The Locavore's Dilemma

by Pierre Desrochers

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Acknowledgments

  Foreword

  Preface

  Introduction

  Chapter 1 - The Globalization of the Food Supply Chain and Its Discontents

  A Short History of the Global Food Supply Chain

  The Call of the Local

  Chapter 2 - Myth #1: Locavorism Nurtures Social Capital

  Grades, Standards, and Brands

  The Pitfalls of Farmers’ Markets and CSAs

  Mom-and-Pops vs. Megastores

  Shantytowns and Social Capital

  Higher Food Prices and Humanistic Pursuits

  Chapter 3 - Myth #2: Locavorism Delivers a Free Economic Lunch

  The Broken Window Fallacy

  Physical Geography and Agricultural Specialization

  The Importance of Latitude

  Economies of Scale

  The Debate Over Land Use

  Time and Trade-offs

  Chapter 4 - Myth #3: Locavorism Heals the Earth

  On the Unbalance of Nature

  Locavorism and the (Mis)management of Natural Resources

  The Basic Problems with Food Miles

  Blame It on the Poor People

  Green Cities and Trade

  Chapter 5 - Myth #4: Locavorism Increases Food Security

  The Third Horseman

  The Slaying of the Third Horseman (with Long Distance Trade)

  Agricultural Resilience: Diversification vs. Monocultures

  Overspecialization and Food Security

  Locavorism and Military Security

  Peak Oil and Locavorism

  Climate Change, Locavorism, and Food Security

  Chapter 6 - Myth #5: Locavorism Offers Tastier, More Nutritious, and Safer Food

  The Changing Human Body

  Taste

  Nutrition

  Food Safety

  Chapter 7 - Well-Meaning Coercion, Unintended Consequences, and Bad Outcomes

  A Brief Historical Overview of Government Intervention in Food Markets

  Public Food Reserves

  Food Export Restrictions and Bans

  Price Floors

  Price Ceilings

  On Appointing “Good” Czars

  Unleashing the Invisible Hand

  CONCLUSION

  EPILOGUE

  NOTES

  INDEX

  Copyright Page

  To Ferenc (“Ferko”) Csillag (1955–2005),

  dear friend and mentor.

  You are sorely missed.

  [T]he time has arrived . . . when the various portions of the earth will each give forth their products for the use of each and of all; that the over-abundance of one country will make up for the deficiency of another; the superabundance of the year of plenty serving for the scant harvests of its successor . . . Climate, seasons, plenty, scarcity, distance, will all shake hands, and out of the commingling will come enough for all . . . God provides enough and to spare for every creature He sends into the world; but the conditions are often not in accord. Where the food is, the people are not; and where the people are, the food is not. It is, however . . . within the power of man to adjust these things . . .

  —THOMAS SUTCLIFFE MORT, Speech delivered on

  September 2, 1875, Lithgow Valley Works (Australia).

  Quoted in “Mort, Thomas Sutcliffe (1816–1878)”

  in David Blair. 1881. Cyclopaedia of Australasia.

  Fergusson and Moore, Printers and Publishers,

  pp. 245–247, p. 247.

  Experience keeps constantly adding to our knowledge of the special advantages of each locality, and every free movement of trade and industry increases the sum of their usefulness to the human race. Scarcity of food can no longer exist among nations that have kept abreast of this economical revolution . . . Those who doubt the advantages of this universal, worldwide intercourse and exchange are bound in consistency to advocate the reversion of society not merely to any earlier stage in its development, but to that state of things which preceded its initiation—that is, to pure and simple cannibalism; for an argument that is good against one step in this march of progress is equally good against another.

