This mindset characterized a dominant segment of the Athenian elite more than two millennia ago when they made economic self-sufficiency (autarkeia) one of their main goals. Autarky, they argued, would make their compatriots freer by minimizing their dependence on international trade. Because all geographical territories, even the largest ones, suffer from resource shortcomings of some kind, this stance inexorably led to the creation of an “Athenian empire” to access vital commodities that were in short supply locally. In later centuries, classical Roman agricultural writers such as Cato the elder, Pliny the Elder, and Varro all praised self-sufficiency, and autarkic instincts undoubtedly played their part in shaping the course of Roman imperial history.39
Closer to us, a century ago in Japan, the push for greater autarky became ever stronger after agricultural protectionists politically defeated industrialists (and their workers) and managed to block rice imports in 1904. Even though this policy stance resulted in domestic prices that were 30% above world prices during World War I and, later, shortages that caused food riots, the Japanese government went ever further down that road by embarking on an imperialistic drive with the avowed goal of producing all of their own rice, mostly by developing production in its Korean and Taiwanese colonies. One result of the “fortress Japan” pursuit was that, by the late 1930s, Nippon rice prices were 60% above the international rate. Despite having been crushed soon afterwards, Japanese authorities never changed course in this respect and decided by the end of the Second World War to expand this tariff protection to a wider range of agricultural products, thus essentially taxing over 99% of the population to support a few uncompetitive agricultural producers.40
Historically, the push for greater agricultural self-sufficiency was never limited to political and military leaders bent on imperialistic pursuits, but also often included a fair number of romantic ideologues, politically connected nationalists, supporters of “good old” and “small is beautiful” ways, and farmers who had no qualms about using the latest technologies but insisted on keeping out the products of their foreign competitors. By and large, past initiatives reminiscent of today’s locavore movement were motivated either by economic recessions (to boost regional economic activity or as a form of protection against price inflation), wars or their threat (to increase local food security), romantic impulses during relatively prosperous times (as a way to live in greater harmony with nature and as a form of dissent from market-oriented society), a deep-seated belief that modern transportation systems were inherently inefficient and wasteful (compared to direct links between producers and final consumers), and a profound dislike of allegedly redundant (if not outright parasitical) profit-seeking intermediaries. A brief discussion of some past American initiatives to promote increased community food reliance will now set the stage for a broader discussion of the inherent flaws of locavorism.
As should be expected, the American pioneers of what could be termed the “romantic” wing of the local food movement originated from some of the wealthiest and most economically advanced regions of the country. After all, “moving back to the land” implies that you have other opportunities available, something that was obviously not the case for subsistence farmers. Best known are the New England Transcendentalists, who rejected science and objective experience as a basis for developing knowledge in favor of intuitive thought processes that transcended the physical and empirical world. Their creed included the dismissal of “urban life in favor of nature in all its wildness.” Their best known representative was Henry David Thoreau, whose classic 1854 work, Walden; or, Life in the Woods, criticized the division of labor on the grounds that it removed people from a sense of connectedness with society and with the world at large and nature in particular.41
There were other attempts by New Englanders of the era to experiment with various alternative lifestyles, including efforts to rebuild community spirit around small-scale and self-sufficient farming communities. One was Brook Farm (also known as the Brook Farm Institute of Agriculture and Education), a socialist cooperative of the early 1840s where each member could select the work he or she found most appealing and where all would be paid equally, regardless of gender or the task performed. Revenues for the community were to be based on farming and from selling handmade products (especially clothing), through fees from paying visitors, and from tuition fees for the school located on the premises.
Another was Fruitlands, whose founders wished to pursue the ideals of simplicity, sincerity, and brotherly love. This would be best achieved, they thought, by withdrawing from the market economy, which the leader of the experiment, Bronson Alcott (the father of Louisa May Alcott of Little Women fame), described as having selfishness as its roots, property as its trunk, and gold as its fruit. Its members would forego trade and strive for self-sufficiency by growing their own food, holding all property communally, and keeping material possessions to a minimum. While residents were expected to subsist on farming, they were forbidden to use animal labor and to eat or use any animal substance, including milk, honey, eggs, and wool (in modern parlance, they were ethical vegans). Other peculiar rules included interdictions to drink anything other than water (this rule specifically targeted stimulants such as tea and coffee), to use artificial light, and to heat water for bathing.
Not surprisingly, if Brook Farm managed to last a few years, Fruitlands was abandoned after less than one.42
Similar sentiments would later be echoed by a wide range of Americans, from the so-called American Dutch Utopia painters at the turn of the 20th century who created visions of Holland that celebrated a preindustrial lifestyle,43 to the Southern Agrarian writers of the 1920s and 1930s who opposed the urbanization, industrialization, and internationalization of their country. And then there were the hippies of the 1960s and 1970s. Perhaps as many as a million of them temporarily moved “back to the land” and attempted to live from it before most eventually abandoned rural bliss and returned to the trappings of civilization.
