No one denies that our modern food system can be improved in various ways and for a long time to come—we personally look forward to the day when humans will be able to “grow” or clone cuts of meat without having to raise and kill animals—but critics should at least try to understand why we now produce food the way we do. Could it be, for instance, that some varieties of heirloom plants were abandoned because they not only had lower yields, but were also less resistant to diseases and bad weather or else displayed significant challenges, such as less regular ripening, shorter shelf lives, and lesser resistance to mechanical handling and transportation? That, for all their flaws in terms of taste, Iceberg lettuces and Elberta peaches provided the best fresh options in quality and price when alternatives were unavailable? Perhaps one hears comparatively little about heritage animal breeds not only because of their lower feed-to-meat conversion ratios (the amount of feed needed to produce a pound of meat), but also because they didn’t taste that good and were more aggressive creatures? Finally, isn’t it conceivable that those who espouse the notion that we should go back to “the sort of food our great grandmothers would recognize” are forgetting that our great grandmothers’ great grandmothers would have heartily embraced the variety of new products available at the turn of the 20th century, from canned condensed milk and soups to breakfast cereals, frozen meat, and tropical offerings, such as fresh bananas?1
Isn’t it possible that crushing bugs and removing weeds by hands were neither very effective nor the most productive use of one’s time? That seeds purchased from commercial suppliers offered access to superior genetic material, were not mixed up with unwanted material and were readily available when needed? That “natural” manure has always been dirty, smelly, chock full of pathogens, and requires several months of composting? That the “slow release” of nutrients from green manures and organic compost could never be as adequately controlled to match crop demands with nutrient supply as is now possible with synthetic fertilizers? Further, that old mineral (including arsenic) and plant-based pesticides were less harmful to plant pests (and thereby more likely to promote insect resistance) and more problematic to human health than more recent offerings? That introducing nonnative insects, mammals, and bacteria in a new ecosystem often had unintended, broader, and longer-lasting negative consequences for non-targeted species?2 And that, unlike chemical pesticides that typically do not persist in an ecosystem once application has ceased, exotic insects who have successfully adapted to a new environment are practically impossible to eradicate and do not remain confined to one geographical location? In the end, why are modern agricultural producers willing to purchase costly synthetic inputs, hormonal growth promoters, antibiotics, and genetically modified seeds when the methods agri-intellectuals prefer are either completely free (such as giving up on the use of these inputs and on equipment such as poultry housing) or seemingly much cheaper (such as feeding cattle entirely on pastureland and saving one’s seeds instead of relying on those marketed by specialized producers)?
On the retail side, perhaps supermarkets and large chain stores displaced farmers’ markets because of their more convenient hours, better parking conditions, greater mastery of logistics and inventory management, higher quality products, lower prices, and superior record in terms of food safety. On the latter topic, couldn’t it be the case that the risk that large processing plants will spread pathogens over long distances is mitigated by the fact that they have better technologies to detect, control, and track such problems in the first place? And let’s not forget that the long distance trade in food and agricultural inputs had the not inconsequential result of eradicating famine and malnutrition wherever it became significant.
Some locavores may continue to believe that our globalized food supply chain is the result of colonial and corporate agri-business raiders who crushed small farmers, packers, and retailers the world over simply because they could. But we contend that modern practices are but the latest in a long line of innovations, the ultimate goal of which has always been to increase the accessibility, quality, reliability, and affordability of humanity’s food supply. And if we may be so blunt, how many activists still use locally manufactured electric typewriters and copper-wired rotary-dial phones to spread their message and set up “grassroots” links between food consumers and producers?3 How many move around in horse-drawn tramways, Ford Model Ts, or even old-fashioned roller skates with parallel wheels? How many would trust doctors, meteorologists and computer engineers clinging to 1940s technology? If nonlocal modern technologies are good enough to serve the locavores’ needs, why aren’t they also desirable for agricultural producers?
We covered much historical material in this book in our attempt to look beyond the anti-corporate, romantic, and protectionist underpinnings of locavorism and to illustrate the rationale behind improvements in food production, processing, and transportation technologies, along with the benefits of an ever broader division of agricultural labor. To quote the historian Paul Johnson, the study of history “is a powerful antidote to contemporary arrogance,” for it is always humbling “to discover how many of our glib assumptions, which seem to us novel and plausible, have been tested before, not once but many times, and in innumerable guises; and discovered to be, at great human cost, wholly false.”4 The available historical evidence tells us that locavorism, far from being a step forward, can only deliver the world our ancestors gladly escaped from,s and which subsistence farmers mired in similar circumstances around the world would also escape if given opportunities to trade. It would not only mean lower standards of living and shorter life expectancy, but also increased environmental damage and social turmoil.
Perhaps the most fitting conclusion to our book is in the words of the American lawyer and legislator William Bourke Cockran, made famous by Winston Churchill in his 1946 “iron curtain” speech: “There is enough for all. The earth is a generous mother; she will provide in plentiful abundance for all her children if they will but cultivate her soil in justice and peace.”5 And, we would add, if they will trade ever more with each other.
