still getting tomatoes, but the former model is a product, and the latter is a service.

The distinction is so subtle yet so important. Rethinking food production as a service forces us to acknowledge certain important responsibilities: the responsibility that we have for our farmers, to support their important work, and the responsibility they have for the land, to sustain it and be its caretaker. These are responsibilities that we currently lack in our current industrialized food system…

As the article acknowledges, food will cost more this way. But the real costs of food are just that high. And perhaps one compelling way of getting people to accept the real costs is to shift our thinking from food-as-product to food-as-service.