What a Lettuce Taught Me About Fifteen Years in the Charity Sector

For years, I was asked the same question.

Usually in meetings. Sometimes by funders. Occasionally by well-meaning professionals trying to be pragmatic.

"Why would we invest time, land and effort growing food locally when you can go down to Aldi and buy a lettuce for 50p?"

It is a fair question. On the surface, it is a very good one. And for a long time, I didn't have a fully satisfying answer — not because the question was right, but because I couldn't yet articulate exactly what was wrong with it.

What I knew, instinctively, was that the question was missing something. That the 50p was not really the price.

It took me years to understand precisely what I meant by that.

The system works. Until it doesn't.

The 50p lettuce is, in many ways, a remarkable achievement — a vegetable grown in another country and placed on a supermarket shelf at a price so low it barely registers.

But the 50p is not the price of the lettuce. It is the portion of the price that appears at the checkout. The rest has been quietly transferred elsewhere — to the climate, to the soil, to the NHS, to workers in other countries, to people not yet born.

We see the price. We do not see the system.

Why this matters beyond food

Once you see this pattern, you cannot unsee it.

You see it in the welfare system, where cutting a benefit saves money on one budget line and generates costs — homelessness, ill-health, family breakdown — that appear later, in different budgets, at far greater magnitude.

You see it in housing policy, where building cheaply creates expensive repair bills a generation later.

You see it in the state of our roads, where years of scaled-back preventative maintenance and temporary patching — cheaper in the moment, gone within months — have produced a repair backlog now estimated by the Asphalt Industry Alliance at over £18 billion. The saving was never a saving. It was a deferral, compounding all the while.

You see it in health systems, where under-investing in prevention produces overwhelming demand for treatment.

And you see it — I saw it, every day, for fifteen years — in crisis support. Where refusing to fund the early relational work means paying for the acute emergency instead. At five times the cost.

In every case, the pattern is the same. The cost does not disappear. It migrates.

What I saw on the frontline

I didn't start with systems. I started with people.

Specifically, I started with the uncomfortable feeling that the people coming through our doors at The Matthew Tree Project were being described by the systems around them in ways that didn't match what I could see in front of me.

The language of those systems was the language of deficit. People were categorised by what they lacked, what they cost, what risk they presented. Case numbers. Dependency metrics. Bed nights. Interventions delivered.

But when you actually spend time with people in those situations — not processing them, but sitting with them, listening, building enough trust that they tell you what is really going on — you see something very different.

You see capability. You see resilience. You see people who have been badly let down by systems designed to be efficient rather than effective, and who have nevertheless found ways to keep going.

The system was measuring the wrong things. And because it was measuring the wrong things, it was funding the wrong things. And because it was funding the wrong things, the same people kept cycling back through the same doors — at greater cost, at greater damage, at greater distance from the recovery that was always possible.

The 50p logic, applied to human lives.

The question the lettuce taught me to ask

It took fifteen years, a charity that I watched close despite everything it achieved, and a book to work through the full implications.

But the question the lettuce eventually taught me to ask is simple:

What is this actually costing — and who is paying for it?

Not just at the checkout. Not just in this financial year. Not just on this budget line.

The full price. The real cost. Honestly accounted for.

That question changes everything. It changes how you design services. How you fund them. How you measure them. How you decide what is worth investing in and what is merely cheaper in the short term and ruinous in the long term.

It is the question I have spent fifteen years trying to answer in practice. And it is the question at the heart of everything the Goodway Advisory exists to help organisations ask.