EPILOGUE
It was during the 2009–2010 academic year that Pierre and I packed our bags and hit the American interstate highway system en route from Toronto to Bozeman, Montana, where we would stay for several months before moving on to Durham, North Carolina, for a semester. This was my first time crossing “fly-over” country at ground level. Over the next several months we would travel more than 35,000 miles, and I would get to experience some of America’s commercial landscapes, national parks, villages, small towns, and cities.
Life in a beautiful small college town in Montana was a completely new experience for me, a born and bred city girl. I enjoyed some juicy bison burgers at Ted’s Montana Grill (a chain owned by media mogul Ted Turner) and a few other local delicacies, although for someone used to the diversity of Toronto’s foodscape and a sushi purist, it proved a bit challenging at times. Fortunately, the globalized food supply chain had already worked its magic. Many once “exotic” food items were in ready supply at the local grocery store: tofu, good quality soy sauce, bean sprouts—I even discovered Vietnamese rice paper at Wal-Mart!
Traversing the middle part of the United States, I got the opportunity to visit once thriving Native American settlements (Mesa Verde, Chaco Canyon, and the Cahokia Mounds) where the local inhabitants had obviously belonged to wider trading and cultural networks. I experienced a wide array of agricultural landscapes: pasturelands in the Shenandoah Valley and Wyoming; apple orchards in Virginia; dairy farms in Wisconsin; wheat fields in Montana; cotton fields in Georgia; abandoned tobacco fields in North Carolina that had reverted to forests; and many other agricultural landscapes. Most impressive, though, was the sea of corn that surrounded us from Ohio to North Dakota. To locavores and food activists this is probably the most despicable part of America, but I couldn’t help but think how much worse off we would all be without it—and be thoroughly impressed by how much of an agricu
ltural powerhouse the United States is.
Americans seem to take their extraordinary agricultural sector for granted and, in my experience, are typically unable to imagine that sometimes things can go horribly wrong. I never experienced hunger myself, but my parents did. My father was born in Tokyo in 1936 and my mother in Kyushu in 1941. They both suffered through the deprivations of the Second World War and its aftermath. As a child, my father, like many others, was sent away to the Japanese countryside in order to escape the firebombing of his city. To this day he can’t stand kabocha squashes and sweet potatoes, as these were the only foods available to him—and even then, he was not fed the sweet potato itself but the vines. My mother told me more times than I care to remember that one of her dreams as a child was to get the opportunity to eat a full bowl of rice. She was the youngest of ten children, only five of whom made it to the age of 20. One of my surviving aunts, severely malnourished as a child, suffered significant rheumatism and osteoporosis for the rest of her life as a result.
True, many other people have had it worse than the Japanese and the members of my family. Yet, it seems that one of the main lessons to be learned from my native country’s experience over the last century and a half is that pushes towards autarkic food policies can only result in disaster. As we wrote in the book—and as many other people have said before us—if goods don’t cross borders, armies eventually will. My parent’s generation is living proof that what militaristic people thought they could only achieve by force can be accomplished much more effectively and successfully through free trade and peace. And, just as important, globalization affords people all kinds of possibilities. About half a century ago, my parents never imagined how abundant and affordable their future food supply would turn out to be (let alone that one of their children would marry a foreigner and move to Canada).
As the Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker observes in The Better Angels of Our Nature, we may be living in the most peaceful time in our species’ existence. This blessed state of affairs, though, was a long time coming and was only made possible through the worldwide exchange of products, resources, ideas, and culture. Despite our current economic woes, we have almost vanquished famine. Most of us live longer, healthier, safer, and more enjoyable lives than previous generations. It seems incumbent upon us to put forward some constructive proposals to improve the global food supply chain rather than turn back the clock to some imagined era of pastoral bliss that most people escaped from when given the opportunity. Growing more and better quality food, and doing so ever more efficiently, healthily, safely, and sustainably is what we should aim for.
Food cosmopolitanism is in everybody’s and the planet’s best interest. It is my hope that “Buy Local” will soon be replaced by the more desirable slogan, “Buy Global—The Planet Is Our Garden!”
—Hiroko Shimizu
NOTES
Foreword
1 Beverly Bell. 2010. “Groups around the US Join Haitian Farmers in Protesting ‘Donation’ of Monsanto Seeds.” Other Worlds (June 4) http://www.otherworldsarepossible.org/another-haiti-possible/groups-around-us-join-haitian-farmers-protesting-donation-monsanto-seeds.
2 Beverly Bell. 2010. “Haitian Farmers Commit to Burning Monsanto Hybrid Seeds.” Other Worlds (May 17) http://www.otherworldsarepossible.org/another-haiti-possible/haitian-farmers-commit-burning-monsanto-hybrid-seeds.
3 Ingo Potrykus. 2010. “Regulation must be Revolutionized.” Nature 466: 561.
4 Matthew Ridley. 2011. “Why Deny Biotech to a Hungry Africa?” Wall Street Journal (December 10) http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204770404577080264187783818.html.
