Returning Stories to Priceless Vegetables: From an Evaluation Economy to an Existential Economy

【Three-line summary】

• Agricultural products are not cheap because they lack value. Because they are essential to life and are required to be affordable for everyone, it is difficult to set a high price based on use value alone.

• Late-stage capitalism attaches prices not to necessity, but to evaluation value—such as brand, story, differentiation, and attention. Agricultural branding also utilizes this circuit.

• However, if stories are used not just to sell products at a high price, but to return the relationships between land, people, and the dining table to our daily lives, then evaluation value becomes a pathway to existential value.

Introduction | Because it is important, it is cheap

Why are agricultural products cheap, even though they are essential things that sustain life?

Normally, one would think that the more important and necessary something is to everyone, the more expensive it should be. Humans cannot live without eating. We would not die today if we lacked stocks, advertising, or consulting. But if food were to disappear, society would lose its functionality in a matter of days.

Yet, even a slight increase in the price of agricultural products is met with complaints that they are expensive.

It is not just farmers.

Nursing care, childcare, logistics, cleaning, construction, and infrastructure maintenance. The jobs most necessary to keep society from stopping are the ones least likely to command prices or wages commensurate with their importance.

There is a paradox here.

Food, nursing care, and childcare cannot be products that only the wealthy can afford. If everyone cannot access them, society itself cannot function.

Therefore, prices are kept low, and the shortfall is covered by unpaid family labor, dedication on the front lines, low wages, subsidies, a sense of mission, and the word "gratitude."

Society praises these as "important work."

However, it does not pay for that importance in price.

1 | Price does not measure importance

Price is not a number that measures the importance of things.

At least, that is the case in an affluent society.

In an emergency where food is scarce, the power of agricultural products comes to the fore. It is meaningless to have money if you cannot buy food. The use value of "if you don't eat, you die," which had receded into the background during peacetime, becomes exposed.

At this moment, it is not that farmers suddenly gained value.

It is simply that the value that was there all along has been exposed.

In normal times, that value is obscured by distribution, imports, stockpiling, price policies, subsidies, and the self-sacrifice of farmers.

In an affluent society, the necessities for survival are sufficiently supplied. Consequently, consumers stop being conscious of the existence of those goods themselves.

Water coming out of the tap.

Rice and vegetables lining the shelves of a store.

Roads being repaired.

Being able to leave children in childcare.

The elderly being able to receive nursing care.

Everything is backgrounded as something that is "taken for granted."

Essential things have no visible value until they are lost.

And as long as they are not lost, they are demanded to be cheap.

2 | Things that are not necessary become expensive

In late capitalism, where daily necessities are widely available, people are not just buying the goods themselves.

Brands, images, stories, scarcity, environmental consideration, a healthy lifestyle, a sophisticated self, and the community one belongs to.

They are buying the "symbols" attached to the goods.

Car advertisements do not explain the structure of the engine.

They show footage of a happy family going camping on the weekend. What they are selling is not a means of transportation, but the life that lies beyond owning that car.

Late capitalism puts a price on difference and attention, not on necessity.

To replace it with the terms I have used until now, value can be divided into three types.

Use value refers to functions such as eating, moving, warming, and transporting.

Evaluation value refers to value derived from brands, stories, reputation, scarcity, and how one is perceived by others.

And existential value is the value where creating, eating, and sharing something with others shapes one's own life and existence itself.

What largely inflates the prices of modern products is primarily the second type: evaluation value.

Agricultural products have extremely high use value.

However, ordinary eggplants, cucumbers, and rice are easily compared solely by their use value. They sit on the same shelf and are chosen based on weight, shape, freshness, and price. What happens there is endless price competition.

In contrast, high-end fruits carry the weight of their origin, variety, gift-giving status, scarcity, vanity, seasonality, and special experiences.

They are not bought just for the sake of eating.

One buys them including the act of giving, the relationship between the giver and receiver, and the special time spent.

They are not expensive because their use value is low.

They become expensive because there is significant room to inflate values other than use value.

3 | Adding stories to agricultural products

To increase the price of agricultural products, one should attach a story to them.

Who grew it?

Where was it grown?

What farming methods were used?

What kind of land and climate does it come from?

Why grow this particular crop?

By eating it, what kind of future can one participate in?

Organic farming, local production for local consumption, domestic products, regional branding, direct-from-farm delivery, and the sixth-sector industrialization—all of these can be read as attempts to layer evaluation value onto the use value of agricultural products.

However, simply adding a story does not mean anything will sell.

Turning surplus fruit into jam just adds one more processed product to the mix. The market is already flooded with countless jams.

What is needed is not the processing itself, but a translation of whose desires or relationships that product reaches.

On the other hand, agriculture cannot survive on stories alone.

Noticing the slightest discoloration of a leaf.

Reading the moisture in the soil.

Tying strings quickly.

Stabilizing harvest yields.

Dealing with heat, rain, and insects.

These gritty, practical skills support the foundation of use value.

Use value without reputation value becomes mere advertising.

Reputation value without use value gets beaten down in price.

