Why we question the fair price and never the impossible one and who actually pays the difference.

There's a habit I've been noticing for years, and once you see it, you can't un-see it: we only ever interrogate the fair price.

Someone will happily pay a euro or two for a burger, chips and a drink, and never once stop to wonder how that is even possible: what had to be squeezed, and out of whom, to put a whole meal on a tray for the price of a coffee. But show that same person a main course at €15, cooked fresh that morning from organic produce grown by farmers nearby and carried to their door, and the questions come thick and fast. Why so much? What am I really paying for?

It's a strange thing to do, when you catch yourself at it. We hold the honest number up to the light and let the impossible one walk straight past.

Cheap was never cheap

Here is the part that isn't really an opinion. It's arithmetic.

The low price on a receipt is only the portion of the cost you can see. The rest doesn't vanish, it's simply moved somewhere off the bill. It's paid by the farmer who was given too little for their harvest, the worker paid less than a living wage, the animal raised too fast, the soil stripped, the river polluted, the climate warmed, the future quietly borrowed against.

Economists have a dry name for this: externalities. The costs a price pushes onto someone who isn't part of the transaction. And when researchers actually add them up, the numbers are staggering. The United Nations' 2023 food report calculated that the hidden costs of the world's food system came to as much as 12.7 trillion dollars in a single year, roughly a tenth of global GDP, and far more than everyone on earth paid at the checkout combined. On top of that sit around 540 billion dollars a year in subsidies that prop up the cheapest, most harmful ways of producing food.

So "cheap food" isn't a bargain. It's a bill sent to someone else. Often someone who never got to see it, let alone refuse it. Cheap, it turns out, is the most expensive word in food — we just don't receive the invoice.

What it's doing to the people who feed us

You don't have to look as far as a UN report to see the cost. You can see it here in Portugal, right now.

A study by EY-Parthenon, released through the restaurant association AHRESP at the start of this month, laid the sector's books bare. Restaurants in Portugal generate 7.6% of the country's GDP and sustain 523,000 jobs, close to one in ten of all the workers in the country. And yet they operate on an average net margin of just 3%, against 8.2% for the economy as a whole. Ninety-one percent of them are microbusinesses. Seventy-one percent of the sector's balance sheet is financed by debt, at interest rates that are climbing. And for one of the only times anywhere in the European Union, more restaurants are now closing than opening.

Add to that a cost-of-living squeeze, preliminary figures for September put inflation at 3.6%, with energy up more than 15%; and the picture is of an entire industry feeding a nation while barely keeping its own head above water.

This is what the race to the bottom does, in the end. It doesn't simply make things cheap. It quietly shuts the door on anyone trying to build something honest. If your competitor can underprice you because their real costs are hidden, or borrowed, or offloaded, then doing it properly stops being a virtue and starts being a death sentence. The people who care most are the first to be pushed out.

"Geiz ist geil," and the religion of more

Years ago in Germany, an electronics chain built an entire, wildly successful campaign around a single phrase: "Geiz ist geil" / "being stingy is sexy." I remember thinking, even then, who is this for? Who falls for the idea that paying as little as humanly possible is something to be proud of?

And yet, two decades on, it has become something close to a faith. Cheaper. More. Faster. A thousand kinds of yoghurt on one shelf, ten new garments a month, each a little flimsier than the last, most of them made by people far away who are paid a fraction of what the label implies.

Underneath it all is an assumption we rarely say out loud: that we can grow forever. More companies, more products, more consumption, every year, without end. But there is only one Earth, and it does not grow along with our appetites. The resources are finite even when the wanting isn't. At some point, and I think that point is now, it's worth asking the quiet question beneath all the noise: do we actually need any of this more, or have we simply been trained to crave it?

The honest price

Let me be clear about one thing, because it matters: none of this is meant to make anyone feel guilty at the supermarket. We all have budgets. Not every choice is a free one, and plenty of people buy the cheapest option because they genuinely have to. The point was never to judge the person at the till.

The point is the question itself. Not "why is the good thing so expensive?" but "how is the cheap thing even possible and who is paying the part that isn't on my receipt?"

That question is the whole reason we price the way we do. A fair price was never a markup, and it was never about charging more for its own sake. It is simply the honest one: the entire cost of a meal, the organic produce, the farmer paid properly, the hands that cook it fresh every morning, the care, the delivery, made fully visible and paid by the person who eats it, with nothing quietly handed off to someone who couldn't say no.

We would rather be the honest number than the cheap one. And we'd rather you knew exactly why.

Something to chew on.

Sources: EY-Parthenon / AHRESP study on the Portuguese restaurant sector (released 1 October 2026); UN FAO, State of Food and Agriculture 2023 (hidden costs of the global agrifood system, ~US$12.7 trillion; ~US$540 billion in harmful subsidies); INE preliminary September 2026 inflation estimates.