The Locavore's Dilemma

by Pierre Desrochers

  While one can always find some committed practitioners of the SOLE lifestyle who do make significant economic and personal sacrifices to live up to their ideals, it remains by and large the province of an elite customer base that can afford a residence near a prime and diversified agricultural area in a temperate climatic zone; higher food prices; much spare time devoted to cooking and preserving food; a large and fully equipped kitchen, a second freezer, and significant storage space for canned goods. As acknowledged by Clara Jeffrey and Monika Bauerlein, editors at Mother Jones, “by focusing on consumer choices—always more available to the affluent—the foodie movement has . . . perpetuated a two-class system: pesticide-laden, processed, packaged, irradiated slop for the many, artisanal sheep’s milk cheese for a few.”38 Echoing this sentiment, on April 27, 2010, Republican senators John McCain, Saxby Chambliss, and Pat Roberts wrote a letter to the U.S. Department of Agriculture requesting information on the “Know your Farmer, Know your Food” program, in which they opined that this $65 million initiative to promote urban farmers’ markets was mostly catering to “small, hobbyist, and organic producers whose customers generally consist of affluent patrons.” These “feelgood measures which are completely detached from the realities of production agriculture,” they added, were depriving suffering rural communities from much needed assistance in order to favor urban consumers who had no real need for it.39

  Many committed locavores are also long-time activists who, once organic and fair trade commodities became widely available at Wal-Mart and other large retail stores (often through the good services of food manufacturing giants like PepsiCo), went looking for other ways to stick it to large polluting and profiteering corporations. As the organic farm certifier David Gould put it: “Know your farmer, that was one of the keys of the organic mission that has been lost.”40 For Gould and like-minded individuals, “organic agriculture” should not be simply about the way food is produced, but just as (and perhaps even more) important, about an alternative economic, social, and ecological paradigm that reconnects urban consumers to the land, or at least to small-scale organic producers, and teaches the value of a simpler and less consumption-based lifestyle. But as the leitmotif of for-profit business has long been “when there is a demand, there is a way,” many large chains have in recent years increased their “local food” offering.41

  In our view, food activists have yet to answer satisfactorily four fundamental questions:

  If our modern food system is so bad for us, why do we now enjoy dramatically longer and healthier lives than our ancestors?

  How can less efficient alternatives to current food production methods provide adequate and affordable nutrition to the soon-to-be nine billion human beings, approximately 85% of whom will be living in developing countries, and who, in the coming decades, will need more food than was eaten in the last ten thousand years?

  How many million acres of wildlife habitat should be sacrificed to implement local and organic farming methods that, while deemed more sustainable by activists, gobble up a lot more land to produce the same amount of food as more technologically advanced ones?42

  If local food production in earlier eras was so great, why did consumers increasingly favor items from ever more remote locations?

  The first three issues have already been capably addressed in much detail by other authors, and we will consequently deal with them on an as-needed basis only. The last one, however, is where we hope to make a significant contribution.43

  What Is Our Beef With?

  Food production and distribution is a complex business, so let us begin by making the obvious point that not all “local” food is created equal and that some of it is perfectly fine with us. For instance, New Hampshire maple syrup, California strawberries, Alaskan salmon and crabs, Washington apples, Florida oranges, Michigan cherries, and Iowa corn are among the best and most affordable in the world and, as a result, have long been enjoyed by nearby and distant consumers alike. Competitively priced, high-quality seasonal local fruits and vegetables have also long been sought after by nearby grocers and restaurateurs alike. “Hobby” gardening is its own psychic reward and should not be judged by economic criteria. In isolated rural areas where land is cheap, game animals abundant, and economic opportunities limited, it often makes perfect sense to cultivate large vegetable gardens along with fruit and nut trees; to keep animal coops while having a few grass-fed ruminants roam over the surrounding pastureland; and to supply one’s pantry, root cellar, and freezer with the results of hunting, fishing, and harvesting wild food of various kinds. Local food items that might not be the most delicious or economical might also have other redeeming qualities, such as an orchard that survives on “pick-your-own” family outings or an otherwise average vineyard to which a gourmet restaurant has been added. Some overpriced local food might also be sold for charitable purposes.

