IT’S a crazy mixed-up world we live in, when it costs more to make a gift than to buy one, and when it costs more to grow a potato than to purchase one at the grocery store.

   Seeking ever more competitive pricing in the marketplace, our modern industrialized society has created a factory food system that puts the environment — and the humans who live in it — at risk. “Cheap food” is dependent on government subsidies and does not reflect the true cost of producing it.

   Even the very definition of what makes a product “food” has become questionable. Crisco, a basic ingredient in many “traditional” family pie crust recipes, was introduced by Procter & Gamble chemists as a way of making cheaper candles. When the light bulb replaced candles, the chemists noted how the hydrogenated cottonseed oil resembled lard and began marketing it as a food product.

   These are some of the issues that will be touched upon in the “Greener Fields, Greener Pastures: Growing for Good Health” conference in New Brunswick Jan. 26.

   Sponsored by the Northeast Organic Farming Association, the day will include a mix of programs on organic farming and gardening, nutrition, marketing and policy, ranging from “Pastured Egg Production” — an easy way for novice farmers to get started with animals — to “Organic Grape Production” and “Farm to Fork for Restaurants.”

   ”For someone interested in food it’s going to be a tough day to make decisions,” says NOFA Outreach Director Mikey Azzara.

   ”Changing the Cheap Food Mentality” will be discussed by Hugh Joseph, adjunct assistant professor at Tufts University’s Friedman School of Nutrition. Mr. Joseph recalls attending the “Food, Ethics and the Environment” conference at Princeton University a year and a half ago, at which he posited the question: “Why does Princeton University spend the best on top-notch professors, buildings, equipment and grounds, but outsource its food for the lowest price? What would the university be like if the faculty were priced out at the lowest bid?”

   Constrained by budgets, “food quality is reduced to the basic nutritional needs with the nominal appeal of the basic American fast food diet, where price is more important than quality,” Mr. Joseph says. In order to get locally grown, farm-fresh food, we need to change the cheap food mentality, Mr. Joseph contends. Cheap food reflects the government and institutions treating food as a commodity. “People are not concerned about the price of a car, but when the gas goes to $3 a gallon, they become alarmed,” he says. “Likewise, people get upset if milk goes up 25 cents.”

   Quoting author Michael Pollan (In Defense of Food, Penguin Press, $21.95), he says food is not so cheap when you take the environmental cost into account. “Poultry is a steal next to fruits and vegetables, but as (Princeton University ethics professor) Peter Singer describes the way costs are kept down using confined animal feeding operations,” it’s not such a great bargain. “Corn and soy are used as low-cost feed (not their natural diet), the animals are mistreated and in the end taxpayers end up subsidizing the cost of the toxic waste produced in the process.” Undocumented foreign workers are employed as another way of keeping costs down.

   When we park our cars in the lots of supermarkets and see the signs that inform us how returning carts will help keep our costs down, we comply because, honestly, we all do want to keep our costs down. But, according to Mr. Joseph, food cost two to three times as much a decade ago as it does today.

   Those with limited means suffer the most nutritionally, but many consumers will spend money on lattes and bottled water and complain about the high cost of farm-fresh food. “We’re spending half of our food dollars eating out,” says Mr. Joseph, so if we can afford to eat out, we can afford to buy higher quality food.

   The cheap food mentality began a century ago when we transitioned from a society that grew its own food to one that purchased its food. At the same time, we went from a world in which we cooked our own food to one in which we buy packaged and prepared food. All this has evolved into what Mr. Joseph calls the “cheap diet,” where almost a quarter of all meals are eaten in the car, or what Mr. Joseph refers to as “one-handed meals.”

   The explosion of obesity and diabetes is finally providing us with a wake-up call on the consequences of the cheap diet. “Schools are making changes to their vending machines, removing sodas and other cheap calories,” says Mr. Joseph. As a nutritionist, Mr. Joseph believes his subject should be a priority in secondary education.

   ”We need to increase the attention of policy makers to the hidden costs of cheap food, what happens to the environment. As consumers, we’re more concerned about the pesticides poisoning us than what it’s doing to the land and how it’s contributing to global warming.”

