The High Cost of Cheap: How Our Quest for Discounts Is Poisoning Us All

There's a cheap poison running through our lives today, and we have only ourselves to blame. It comes from the choices we make every single day, often without a second thought.

Think about it. When you go to buy onions, apples, kiwis, mangoes, or even a car, what are you really looking for? Most of us are hunting for something cheap. Oh, we dress it up in fancier language. We talk about "return on investment" or "optimal pricing." But strip away the jargon, and what remains is simple: we want it cheap, we want it from a good brand, and above all, we want a discount.

We have created a discount culture. I want everything discounted. And if there isn't a discount on what I'm buying, I'll happily go somewhere else that offers one. This puts enormous pressure on every company, every vegetable vendor, every producer to offer discounts. But here's the uncomfortable truth about how those discounts actually work. The only way they can give us the discount we demand is to hike the prices first and then mark them down. We are caught in a cycle of our own making.

We want three things that don't naturally go together: we want something cheap, we want it to be the best, and we want it discounted. Perhaps the sequence should be different. Perhaps we should want something that is genuinely the best, from a trustworthy source, and then seek the fairest price possible. But that's not what happens. Cheap comes first. Everything else follows.

The Real Cost of "Low Price"

Why does this obsession with cheap cause such problems in our society? Because when the focus is entirely on low price, quality takes a backseat. We stop asking where things come from. We don't wonder how they were made. We don't consider whether something was produced in an eco-friendly way, whether it came at the cost of children being exploited, whether some community or culture was harmed so we could save a few rupees. We never think about whether another country had to lose something precious so we could gain a little more.

When we go to the market, our only question is: "Is this cheap?" And that single question sets everything else in motion.

Let me give you an example from my own life. On our farm, the Pre-Healing Farm, we grow mangoes. But we don't grow them the way most farms do. Each tree on our land is looked after with genuine care. We give them natural fertilizers that we create ourselves through bio-fermentation. We develop different cultures and spray them on the trees, feed them to the roots, all so the plants can be healthy.

But it goes beyond just nutrition. Every plant deserves companionship. So our farm isn't a monoculture with only mangoes stretching in neat rows. We have mangoes alongside drumsticks, guavas, avocados, coconuts, limes, sapota, figs, teak and lemons. We grow herbs like brahmi, tulsi, neem, adathoda, sandalwood, and pongamia. It has become an ecosystem. The plants are never alone. It's like a gathering of different species sharing space, each protecting the other. In this way, we've created a unique environment where plants can prosper, where the environment can thrive, and most importantly, where we can get good food.

Now, what is the cost of a mango I harvest from one of these trees? What is the cost of sapota, or tulsi, or brahmi from our farm? This question has set me thinking deeply.

My mother, my father, my children, my community members, we all personally spend time nurturing these plants. We don't focus on how much the plants give us. We focus on how well they give. Rather than obsessing over the output, the throughput, the sheer number of fruits, we try to ensure the plant gets the best from us so we can get the best in return, whatever that may be.

We also make sure the bees get their share, the birds get their share, the insects get their share. So when insects come and feed on some fruits, when a few fruits get worms, we accept it. The worms need space to survive too. They molt into flies, and those flies go on to do other important work. They are integral parts of the ecosystem.

When you nurture mangoes this way, the numbers look very different from a conventional farm. A tree that might have produced a thousand mangoes under chemical farming might give us only a hundred or two hundred. And we are okay with that. This is an ecosystem of sharing, of caring, of nurturing. We nurture it so it can nurture us in return.

The Priceless Fruit

So I ask again: what is the price of this mango? There are no pesticides. There are no chemicals. Nothing has been used to kill any element of the ecosystem. There is no poisoning, no toxicity. We haven't used fertilizers that skew the nutrient balance in the soil. Even our foliar sprays are a form of bio-fortification, where we understand what the plants need and supply minerals that might be missing from the water or depleted from the soil, things like selenium, zinc, copper, and boron. We ensure the plants are cared for like family members.

How could you possibly price such mangoes for the market? This is one of the biggest challenges we've faced. You cannot price a mango that has been nurtured with care, with love, that has been given the best and will give the best in return, the same way you price ordinary mangoes. When mangoes in the market sell for a hundred or two hundred rupees, these mangoes from our farm are priceless.

And realizing this, we made a different choice. We started sharing them for free. All the mangoes from our farm go to Pre-Healing community members and the people living around us. We share them freely, knowing that some things cannot be priced. You cannot put a price tag on something priceless.

The Chain of Compromise

But this isn't how most markets work. When you go shopping and haggle over price, you're bargaining for quantity. You're looking to get the most for the least you can pay. And that mindset trickles all the way down to the farmer.

The farmer stops worrying about the means and focuses entirely on the end. He doesn't think about what it means to use chemicals. He doesn't worry about killing insects or spraying pesticides. He doesn't consider the consequences of excessive fertilizers. He worries about what he will get today. And what he gets today depends entirely on high yield, on large numbers. He knows that only high numbers in the field will give him high numbers in his pocket. So he focuses on quantity.

And when quantity becomes the focus, quality is inevitably compromised.

So what happens to the food you get? It becomes toxic. There are chemicals on the peels and chemicals within the plant itself. The plant has grown in an environment where the microbiome isn't nurtured. As a result, the plant is unhealthy. Its root development is imperfect. The mineral balance is destroyed because fertilizers interfere with how plants absorb nutrients. Too much of one mineral actively blocks the uptake of others. So the plants become deficient in things like zinc, copper, selenium, or boron.