  —J. J. MENZIES. 1890. “The Localization of Industries.” The Popular Science Monthly 36 (February): 454–460, p. 455.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Best-selling nonfiction books typically discuss the lives of interesting people, relationships, sex, soul searching, societal and environmental collapse, babies, cats, and food. While this book does address the last of these topics, we fell short in terms of providing memorable recipes, miracle weight loss cures, and shocking exposés of mad scientists playing God with our groceries. Even worse, we did our best to slaughter as many sacred cows in the food activists’ intellectual herd as we could. And, perhaps worst of all, we are reasonably optimistic about the future! Our first thanks must therefore go to our publisher, PublicAffairs, for taking a chance on two unknown authors during troubled economic times and for giving us the opportunity to work with a seasoned editor, Mindy Werner.

  As we explain in our preface, the chain of events that ultimately resulted in this book was somewhat fortuitous. Truth be told, we would have been more hesitant to write our first policy paper on the local food movement without the assurance that we would benefit from the advice and support of our good friend Andrew Reed, who worked for a few decades and in various capacities in the agri-business sector. Andrew once again read the whole manuscript of this book and provided much valuable feedback. Other individuals who shared their knowledge of agriculture with us include, most prominently, Dennis Avery, Gary Blumenthal, E. C. Pasour, and P.J. Hill. Thanks also to Blake Hurst for not only writing the foreword to our book, but for the chuckles he gave us through his other writings. Of course, none of them should be held accountable for errors and omissions in our manuscript.

  Work on this project began at Duke University’s Center for the History of Political Economy where we were both hosted for a semester by Professor Bruce Caldwell. Feedback on various portions of our draft was then provided by some of Pierre’s colleagues in the department of geography at the University of Toronto Mississauga, namely Tom McIl-wraith, Joseph Leydon, Monika Havelka, and François Ndayizigiye. None of them should be held accountable for the fact that we did not always heed their advice. Pierre’s department is not only an intellectually diverse environment, but also one that truly lives up to the academic ideal, in no small part because of the man who was most influential in shaping it, the late Ferenc Csillag, to whom this book is dedicated.

  FOREWORD

  Pierre Desrochers and Hiroko Shimizu should not have had to write this book. In a more rational world, their defense of what is so clearly true would not be needed. History, theory, common sense, and the most cursory observation and thought about the subject of food and how and where we grow and buy it would lead most of us to the conclusions drawn by the authors. However, our world is not rational, and most of what passes for thinking about food is as full of air as an elegant French pastry. Hence, the need for this valuable contribution.

  Desrochers and Shimizu take the idea of local food to the back of the barn and beat the holy livin’ tar out of it. The idea of food miles will never again rear its ugly head in polite company, nor should we have to hear about how far farmers are from their consumers. Now, I’ve no doubt that food miles will continue to be mentioned, and farmers at farmers’ markets will still have those little signs measuring how far their wares have traveled, but everybody will know it’s just horse manure, in the same way that we know we won’t get to take the prettiest girl home if we drink Bud Light. We M
issouri farmers will still drink Bud Light, and I have no doubt that people will continue to patronize the Ferry Market in San Francisco, but one can hope those programmers and executives in Northern California will never again take local food marketing claims seriously. That’s how important this book is.

  According to surveys I’ve seen, only about 5% of the consuming public will pay more for local, organic, or sustainably grown food. That statistic is no surprise to my wife and me. We grow vegetable starts and flowers at our small greenhouse in rural Missouri. Our customers are extremely price sensitive: the fact that we are local and employ local people matters not a whit to our typical buyer. We survive by offering the newest varieties of flowers at competitive prices. We’ve tried to carry a line of heirloom tomatoes as well, but we’ve yet to have a repeat buyer. People will read an article trumpeting the wonderful taste of German Johnson or Brandywine tomatoes, buy a few, and lose them all to blight. The next year, they ask for hybrids with blight resistance.

  Now, other growers have had better experiences branding themselves as local and selling traditional varieties. After all, our part of Missouri is notably short on upscale, trendy consumers. We live in a farming community, where people are careful with their dollars. They typically grow the latest and most technologically advanced hybrids on their farms, and the thought of paying extra for a tomato variety that is more susceptible to disease and yields less strikes them as crazy.

