The Locavore's Dilemma

by Pierre Desrochers

  Urban agglomerations have always proved essential for agricultural advances, be it in terms of providing the best setting for technological innovations, by offering large and concentrated markets for rural goods, and in generating the capital required to invest in rural development. As the urban theorist Jane Jacobs observed in 1969, agriculture “is not even tolerably productive unless it incorporates many goods and services produced in cities or transplanted from cities. The most thoroughly rural countries exhibit the most unproductive agriculture. The most thoroughly urbanized countries, on the other hand, are precisely those that produce food most abundantly.”16 Of course, many past agricultural advances can be traced back to the work of specialists such as livestock and crop breeders, geneticists, nutritionists, chemical and mechanical engineers, veterinarians, plant pathologists, and soil scientists who were sometimes (but often not) based in more rural regions. Yet, these people typically benefited from other advances first developed in urban contexts.

  The key point for our discussion, however, is that urbanization has long been impossible without substantial food imports from distant locations. As some of Plato’s characters in his Republic observed so long ago, to find a city “where nothing need be imported” was already then “impossible.”17 Some of these included grazing and foraging livestock (such as beef, goats, and sheep) that could transport itself over some distance on land despite the poor state of road transportation at the time. Items that could be shipped by boat covered much more distance. In the Ancient Mediterranean era, these included grain, wine, olive oil, fish sauce and paste, salt, and, to a lesser extent, honey, and spices (some of which came from as far away as India and China).

  Over time, the development of ever better means of transportation (improved sailing ships, canals, and barges; coal, gasoline, diesel, residual fuel oil and kerosene-powered rail locomotives, boats, ships, trucks, and cargo planes; and intermodal shipping containers) and improvements in old ways of preserving food and the development of new ones (from fermenting, drying, smoking, salting, and pickling to canning, juicing, chilling, freezing, and irradiation) provided urban consumers first—and rural consumers later—an ever broader range of commodities that had traveled over long distances, from pickled herrings, salted and dried cods, sugar, coffee, tea, and cocoa to canned fruits, frozen meat and eventually fresh produce, meat, fish, seafood, dairy products, and eggs.18 Apart from increased diversity and volume of supply, advances in transportation also equalized prices between locations. For instance, between 1820 and 1830, the development of steamboats helped reduce the price differential between Cincinnati and New Orleans by 19% for wheat, 68% for mess pork, 84% for coffee, and 74% for sugar.19 In the trans-Atlantic trade, the advent of ever better performing steel hull steamships reduced the cost of transporting a bushel of wheat from Chicago to Liverpool from approximately 37 cents in 1869 to approximately 10 cents in 1905.20

  Until slightly more than a century ago, much food production for the urban population of the world’s most advanced economies still took place within or in close proximity to city limits, especially in the case of items such as produce, animals, and animal products (mostly milk and eggs) that did not travel or keep well, or else could turn urban organic refuse of all kind into edible calories. To give a few less than idyllic illustrations, in Korea and China, “privy pigs” were kept to convert human excrement into meat (in technical terms, these pigs were “scatovores”). Walking through the streets of Manchester, England, in the early 1840s, Friedrich Engels blamed much of the filthy conditions on the Irish workers’ “multitude of pigs walking about in all the alleys, rooting into the offal heaps, or kept imprisoned in small pens.” Urban poultry in 19th century London was fed maggots raised on the carcasses of dead urban work horses.21 Dairy cows converted much swill and brewery by-products into milk. Urban work horses and dairy cows not only gave cities like London a “distinctly agricultural whiff,”22 but also generated valuable manure that was turned to good uses by local produce growers.

  Perhaps the most celebrated past local “urban farmers” were the Parisian maraîchers who, through the use of about one sixth of the city’s area, supporting technologies (from greenhouses to cloches) and very long hours,23 grew more than 100,000 tons of produce annually in the late 19th century.24 Unlike today’s locavores, however, not only did Parisian truck farmers do their best to defy the seasons (they were already producing green asparagus year-round in the 1820s25 and a few decades later had managed to grow significant amounts of pineapples profitably), but they also exported their crops to distant urban markets including London. Interestingly, as two Parisian producers observed in 1845, it was their profession’s ability to defeat seasonality that had significantly enhanced its prestige among the rest of the population while the greatest ambition of all maraîchers was to find ways to be the first to deliver a specific produce to the market in any given year.26

  Residents of the world’s most advanced cities have thus always relied on both distant and local sources of food. For instance, in 1856, the English historian George Dodd listed the geographical origins of the main food commodities sold in London (see opposite page).