The plant becomes handicapped. It forgets how to seek out nutrients for itself. It grows weak and loses the ability to defend itself. There's no hormesis, that process where plants learn to fight and grow stronger from challenges. They become delicate. They don't produce the phytochemicals needed for defense. And when a plant has to divide its limited nutrients among far more fruits than nature intended, each fruit gets diluted.

Let me illustrate with an example. Imagine a tree that absorbs 100 units of selenium from the soil. This is just an illustration, not exactly how nature works, but follow the logic. The tree has 10 fruits on it. It distributes those 100 units evenly, and each fruit gets 10 units of selenium.

Now the farmer uses nitrates and potash and extensive fertilizers to force a high yield. The tree produces 100 fruits. But has the selenium uptake increased? No. Probably it has even decreased. Now those same 100 units get distributed, and each fruit gets just one unit of selenium.

The quantity has multiplied. The quality has collapsed.

This is why people notice that something has changed. In older times, a glass of carrot juice or celery juice made you feel noticeably better. Today, somehow mysteriously, our fruits don't give us the nutrition they once did. The reason isn't mysterious at all. We are cultivating them wrong. We chase volumes and lose quality.

The Greed Cycle

This desire to save more, to have more money in the bank, to maximize the kick for every buck, this is what poisons us. We get poor nutrition. We get toxins disguised as medicine. We are cheated and fooled. We are told things that aren't true. We get discounts on prices that were hiked up beforehand. And this creates inflammation, both in the economic sense and within our bodies.

When you eat fruits that are subpar, tainted with pesticides, antibiotics, fungicides, insecticides, these toxic compounds enter your body and start their work. Some have a special property of bioaccumulation. They become biological time bombs. Over years, they gather and gather, and when they reach a tipping point, they impact us in ways we never connected to the cheap mango we bought decades ago.

This isn't just about food. When I buy a car, there's a compromise in quality. When I buy a phone, there's a compromise in quality. Spend all you want on a good phone, and you'll still realize you're being cheated.

Take the iPhone I purchased back in 2016. Technically, that phone should be mine. I should be able to use it however I want, as long as I'm using it for its intended purpose, making calls and using software. But a couple of years later, it stopped functioning well. Updates stopped coming. And there was talk, proven in court, I believe, that old iPhones were intentionally slowed down. New updates interfered with old phones in ways that forced people to buy new ones.

And then there's the battery. It's locked inside most phones today. For safety, they say. To make it slimmer. But what happens when that battery, which costs only a few dollars, stops working? You can't open the phone. It's sealed. So you discard the entire device. A battery that costs practically nothing makes an entire phone obsolete. It's like losing the key to your house and having to purchase a new house, since the lock is highly secure and the house is unbreakable. What nonsense.

The operating system becomes obsolete because updates stop. The software interface systems change every few years to ensure old phones can't use new updates. Soon you're holding a phone that can't access anything happening in the present.

Why is this done? Greed. Pure and simple.

But if I blame Apple or Samsung or any other company, I have to ask myself a harder question. Is it just them? Are they the only greedy ones here? We are greedy too. We want more and more. We want to earn more, we want our children to earn more. And if my child is employed by Apple, who pays their salary? Apple does. And who pays Apple? I do. Every time I buy their products.

The cost of our greed comes back full circle to us.

The Poison We Choose

Collectively, as a society, we have to figure out how to control this need for everything cheap. Because when we focus on cheap, we are getting poisoned. We are paying a very heavy, very costly price. That price is the poisoning of our ecosystem, the poisoning of our society, of our culture, and most intimately, the poisoning that happens within our bodies.

If we can handle this, if we can shift our focus, we will not only be happier as a society, we will be more stable. And we will lead longer lives.

Our loss of focus on quality and balance is one of the key reasons people don't live long, healthy lives in an age where we are so technologically advanced. It is our own greed and its resultant toxic side effects that impact the quality of our lives. We want everything for the lowest possible price. We want to hold as much as we can and give as little as we can. And because of this mindset, we are getting poisoned. Not Apple, not Samsung, nor anyone else. We are responsible for our own poisoning.

If we can fix this as a community, as a society, as humanity, we can live much longer. Just imagine if the right research went into making the best foods. We wouldn't fall sick. There would be no poisoning cases. Our bodies would be healthy. Imagine if cars, mobile phones, every piece of technology was made in sync with nature, following best manufacturing practices that don't harm the environment. The water wouldn't be polluted. There would be no environmental crises. And a healthy environment means healthy humanity.

When we go searching for cheap, we end up paying a costly price. That price is the poison that eventually impacts us all.

The mango grown with love on our farm, shared freely with our community, carries no price tag because it is priceless. The mango grown with chemicals, forced to yield beyond its capacity, sold cheap in the market, carries a low price but a high cost. We pay that cost with our health, with our environment, with our future.

The choice, ultimately, is ours. We can keep hunting for discounts and deals, demanding cheap above all else. Or we can start asking better questions. Where did this come from? How was it made? Who and what was harmed in its making? What am I really consuming?

The answers might cost more in the short term. But the price of not asking them is far, far higher. It's the poison we drink willingly, one "bargain" at a time.