  “Local when sensible” is obviously not our concern, nor do we believe that most committed locavores sincerely promote the cultivation of pineapples or bananas in the American snowbelt; in our experience, they would rather have local residents get by without them. We don’t even disagree with their belief that “eating locally means eating seasonally,” which, in turn, results in “deprivation lead[ing] to greater appreciation.” 44 In our view, food masochism should be left to the realm of personal preferences. Rather, we draw the line where local food is deemed desirable simply because of its geographical origin and is not more affordable, nutritious, safer, or better tasting than alternatives produced further away.

  Locavores and people otherwise indifferent to the movement might interject that life is not only about turning a profit and what people do on their own time and with their own dime is their business. Besides, if the current obsessions with small organic homesteads, urban gardens, green roofs, and backyard poultry are nothing but the latest in a long line of pointless food fads, why argue over the issue? The problem is that local food activists are spreading environmental misconceptions, increasingly picking our pockets, and threatening our food security. “Vote with your fork and your consumer dollar!” might be their unofficial slogan, but their campaign material so frequently and so severely distorts the true impact of uncompetitive local agriculture that they could be held liable to prosecution under false advertising statutes. On top of that, many activists have been hard at work to mandate the purchase of pricier local food by public institutions (most prominently government agencies, school boards, hospitals, prisons, universities, and military bases), prevent the redevelopment of abandoned marginal agricultural land for other useful purposes, prohibit modern agricultural practices, and ultimately close national doors to foreign products.45 For reasons that we will discuss in more detail later on, the outcomes of such initiatives range from bad to utterly disastrous.

  To sum up our basic argument: If widely adopted, either voluntarily or through political mandates, locavorism can only result in higher costs and increased poverty, greater food insecurity, less food safety, and much more significant environmental damage than is presently the case. Policies should be judged by their results, not their intentions. Consumers who bought into locavorism because they sincerely cared about making our food supply ever more secure, safe, affordable, and sustainable while supporting their local community should reexamine whether the supposed means actually lead to the desired ends.

  As we will illustrate in the remainder of this book, our modern food system is an underappreciated wonder that is the culmination of thousands of years of advances in plant cultivation and animal breeding; harvesting, storing, transporting, and processing food; and retailing and home cooking techniques. Only through greater technological advances, economies of scale and international trade can we achieve the locavores’ worthy goals of improving nutrition while diminishing the environmental impact of agricultural production.

  Our text is structured as follows. We begin with a brief look at the emergence and development of the globalized food supply chain, along
with a short discussion of the backlash against it that has ensued at every step of the way. We then offer an in-depth analysis of the five key arguments espoused by locavores and discuss why, if implemented as proposed, such a food system can only ever deliver increased social and economic misery, environmental degradation, greater food insecurity, and poorer nutrition. In the final chapter, we further discuss additional policy steps that would be required to make locavorism a reality and explain why they would again fail to meet their objectives. Our main conclusion is that the best way to achieve the outcomes desired by locavores is paradoxically to globalize our food supply chain even more than it is at the moment. It is our hope that readers come away from this book with an understanding that buying or abstaining from buying local food should be a shopping decision, not a moral or political one.

  Writing in 1923, the British professor of agriculture Thomas Hudson Middleton observed that his compatriots were “chiefly fed upon imported food, and are interested in the quality and price of their foodstuffs rather than in its origins, the ordinary consumer takes little interest in the well-being of agriculture.”46 (Most of his compatriots did not even care whether or not foodstuffs were produced in the British Empire, thus prompting the creation of an “Empire Marketing Board” in 1926.) Despite the fact that they have been conditioned to provide SOLE answers when formally quizzed on their shopping habits, today’s British consumers are apparently still behaving like previous generations. 47 This, we will argue, is the right path for all consumers to pursue. Getting the most for your hard-earned dollar is not only enlightened self-interest, but also the best way to create a better world.