  Today, in the largest cities of less advanced economies, approximately 200 million producers and perhaps as many as 800 million consumers rely at least partly on local urban agriculture for their survival. 27 In all rapidly developing economies, however, the unmistakable trend has long been the displacement of urban food producers by more distant and suitably located firms. Apart from the development of better transportation and food preservation technologies, this process was also driven by increases in urban land value that mandated their conversion to more profitable activities; better economic opportunities for urban and peri-urban agricultural workers; the advent of the automobile, which drastically curtailed the local availability of urban horse manure; and epidemic diseases that could be traced back to or affected urban livestock.

  TABLE 1

  Source: Adapted from George Dodd. 1856. The Food of London: A sketch of the chief varieties, sources of supply, probable quantities, modes of arrival, processes of manufacture, suspected adulteration, and machinery of distribution, of the food for a community of two and a half million. Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, pp. 102–103. http://books.google.ca/books?id=wlUZAAAAYAAJ&source=gbs_navlinks_s

  Meat Livestock (general): England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, Denmark

  Bacon & salt meat: Ireland

  Hams: England (Yorkshire), Germany, Spain

  Games: England (Northern Counties), Scandinavia

  Rabbits: England (Southern Counties), Belgium (Ostend)

  Poultry: England (half the counties)

  Eggs Ireland, France

  Fish All the seas around and between the British Islands

  Bread (grain) Western Europe, Eastern Europe (Prussia), Russia (Odessa and Tagarong), USA, Moldavia

  Cheese England (over a dozen counties), Holland, America

  Butter England (over a dozen counties), Ireland, USA

  Milk Within thirty miles of London

  Produce Gardening belt surrounding London, many European countries

  Tea China

  Coffee Ceylon (Sri Lanka), Arabia, Brazil, West Indies

  Cocoa West Indies, South America

  Sugar East Indies, West Indies, Brazil, other tropical countries

  Salt 150 miles from London

  Spices and condiments One half of the circumference of the globe

  Alcohol Brandy: France

  Wine: France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Germany (Rhineland), Hungary

  Whiskey: Scotland, Ireland

  Along with long distance trade and rapid urbanization came an unmistakable trend towards large-scale monocultures and regional specialization. As the American agricultural economist Lorian P. Jefferson observed in 1926, while a few decades before “most communities produced many or all the products they required,” the U.S. agricultural landscape was by then thoroughly dominated by great g
eographic specialization and few sections of the country could now “supply all their own food needs. Areas of production are generally devoted largely to those products for which they are peculiarly adapted by soil and climate” and deficits in local production had to be “made up from distant sources.” Overall, though, improved facilities for transportation and storage had “made available for nearly all markets the products of the entire country in fairly uniform supply, and the variety of our foods has been greatly increased.”28

  Reflecting upon the changes he had witnessed during his lifetime, the San Francisco Chronicle editorialist Edward F. Adams wrote in 1899 that the quasi-subsistence lifestyle of his youth was no longer possible nor agreeable to the American farmer because “it would involve a distinct lowering of our present standard of comfort, which, with all our complaint, is far higher than formerly, and would not result in the same content and consequent survival which the same conditions formerly induced. The impossibility of the life will be seen by any farmer who will trace out what would happen should he attempt it.”29

  The results of these advances was that, as the French agronomist Henri Hitier observed in 1901, for the inhabitants of the world’s most prosperous economies, “the steam engine had eradicated seasonality”30 and that the quality, price, and geographical origins of their food bore little resemblance to the offerings available to previous generations. The geography textbook writers of the time were also fond of describing the increasingly globalized nature of the meals served on American tables. To give but one illustration, one Jacques Redway not only observed in 1907 that there was “scarcely a country in the world that does not yield something or other to civilized peoples… scarcely a household whose furnishings and contents do not represent an aggregate journey of several times around the earth,” but also that a typical middle class New York family would partake for breakfast “of bread made of wheat from Minnesota, and meat from Texas prepared in a range made in St. Louis; coffee grown in Sumatra or Java, or tea from China . . . served in cups made in Japan, sweetened with sugar from Cuba [and food seasoned with] spices from Africa, South America, and Asia.”31

  Interestingly, the distant origins of many food items were often marketed as providing some assurance of superior quality. For instance, in the 1930s, the candy, chocolate, and restaurant chain Schrafft’s advertised that the fresh grapefruits, oranges, and strawberries in its fruit cocktails had cumulatively traveled 7,800 miles to its New York City locations while the components of its vegetable salad had racked up more than 22,250 miles.32 As Redway had observed a few years earlier: “An old saying, ‘All the world feeds the rest of the world,’ is fast coming true.”33