There is also a long history of politically-driven attempts to promote local food production in urban settings in times of economic depression. Much like the rise of agrarian romanticism, it was a reaction—in this case to the fact that much old-fashioned urban food production had vanished. One such initiative was the “Urban Potato Patches” launched in Detroit during the depression of the 1890s, in which municipal authorities asked owners of vacant lots to allow unemployed individuals to grow vegetables on their land. The measure was soon copied by mayors of other large cities at the time, while urban gardening as something of a social welfare policy would reappear in various forms and labels (“Garden City Plots,” “Depression Relief Gardens,” “Welfare Garden Plots,” and “Community Gardens,” among others) over the next century.44
Many readers will no doubt be familiar with the “Liberty Gardens” and “Victory Gardens” of the First and Second World Wars. Among the most interesting sources on the topic is a collection of wartime local food posters now available on the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) website.45 With little tweaks in language, design, and content, some of these, such as the one found in the figure on the opposite page produced in 1917, would not seem out of place in today’s farmers markets.
Source: USDA 1917: War Era Food Posters http://www.good-potato.com/beans_are_bullets/chapter2/ch2gallery6.html
The spirit behind such efforts during World War I was well captured by Charles Lathrop Pack, the President of the National Emergency Food Garden Commission, who observed that it wasconservative to state that by the planting of gardens where none grew before the nation’s food supply has been increased to the extent of more than $350,000,000. The canning and drying movement has brought back to thousands of American households an art almost forgotten since our grandmothers’ days. This particularly applies to the drying of vegetables and fruits which this year, in addition to canning, is being done by good housewives far beyond any anticipation.46
These results, he later added, were especially r
emarkable in light of the fact that this food was raised where none had “been produced in peacetime, with labor not engaged in agricultural work and not taken from any other industry, and in places where it made no demand upon the railroad already overwhelmed with transportation burdens.”47
Less well-remembered than wartime gardening policies are the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Administration’s promotion during the 1930s of “subsistence homesteads”—the best known being Arthurdale in West Virginia—into which impoverished laborers and coal miners could relocate and revert back to the land. From their beginnings, however, these experiments proved to be money-losing propositions that only lasted as long as their government funding.48
Sophisticated critiques of the modern food supply chain and proposals remarkably similar to those now put forward by locavores also have a long history. For instance, in 1918, Morris Llewellyn Cooke, then a former Director of Public Works of the City of Philadelphia, asked why do strawberries go from Selbyville, Delaware [the largest strawberry-shipping point in the United States at the time], to Philadelphia, 104 miles distant, to be resold and go back again over the same route as far as Wilmington, Delaware, 27 miles away, to be hauled to the storage house of the commission man, again sold, and hauled by huckster’s team fourteen miles to reach the consumer at Kennett Square, Pennsylvania? … Any quality left in the berries after the last leg of this roundabout journey is due rather to the providence of God than to the wisdom of men.49
Cooke added that the berries lost between 25 to 35% of their value during the trip, a “relatively simple and obvious example of the want of organization in the marketing of our local products.” To his amazement, however, the railroad managers of the time “ridiculed all proposals to effect any advantageous changes in the cities’ food supply through the encouragement of local shipments and the local consumption of locally grown foods.”50
In another study published in 1913, Clyde Lyndon King, a political scientist at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, argued that perhaps as much as a third of the price of foodstuffs in northeastern American cities could be traced back to “cartage and delivery costs” and “retailers’ profits,” a share he deemed excessive.51 In 1916, Henry W. Collingwood, editor of the Rural New Yorker, described the distribution system of his time as “so costly, cumbersome, and complicated that it is little short of robbery of both producer and consumer.”52 The future American President, Herbert Hoover, similarly attributed the high cost of food in cities at the time to “faulty transportation” and the multiplicity of “wholesaler, transportation agent, commission man, cold-storage warehouse, food manufacturer [and] retailer,” that each needed to make a separate profit on their investment.”53 (More recently, Michael Pollan apparently hit upon the same line of thought when he suggested that the USDA “should make grants to rebuild local distribution networks in order to minimize the amount of energy used to move produce within local food sheds.”54)
Early 20th century American local food activists were given an opportunity to test their ideas during the First World War when the Hoover-run U.S. Food Administration promoted a “policy of local consumption of the vicinity-grown produce.”55 King believed that wartime conditions would make it possible to demonstrate that “to clear the way from the farm to the city and from the city to the farm” would “decrease the farmer’s transportation costs and the amount of time spent in marketing his goods; . . . enhance the facilities through which the stores in the small towns can handle more economically both their incoming and outgoing freight;” and “extend the bounds of social life in each agricultural district.” Efficient trolley freight service to outlying areas, he added, would “give to the retail stores a smaller transportation charge; give to Philadelphia’s manufacturing establishments and stores increased facilities for sales; and give to Philadelphia’s consumers fresher produce at better prices.”56