To make agricultural products economically viable, both are necessary.

Up to this point, this is a discussion about general branding.

4 | Terroir Verde is also an economy of reputation

The "Terroir Verde" I post on social media morning and night also uses the circuits of an economy of reputation.

Vegetables harvested at Uribo Farm.

Garlic and leafy greens received from people nearby.

Sake made in Atsugi.

I cook them, plate them, take photos, and write down who produced them.

If you consume them just as ordinary eggplants or garlic, they are gone in a single meal.

However, when you reweave the land, the people, the fields, the seasons, the cooking, and the sake into a single narrative, agricultural products become more than just ingredients.

You can see 'where, who, and how it was grown.'

In other words, Terroir Verde is also an attempt to give agricultural products a story and increase their added value.

Up to this point, it can be explained using the grammar of an evaluation economy.

Take beautiful photos.

Give them a name.

Communicate continuously.

Connect the land with the cuisine.

Create differences, attract attention, and raise the evaluated value of the agricultural products.

It is the same circuit that brands, advertising, and social media have been using.

However, I am not doing Terroir Verde merely as regional branding.

If the only goal were to sell at a high price, there would be more efficient ways to present it.

5 | Recovering stories, not pasting them on

Advertising pastes a story onto a product.

Terroir Verde recovers the story that has been severed from the product.

A lot of information has been stripped away from the vegetables lined up in the market.

The smell of the soil.

The hands of the person who grew them.

Watering on a day of extreme heat.

Leaves eaten by insects.

The time they were harvested.

The conversation when they were handed over.

The atmosphere of the night they were cooked.

The sake shared with them.

To the market, these are extraneous pieces of information that complicate price calculations. Therefore, agricultural products are compressed into interchangeable information such as standards, weight, grade, and origin.

What Terroir Verde is doing is decompressing that information.

They are not adding fictional stories.

They are making visible once again the relationships that were there all along, but were cut away during the process of passing through the market.

This difference is significant.

The former uses stories to sell products at a higher price.

The latter uses stories to place products back into daily life.

Of course, simply talking about existing relationships does not automatically take you outside of the evaluation economy.

Fields, cooking, and regions can all be converted into symbols of a "mindful lifestyle" within social media. There is a danger that the self, appearing to lead such a life, becomes the product rather than the relationships themselves.

What is important is where the gathered evaluation returns.

If attention is accumulated only as one's own numbers, it is a standard evaluation economy.

However, if that attention returns to interest in the farmer, exchange within the community, the next cultivation, a meal with someone, or an understanding of the land, then the evaluation begins to circulate.

6 | Evaluation value becomes a passage to existential value

If a story only raises the price, it ends at evaluation value.

If a story reconnects people and the land, it connects to existential value.

Eat vegetables from Uribo Farm.

Give them to someone.

Cook the vegetables you received.

Record the cooking process.

People who see the record learn about the producer and the land.

They start wanting to grow something themselves.

Here, agricultural products are not just commodities, but media that generate relationships.

Eating is no longer just an act of consuming nutrients.

It becomes an act of confirming where you live, who you interact with, what you grow, and what you eat.

This is what I consider a connection to the existential economy.

An existential economy is not an economy that rejects money.

It is not an economy that rejects stories or evaluations either.

It is an economy that circulates use value, evaluation value, and existential value without severing them.

Agricultural products have use value.

By telling the story behind them, evaluation value is born.

When that evaluation creates a relationship between people and the land and returns to daily life, it becomes existential value.

And as that relationship supports the next cultivation or exchange, use value is born once again.

Value does not pile up; it circulates.

Conclusion | Beyond selling at a high price

Why are agricultural products cheap, even though they are important and precious?

Because they are important and precious, they are required to be priced so that everyone can afford them.

And in late-stage capitalism, where it is difficult to set high prices based on use-value alone, farmers are expected to provide a story.

To give it a story.

To build a brand.

To create differentiation.

To increase added value.

These are necessary attempts. There are people who cannot continue farming unless they translate the value of agricultural products into price.

However, there is something beyond that.

Stories are not just for selling agricultural products at a high price.

They can also return the relationships that agricultural products originally had with the land, people, and time back into our daily lives.

Terroir Verde is an entry into the reputation economy.

At the same time, it is an attempt to use the reputation economy to cross over into the existential economy that lies outside of it.

It is not about attaching a story to make vegetables more expensive.

It is about returning the stories that had been cut off and reconnecting vegetables to our lives once again.

If daily life itself is research, and research itself is daily life, then these morning and evening dining tables are also small economic experiments.

References

・Scientifically Fun Self-Sufficiency Channel
“[Shocking] Why don't agricultural prices rise? The 'darkness' of the Japanese economy”
https://youtu.be/zPmLfWMtwPs
・My article “Approval is currency, not value—The structure of the existential economy”
https://note.com/gilles1974/n/n6bf557a934ee
・My article “What comes after the reputation economy—The conceptual framework of the 'existential economy' / From 'value of being seen' to 'value of being'”
https://note.com/gilles1974/n/n5d87f765d8b3