   Speaking of warmer earth, wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could raise the food we eat year round? In fact, we can, if we grow asparagus, rhubarb and other perennial vegetables. Eric Toensmeier, author of Perennial Vegetables: From Artichokes to Zuiki Taro, A Gardener’s Guide to Over 100 Delicious, Easy-to-Grow Edibles, will speak about growing seakale, water celery, Good King Henry (like spinach) and leaf crops. He defines perennial vegetables as anything that lives three or more years, and includes root crops such as skirett and ground nuts, as well as trees with edible leaves.

   The New Oxford American Dictionary made locavore — a person who seeks foods produced within a 100-mile radius — its word of the year for 2007. This is proof the local foods movement is gaining momentum as we rediscover that the best-tasting and most sustainable choices are foods that are seasonal, and grown close to home.

   But in order to raise these foods, we need honeybees to pollinate them. And what a miracle it is honeybees continue to work for us, considering all we’ve done to them. We ship them all around the world to pollinate our crops, we spray their hives to control Varroa and other mites, we genetically modify the crops they’ve survived on — not to mention all the fields we’ve paved over. Beekeeper Ross Conrad of Middlebury, Vt., will talk about “Transitioning to Organic Beekeeping.”

   Mr. Conrad points out that in all the research into what has been causing colony collapse disorder — the disappearance of the male honeybees, first identified in 2006 — nothing is conclusive, but it may very well be the cumulative effects of stresses, chemicals, diseases and management technologies.

   ”Our agricultural system has evolved to large fields of monocultures, and there are not enough natural pollinators, so honeybees are a crucial component” of growing food, he says. As a result, beekeepers load up their trucks with hundreds of bees to ship thousands of miles, and the temperature swing and loss of nutrition leads to 10 percent mortality just in transit.

   ”Then, the bees’ diet is limited to just one crop,” says Mr. Conrad, author of Natural Beekeeping: Organic Approaches to Modern Apiculture (Chelsea Green Publishing, $35). “Just as humans need a varied diet, so do bees.”

   This weakens the bees’ immune systems and they get more viruses. “Of the few remaining in the hive, there is one consistent finding — their immune systems are stressed,” he says.

   Antibiotics are harmful to bees because they kill off beneficial bacteria, necessary for bees to ferment pollen and make “bee bread,” or ambrosia — which serves as food for the bees.

   Some beekeepers will feed cheaper sugar syrup or corn syrup, to their bees, rather than the honey they’ve made from plant nectar, and thus the bees are robbed of the full complements of nutrients. Mr. Conrad advocates organic beekeeping as a way of helping to build healthier bees. “Bees are partially domestic, but still semi wild, and they get a lot of their food from nature,” he says. “But when nature is under stress from global warming — it’s hotter, colder, wetter, dryer — it affects the flora (that produces the nectar ultimately used in the bees’ diet).” Sometimes the plants bloom earlier, and it may not coincide with the time for building the hive.

   ”If we don’t learn the lessons inherent in what we’re observing, the path our Western culture has embarked on is not sustainable,” says Mr. Conrad.

   Bees have much to teach us. “They are amazing creatures,” he says. “They go about their daily life collecting water and pollen without killing or hurting anyone. By taking what they need they pollinate plants so they can grow and be abundant in their gift to the world.” They don’t need a lot of machinery, and raising them is not dependent on oil or gas.

   Mr. Conrad says he asks himself how he can live his own life by taking from the world around him and making it better, as the bees do. “It’s by making a career choice: by keeping bees, a person can help all of creation.”

   In a way, says Mr. Conrad, all the media exposure about colony collapse disorder has led to the best of times for bees. “Bees had always been the ugly stepchild, but because of CCD, people know they’re important and something to pay attention to. More money is being funneled into research, and people want to do something to help bees. This bodes well for the future of our planet.”

Greener Fields, Greener Pastures: Growing for Good Health, NOFA-NJ’s annual winter conference, will take place at Rutgers University’s Hickman Hall, New Brunswick, Jan. 26, 8 a.m.-5 p.m. Admission costs $55, $40 NOFA members, $15 students. (609) 206-0344; www.nofanj.org