  If local food is just a lifestyle choice made by people with money aplenty, and if the adherence to local food is the latest example of the human need to preen, why should a book like this one need to be written? Why, indeed, should we care what Michael Pollan eats for lunch?

  We should care because ideas have consequences. Many, many more people will pledge allegiance to the local food movement than will actually pay a premium in price or inconvenience for local food. They’ll support politicians who pay fealty to the latest trends and complain about conventional food to pollsters. Consumers and voters are willing to show support for local food while letting others pay the bill for their good intentions. The notions that the past was better, local is important, technology should be feared, and trade is bad are powerful, and extremely dangerous.

  After the January, 2010 earthquake in Haiti, the biotech company Monsanto donated 475 tons of seed to Haitian farmers. Monsanto is not known for being nimble in its relations with the public, but the company made sure that none of the donated seed was genetically altered. That gesture wasn’t enough; protests quickly erupted all over Haiti and the U.S. You would have thought Monsanto was passing out free cigarettes to teenagers. “Peasant groups” in Haiti marched under banners of “Down with GMO and hybrid seeds.” Hybridization has been around since Gregor Mendel experimented with peas in the 1850s. Hybrid crops have saved the lives of billions of hungry people. Farmers in the U.S. began adopting hybrid seeds in the 1920s, and hybrids have increased yields for every crop that lends itself to hybridization. Donating hybrid seeds is not exactly pushing the envelope of food or farming technology, but breeding and producing hybrid seed is a complicated process typically done by large firms and never by individual farmers. That was enough to set off the protests.

  The Organic Consumers of America sent 10,000 emails damning Monsanto. Doudou Pierre, the “grassroots” National Coordinating Committee Member of the National Haitian Network for Food Sovereignty and Food Security, said: “We’re for seeds that have never been touched by multinationals.”1 U.S. writer Beverly Bell explains: “The Haitian social movement’s concern is not just about the dangers of chemicals and the possibility of future GMO imports. They claim that the future of Haiti depends on local production with local food for consumption, in what is called food sovereignty.”2 Church groups in the U.S. donated some 13,300 machetes and 9,200 hoes to, I guess, encourage traditional agriculture in Haiti. It’s worth noting that defenders of “traditional agriculture” are usually several generations removed from its practice. The romance of swinging a hoe or a machete is largely lost on people who’ve actually spent some time on the business end of those “traditional” technologies.

  One in four Haitians was hungry before the earthquake: local food for local people was and is sentencing Haitians to a life of misery, disease, and all too often death. The position of the groups protesting Monsanto’s donation is that brown people should starve rather than plant seeds touched by the hands of multinationals. Desrochers and Shimizu write not because it matters what the residents of Berkeley or the Hamptons eat, but because it matters that the residents of Haiti don’t eat. It is the worst kind of cultural imperialism for wealthy and well-fed Americans to sentence their neighbors to a life of hunger and machete swinging. Bad ideas can have terrible consequences, and hopefully this book will help to put some of those bad ideas to rest.

  Only three countries in Africa allow the use of biotechnology because of the reluctance of international organizations to approve the technology and the fact that the European Union will not buy most genetically modified products. While U.S. yields are increasing at 2% a year and Asian yields have quadrupled over the past 50 years, African yields haven’t increased at all. There are many reasons for Africa’s lagging yields, but the refusal of most of the continent to adopt biotechnology explains much of the disparity.

  On my farm in Missouri, we use genetically modified seeds that control insects. African farmers have not had the opportunity to plant similar genetically modified varieties, and can’t afford insecticides. Consequently, each year African farmers lose a large portion of their crops to insects.