  In the last few decades, the extension of seasonal production using alternative methods such as large-scale greenhouses; the diversification of production locations; transportation advances and deregulation; product-capacity expansion; a growing awareness of the nutritional benefits associated with fresh produce; and the establishment of large-scale temperature-controlled logistic systems built around refrigerated containers and cold-storage facilities have again dramatically expanded the range, quality, volume, and reliability of traded varieties. At the same time, their prices dropped, especially for exotic fruits and vegetables (such as lychees, passion fruits, and Chinese cabbages), salad greens (such as arugula and chicory), and baby vegetables. These changes also brought significant benefits to less developed countries, whose exports of fresh produce have risen significantly in the last few decades—fruits and vegetables now account for more than 20% of their exports—and have not only considerably enriched our daily diet, but also the wallets of previously much poorer agricultural workers in less advanced economies.34

  Of course, the globalization of the food supply chain was not limited to final products such as grains, spices, meat, and produce. Over time, an increasingly wider range and volume of inputs came to be manufactured by specialized producers in comparatively few locations and traded over long distances. For instance, animal producers have long relied on “nonlocal” frozen semen and embryos, animal feed and feed supplements, veterinary products and building structures, plastic products of all kinds, cages, fences, and ventilation, feeding and breeding equipment. For their part, crop producers have come to rely on a wide range of nonlocal seeds, fertilizers, pesticides, fungicides, herbicides, rodenti-cides, desiccants, tractors, combines, sprayers, crop dusting airplanes, plastic sheeting, irrigation systems, global positioning satellite data, and drying, storage and refrigeration systems. For example, for more than two centuries seeds of all kinds have been profitably marketed by private producers, both in order to export domestic surplus and to import foreign material of greater quality. By specializing in one type of crop, seed producers were able to develop higher yielding and more resistant plant material along with various ways to address funga and bacterial diseases. Especially significant in the context of this book is that these firms are typically active in more remote regions or confined environments where diseases often endemic to large-scale production zones are, ideally, entirely absent, where maintaining varietal purity can be more easily achieved, and where more numerous cropping cycles can be realized in shorter periods of time (such as in tropical locations for non-tropical plants). Among other advances, because of their ability to work in both the northern and southern hemispheres, the best seed companies have been able to halve the period of time required to develop new seeds.35

  Food manufacturers have long relied on distant suppliers for additives that affect not only color and flavor, but also extend shelf life while often reducing production costs. People afflicted by diabetes, obesity, and dental decay have benefited from non-nutritive sweeteners such as saccharin, aspartame, and acesulfame K, used in everything from soft drinks and chewing gum to mouthwash. The application of fumigants keeps worms away from grain products such as flour and spices, a problem that was once significant. The fortification of staples such as flour, milk, sugar, and salt with the likes of iron, vitamins, and iodine also had important benefits including eradicating blindness (vitamin A), beriberi (vitamin B1), ariboflavinosis (vitamin B2), pellagra (vitamin B3), anemia (vitamins B6 and B12, iron), scurvy (vitamin C), rickets or insufficiently calcified bones (vitamin D), birth defects (folic acids), and weak immune system and growth (zinc). As with other manufacturing processes where economies of scale are significant, the production of food additives now takes place in a few large plants, some of which are located in India and China.

  To summarize, over a period of a few thousand years, humanity transitioned from foraging, a mode of subsistence that required about 1000 hectares of land to support an individual, to a globalized food supply chain characterized by regionally specialized and extremely productive monocultures, a relatively small number of producers, and a large supporting infrastructure that can feed an individual on perhaps as little as one-tenth of an hectare.36 Much innovation and tampering with nature was required, but long-distance trade also drastically changed the character of our food supply and its availability. In past eras, fresh fruits and vegetables could only be consumed at harvest time, fresh meat only immediately after slaughter and in the winter months, anything ingested had to have been dried, smoked, or steeped in brine. In the last two centuries, however, consumers went from shopping in “dry good” stores to the “permanent summertime” produce sections of progressively larger supermarkets whose ever expanding range of offerings have become only safer, healthier, and considerably more affordable.37

  Perhaps most remarkable, however, has been humanity’s capacity to nearly defeat famine and hunger. As late as 1950, at least 1 billion people out of about 2.5 billion were thought to be going hungry every day. Today the number is below 1 billion out of about 7 billion people. In other words, in about six decades the percentage of the human population that suffered from hunger and malnutrition went from nearly 40% to less than 15% while the absolute number of people who were provided an adequate diet rose from about 1.5 to 6 billion—
an accomplishment even more remarkable given that, if 1950s technologies had been used in later decades, an additional land area equivalent to South America would have needed to be ploughed under in the process.38

  The Call of the Local

  While greater reliance on long-distance trade delivered ever more abundant and affordable goods to consumers and significantly improved overall standards of living, it drew the ire of uncompetitive local producers and of a wide range of people uncomfortable with the social changes brought about by urbanization, the seemingly ever widening disconnect between urban and rural populations, and the perceived over-reliance on foreigners for something as crucial as food. Tapping into these sentiments, countless political leaders throughout history did their best to keep foreign supplies at bay and to increase domestic food production.