  1

  The Globalization of the Food Supply Chain and Its Discontents

  The railroad, the steamship, the telephone, and the tele- graph have opened to us a world market and world com- merce. The novelty of these opportunities has caused them to be used to excess. Man may be said to have gone on a transportation spree, a very orgy of transportation. We have unduly separated man’s home space from his sustenance space, to the detriment of both sustenance and home . . . Mr. Ross [Department of Food Supply, Com- mittee of Public Safety of Pennsylvania] worked out a plan which should some day be applied to every community in every civilized country if modern society improves as we have reason to expect it to do. The plan is to study the local food needs and the possibilities of local food production, and so far as is feasible to make the locality feed itself.

  —JOSEPH RUSSELL SMITH. 1919.

  The World’s Food Resources.

  H. Holt & Company, pp. 566 and 5681

  In the words of urbanists Branden Born and Mark Purcell, the “local trap” is the “tendency of food activists and researchers to assume something inherent about the local scale” in terms of the values they hold dear, from democracy, social justice, and food security to ecological sustainability, better nutrition, freshness, and quality.2 A logical outcome of this stance is to consider large multinational corporations inherently bad and “foreign” goods suspect. According to some evolutionary psychologists, our natural propensity to favor members of our community over distant people3 owes much to our foraging heritage because, for countless generations, human beings were group and territory-based creatures. The fact that these instincts are still very much with us today can be observed at any meaningful sporting event involving rival teams. Nonetheless, all economically prosperous episodes in human history have been characterized to one degree or another by the expansion of a community’s food provisioning.

  A Short History of the Global Food Supply Chain4

  With the exception of nomadic groups, most of the food supply of our hunter and gatherer ancestors came from within a rather limited territory. At some point, though, humans developed what the economist Adam Smith described in 1776 as the propensity “to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another,” a capacity which proved so advantageous in evolutionary terms that it became “common to all men.”5 Although much debate still surrounds the origins of trade (for instance, did it first occur within or between groups?), no one disputes that it is substantially older than the development of agriculture and many suggest that from its beginning it probably entailed interactions between and beyond “local” communities. Until time travel is developed, however, the study of the ancient long distance trade in food will remain difficult as, unlike stones and bones, perishable items left very little trace in the archeological record. More recent evidence nonetheless suggests that it might have been significant in some locations. For instance, before European contact, the native inhabitants of a portion of northern British Columbia, who lived in three different yet adjacent climatic and biotic zones (the Pacific coast, the boreal forest, and the interior plateau), traded goods such as dried seaweed, edible candlefish grease, and dried salmon for items such as moose hides and caribou and other meat. As stated by some of their descendants: “No one community existed in economic isolation, and the use or value of resources was not limited to its place of harvesting . . . [the regional economy] was never isolationist [and] combined elements of domestic production and consumption with an elaborate complex of trading networks.”6

  For approximately 90% of their existence, anatomically modern humans managed to survive without practicing what we now call agriculture. 7 In time, though, some wild plant and animal species were domesticated, meaning that they were brought under human control and gradually modified, at first through selection, breeding, hybridization, and grafting to which would later be added exposure to potent chemicals and irradiation,8 and rDNA technologies. As a result, plants and livestock were progressively given features better suited to human ends, from larger seeds and simultaneous ripening to a greater capacity to convert biomass into meat and less aggressive behavior.9 Significant and rapid advances in this respect preceded the advent of modern agribusiness. As the economic historians Alan L. Olmstead and Paul W. Rhode observe in their 2008 survey of American agricultural history, the varieties of corn, wheat, fruits, cotton, and tobacco grown at the beginning of the 20th century were dramatically different from the varieties grown one hundred years earlier, while 1940s farm animals such as swine, sheep, and cattle bore little resemblance to those of 1800.10 Of course, along the way innovative farmers adopted and adapted domesticated plants and animals that had been developed in distant lands, such as in the “Columbian exchange” that followed the incorporation of the Americas into the world economy more than 500 years ago. Native American contributions included edible crops like the tomato, potato, sweet potato, chili pepper, cocoa, pineapples, beans, cassava, and corn, as well as tobacco and some varieties of cotton. Many products refined in the Old World, from wheat, rice, and soybeans to onions and peaches and virtually all of its domestic animals, traveled west and significantly altered the American landscape.