  Rice varieties genetically modified to prevent blindness have been tied up in the regulatory equivalent of purgatory for 13 long years. The Swiss biologist who invented the technology is furious, as well he should be. The delay, according to him, has been “responsible for the death and blindness of thousands of children and young mothers.”3

  African farmers are aware of what is happening to them, and they aren’t happy. Matthew Ridley, writing in the Wall Street Journal: “In Uganda, where people often eat three times their body weight in bananas a year, a GM banana that is resistant to a bacterial wilt disease, which causes $500 million in annual losses and cannot be treated with pesticides, is being tested behind high security fences. The fences are there not to keep out anti-GM protesters, as in the West, but to keep out local farmers keen to grow the new crop.”4

  It’s clear that something more than a debate about health and science is going on here. The EU recently allowed the planting of a genetically modified potato, and even though this tuber was intended for paper production and not for human consumption, the Italian Agriculture minister protested, vowing to “defend and safeguard traditional agriculture and citizen’s health.” It is no coincidence that the mention of “traditional agriculture” was given precedence in the Minister’s statement. The reluctance of much of the world to adopt biotechnology is not about the safety of the seed, but rather the preservation of “traditional agriculture” and what the Haitian protesters called food sovereignty. In large parts of the world, local trumps science, and people suffer as a result.

  The Obama administration has had much to say about local food. The First Lady has planted a garden, organic, of course, and the Department of Agriculture is spending 50 million or so on a program called Know Your Farmer. The effort is likely to disappoint: in fact, a suburban housewife determined to know this corn farmer is likely to be mortified by my looks, the way I smell, and my opinions. I can’t imagine why any resident of Manhattan would want to know me, and, trust me, some of my neighbors are even worse.

  This is all right with us. There’s a certain comfort that comes from never having to make a sales call. I raise #2 yellow corn, and it’s worth no more or no less than any other farmer’s corn. As a producer of commodity corn and soybeans, the fact that I’m wearing bib overalls and am the antithesis of charming doesn’t affect my success at all. One of the assumptions implicit in all this local food stuff is
that we farmers are dying to make a connection with our customers. In many cases, nothing could be further from the truth. All we want is to sell corn and be left alone.

  Political leaders are telling farmers to grow and sell local, traditional, and even organic foods, and the culture and the intelligentsia are telling us much the same. As the authors point out, Michael Pollan is a rock star, and Oprah Winfrey spent a lot of time criticizing our present food system. Food Inc. was nominated for an Academy Award and has become part of the curriculum for an untold number of college courses. Everybody that matters advises me to find a farmers’ market and set up a stall. I should concentrate on marketing directly to consumers, including computing the food miles I have to travel to reach that market. Perhaps Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) would be just the thing—I’ll arrive on your front porch once a month, with corn, soybeans, and maybe even a geranium or two.

  There is a problem with this plan. “Think local” may be what the culture prescribes, but the market is sending a markedly different message. Farm income was up 28% in 2010, topping 100 billion dollars for the first time. There’s no better way to make a farmer mad than to accuse him of making a profit, so please don’t quote me, but many “industrial” farmers are thriving. Corn and soybean exports are booming; beef and pork exports are at record highs. It is a very good time to be a monoculture growing industrial farmer using genetically modified seeds. Come to find out, the world desperately needs what we industrial farmers produce, and doesn’t seem to care very much how we raise it.

  This is exactly the opposite of so much of what we read about farming. One of the mainstays of the literature on the corruption of our present food system is that we farmers are mere grit in the gears of the industrial food system, ground to nothing by the ring gear of corporate greed and the pinion gear of concentrated markets, ruthless advertisers, and a political system controlled by Big Food. Michael Pollan spends a few days with an Iowa corn farmer in one of the early chapters of The Omnivore’s Dilemma. By the end of the chapter, I felt like sending the farmer a bus ticket to the nearest homeless shelter. The combination of monopolistic purchasers of his products, price gouging suppliers, and the general tendency of everyone in our economy to stick it to the small farmer made Pollan’s aggie quite a sympathetic character. Except the book gives just enough information for me to estimate his income in the past year, and if he didn’t make $150k in 2011, I’ll eat my hat.