Meanwhile, a Pennsylvania agricultural extension employee by the name of A. B. Ross proposed a “point of origin plan for marketing” whose key objective was to “reduce transportation to a minimum.” This, in turn, would allowthe feeding of each community, as far as possible, with food from within its own natural trading area, and the laying by of dried, canned, and stored reserves of food from local sources; the keeping of community money within the community area, and using it for community development; the making of each community a self-contained, self-sustaining, compact trading unit; the development of the smaller community centers into exporters of food to the larger cities, reversing the present system whereby natural food-producing areas are importing food.57
Ross argued that this plan had been built upon “ten years of patient study, labor, and experimental marketing carried on jointly by farmers and myself” and had met “with the instant, unqualified, and enthusiastic endorsement of the great mass of farmers to whom it has been submitted, and who joined the ranks of nonproducers of city food because they could not make production profitable.” His most detailed case study had been conducted in Altoona, then a railroad hub of 58,000 inhabitants. According to his 1915 food survey, of a total annual food bill of $4,200,000, “not less than $1,680,000 [had been spent] for a riot of transportation and retransportation, handling and rehandling, commissioning, jobbing, and the allowance for waste which the retailer must make knowing the condition of the produce when it reaches him.”58
Commenting on Ross’s proposal, the economic geographer Joseph Russell Smith added that approximately 80% of the city’s perishable goods were delivered by train, “often [from] long distances” and were therefore chiefly “stale and therefore tasteless, unappetizing and partially inedible vegetables.” This situation was actually “typical not only of the small town, but also of the great city” and helped “explain why the way of the vegetarian [was] hard” to follow and why Americans farmers were keen to convert most of their crops into animal meat.59 If replicated on a large scale, the geographer argued, Ross’s plan would allow5,000 little towns each [to be fed] with good fresh, home-made vegetable food from its own local plant. It would eliminate the waste of vegetables so common in farmers’ gardens, for the farmer is not in a position to handle small surpluses. It would eliminate waste of labor by greatly reducing railroad freightage; it would reduce waste of work and lumber by saving the making of thousands of packages. It would reduce waste of labor and money, for middlemen’s work and profits would not need to be paid. It would reduce the price of meat, because people would have more abundant and satisfying supplies of substitute foods. By giving to the farmers around every population center the local market for twelve months in a year, it would aid greatly in the intensification of our agriculture and in its fine adjustment to need. We are at the present time a nation that is freight car crazy. We are also crazed by freight car shortage. Next year it will be worse. Here is a way out. Such a point-of-origin standardized plant would give the small town its natural and proper advantage of a lower cost of living than any great city could rival.60
In subsequent years, a number of grants were made available to agricultural economists to study local food markets and assess the sensibility of these earlier “eat local” proposals.61 In recent decades, too, numerous governmental and activist-based initiatives have promoted local food production in contexts ranging from American inner cities to Native American reservations.62
Clearly, much historical and recent material can be brought to bear on the current “local food” rhetoric—and we haven’t even said anything about the history of similar attempts in Europe.63 As we will now argue, all the available evidence suggests that locavorism is a fundamentally futile and counterproductive endeavor that repeatedly failed because of sound reasons and not because of conspiracies involving big agricultural interests. Locavores might wax poetic about wartime gardening and other past initiatives, but the fact remains that none of them lasted once most people had other options available to them. As the social reformer Frederic Clemson Howe observed nearly a century ago:To many people t
he city is an evil that exacts so terrible a tribute of misery that they would have us “return to the land.” They dream of an age of rural simplicity in which wealth and want no longer stare each other in the face. They would stem the tide to the city and turn back the movements of a century and re-establish the conditions of our fathers. To them the city is not the hope, it is the despair of civilization. But the tide will never turn. Back to the land is an idle dream. We can no more restore the pastoral age than we can go back to the spindle and the loom.64
We will now begin our detailed critique of the locavore rhetoric and policy agenda with the seemingly innocuous claim that getting farmers and end consumers to know each other directly improves a community’s social capital.
2
Myth #1: Locavorism Nurtures Social Capital
When each village was a virtually self-sufficing economic unit, some sense that he was helping to feed his neighbor must have accompanied the work of the husbandman who tilled the soil; but the Dakota farmer, whose wheat will pass into an elevator in Chicago and after long travel will go to feed some unknown family in Glasgow or in Hamburg can hardly be expected to have the same feeling for the social end which his tilling serves.
The Locavore's Dilemma Page 6