  Along with the rise of agriculture, permanent human settlements gradually increased in size, numbers, and economic diversity. Indeed, regardless of the location or time period, economic growth has never occurred without the development of cities. There are several reasons for this. In short, the geographical agglomeration of diverse economic activities makes possible the profitable operation of a transportation hub through which firms can better serve a broad range of activities (both in local and more distant markets) while facilitating the lucrative transformation of production residuals, such as when a manufacturer of wood alcohol uses as its main input the sawdust created by a nearby sawmill.11 Being located next door to suppliers, customers and creative people in general facilitate the diffusion and development of a broader range of skills and the launching of new innovative businesses. Urban labor markets are also much larger and diversified than those of rural areas and smaller towns, thus making it considerably easier for entrepreneurs and managers to find the specialized or temporary workers they need and for individuals to invest in the acquisition of ever more refined skills.

  A compelling description of some of these unique features of large cities was p
enned more than two millennia ago by the Greek historian and philosopher Xenophon:In a small city, the same man must make beds and chairs and ploughs and tables, and often build houses as well; and, indeed, he will be only too glad if he can find enough employers in all trades to keep him. Now, it is impossible that a single man working at a dozen crafts can do them all well; but in the great cities, owing to the wide demand for each particular thing, a single craft will suffice for a means of livelihood, and often enough, even a single department of that; there are shoemakers who will only make sandals for men and others only for women. Or one artisan will get his living merely by stitching shoes, another by cutting them out, a third by shaping the upper leathers, and a fourth will do nothing but fit the parts together. Necessarily, the man who spends all his time and trouble on the smallest task will do that task the best.12

  In the end, the crucial differences between urban and rural folks is not that the former are inherently harder working and more creative, but rather that they have access to more opportunities to specialize and act on their insights and vision, and to turn them into economic realities.

  In the words of economist Edward Glaeser, there is “a near-perfect correlation between urbanization and prosperity across nations.” This is now as obvious as ever as the per capita income in countries with a majority of people living in cities is nearly four times higher than in countries where a majority of people still live in rural areas.13 And despite long-standing predictions that recent advances in transportation and communication technologies (going back to the development of the railroad and the telegraph) will reverse this trend, it shows no sign of abating.14 To give but a few numbers, the proportion of the world’s population living in cities remained below 5% for most of history and even in the most advanced societies of past periods, from the Roman Empire to Ming Dynasty China, probably never exceeded 10%. In 1800, less than 10% of the U.S. population lived in urban areas while between 70 and 80% of the working population in the richest economies of the time was still engaged in agriculture. Back then, only two cities—London and Beijing—had populations exceeding one million individuals. By 2000, there were 378. The average size of the world’s 100 largest cities was 0.7 million inhabitants in 1900, 2 million in 1950 and 6.3 million in 2000. In 1900, one could count 6.7 rural dwellers to each urban dweller worldwide. In 2008, for the first time in history, the world’s urban population exceeded its rural population, and, at more than 3 billion people, was actually larger than the world’s total population in 1960. According to recent UN projections, by 2025 there will be at least three urban to two rural dwellers. By 2050, approximately 70% of the world’s population will be living in cities.15