Preface
1 According to a rough estimate, Japanese people suffered on average one year of famine out of seven between 600 AD and 1885. The last major famine to hit the islands occurred in the 1830s (see Osamu Saito. 2002. “The Frequency of Famines as Demographic Correctives in the Japanese Past.” In Tim Dyson and Cormac Ó Gráda (eds). Famine Demography: Perspectives from the Past and Present . Oxford University Press, pp. 218–239). For readers fluent in Japanese, see the Japanese Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries discussion of what present day self-sufficiency would entail in terms of available food supply at http://www.maff.go.jp/j/zyukyu/index.html.
2 We discuss these issues in much greater detail in chapter 4.
3 See their “Enterprise Africa” initiative http://mercatus.org/enterprise-africa.
4 Pierre Desrochers and Hiroko Shimizu. 2008. Yes, We Have No Bananas. A Critique of the “Food Miles” Perspective. Mercatus Policy Series Primer no. 8, Mercatus Center (George Mason University) http://mercatus.org/publication/yes-we-have-no-bananas-critique-food-miles-perspective?id=24612.
5 On average, farmers in African countries use 8 kilograms of synthetic fertilizers per hectare as opposed to 107 kilograms in the developing world as a whole.
6 Bruce Gardner. 2003. “U.S. Agriculture in the Twentieth Century”. In Robert Whaples (ed.) EH.Net Encyclopedia http://eh.net/encyclopedia/article/gardner.agriculture.us.
7 Malnutrition or undernutrition refers to either or both a calorie and micronutrient (vitamins and minerals) deficit. Stunting occurs when an individual’s stature is too short relative to his or her age and wasting when his or her weight is too low. For a more detailed introduction to the topic and the latest statistics on world hunger, see the “Hunger Portal” of the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) of the United Nations at http://www.fao.org/hunger/en/.
Introduction
1 Columella’s two millennia–old text is freely available at http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Columella/de_Re_Rustica/Praefatio*.html #ref1.
2 Pépin has discussed his failed doctoral proposal in a few venues, such as in Grace Russo Bullaro. 2009. “Blue Collar, White Hat: The Working Class Origins of Celebrity Superstar Jacques Pepin.” The Columbia Journal of American Studies, Volume 9 (Fall), pp. 28–47 http://www.columbia.edu/cu/cjas/Jacques_Pepin.html.
3 Pollan’s website is at http://michaelpollan.com/ For an online synthesis of his policy thinking, see Michael Pollan. 2008. “Farmer in Chief.” New York Times Magazine (October 9) http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/12/magazine/12policy-t.html.
4 As of this writing, less than 0.6% of the U.S. population was employed as full-time farmers while several others supplemented their farm production income with other off-farms sources of revenue. For a concise portrait of the evolution of this sector in the context of the overall U.S. economy, see Carolyn Dimitri, Anne Effland, and Neilson Conklin. 2005. The 20th Century Transformation of U.S. Agriculture and Farm Policy. Electronic Information Bulletin No. 3, USDA http://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/eib3/eib3.htm. The reference to lawyers is borrowed from Peter C. Timmer. 2009. A World without Agriculture? The Historical Paradox of Agricultural Development. Development Policy Outlook, American Enterprise Institute, May http://www.aei.org/docLib/01%20DPO%20May%202009g.pdf.
5 In essence, vitalism is the belief that a molecule produced in a bird’s or a cow’s stomach is inherently superior to a chemically identical molecule produced through industrial processes.
6 Professor Tom Perrault, Department of Geography, Syracuse University, course syllabus for GEO 400: Food: A Critical Geography https://www.maxwell.syr.edu/uploadedFiles/faculty/geo/Food.pdf.
7 GRAIN (Genetic Resources Action International). 2008. “Making a Killing from Hunger” Against the Grain (April) http://www.grain.org/articles/?id=39.
8 Michael Pollan. 2008. “Farmer in Chief.” New York Times Magazine (October 9) http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/12/magazine/12policy-t.html.
9 The label “SOLE food” is usually traced back to a 2006 entry on the Ethi-curean blog.
10 A typical statement to this effect is Bryan Walsh. 2009. “Getting Real about the High Price of Cheap Food,” Time (August 21) http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1917458,00.html See also John Ikerd. 2005. “Eating Local: A Matter of Integrity” Paper presented at the at The Eat Local
Challenge (Eco Trust, Portland, OR), June 2, available at http://web.missouri.edu/~ikerdj/papers/Alabama-Eat%20Local.htm.
11 Of course, political problems still prevent nearly one individual in seven from eating a satisfactory diet, but political problems rather than food production per se are the real cause of this situation.
12 The terms “localvorism” and “localvores” are also used by some activists. Our choice of “locavore” was motivated by its more common usage and its selection as “word of the year” by the New Oxford American Dictionary in 2007.
13 Anonymous. 2009. “Tom Vilsack, The New Face Of Agriculture.” The Washington Post (February 11) http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/story/2009/02/10/ST2009021002624.html.
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