The Locavore's Dilemma

by Pierre Desrochers

  14 News Desk. 2011. “USDA Rule Encourages Local Food for School Meals.” Food Safety News (April 29) http://www.foodsafetynews.com/2011/04/usda-rule-to-encourage-local-food-for-school-meals/.

  15 Sherrod Brown. 2011. “Brown Introduces Bill to Expand Markets for Farmers and Increase Access to Local Foods Legislation Would Boost Ohio’s Rural Economy, Improve Consumer Access to Healthy, Fresh Foods.” Press Release, Senator Sherrod Brown Office http://brown.senate.gov/newsroom/press_releases/release/?id=62ee64a8-f401-4387-9b2f-ab35ed0fbacc .

  16 Danna Staaf. 2011. “West Coast Locavores Should Turn Teuthovore.” Science 2.0 (May 25) http://www.science20.com/squid_day/west_coast_locavores_should_turn_teuthovore-79384.

  17 For a concise presentation of these alleged advantages from a proponent of this shopping lifestyle, see Molly Watson. Eight Reasons to Eat Local Foods. Straight-Forward Benefits of Eating Local Foods. About.com Guide http://local-foods.about.com/od/finduselocalfoods/tp/5-Reasons-to-Eat-Local-Foods.htmFor a more detailed discussion of these arguments, see Steve Martinez, Michael Hand, Michelle Da Pra, Susan Pollack, Katherine Ralston, Travis Smith, Stephen Vogel, Shellye Clark, Luanne Lohr, Sarah Low and Constance Newman. 2010. Local Food Systems: Concepts, Impacts, and Issues. Economic Research Report #97. United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Economic Research Service http://www.ers.usda.gov/Publications/ERR97/ERR97.pdf.

  18 Blake Hurst. 2009. “The Omnivore’s Delusion: Against the Agri-Intellectuals.” The American (July 30) http://www.american.com/archive/2009/july/the-omnivore2019s-delusion-against-the-agri-intellectuals/.

  19 Joe Pompeo. 2009 “The Foodiots.” New York Observer (September 22) http://www.observer.com/2009/food-amp-drink/foodiots.

  20 Stephen Budiansky. 2010. “Math Lessons for Locavores.” New York Times (August 19) http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/20/opinion/20budiansky.html.

  21 Ronald Bailey. 2008. “The Food Miles Mistake: Saving the Planet by Eating New Zealand Apples.” Reason.com (November 28) http://reason.com/archives/2008/11/04/the-food-miles-mistake.

  22 Dave Lowry. “The Locavore’s Dilemma: One Critic’s Take.” StLMag.com, September 20, 2010 http://www.stlmag.com/Blogs/Relish/September-2010/The-Locavore-039s-Dilemma/.

  23 Greg Critser. 2001. “Mean Cuisine: Gone Is the Joy of Cooking. Today’s Celebrity Chefs are Serving Up a Menu of Global Doom and Politically Twisted Snobbery.” Washington Monthly (July/August) http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2001/0107.critser.html .

  24 Thomas R. DeGregori. 2004. “Julia Child’s Legacy for the Future.” Health FactsandFears.com, August 16 http://www.acsh.org/factsfears/newsID.436/news_detail.asp.

  25 Art Carden. 2008. “Should we Only Buy Locally Grown Produce?” Mises Daily (July 15) http://mises.org/daily/3026 and “The Locavore’s Dilemma: Local Food, Continued.” Mises Daily (August 18) http://mises.org/daily/3059.

  26 Steven Landsburg. 2010. “Loco-Vores.” The Big Questions (August 23) http://www.thebigquestions.com/2010/08/23/loco-vores/.

  27 Steven Sexton. 2009. “Does Local Production Improve Environment and Health Outcomes?” ARE Updates 13 (2): 5-8 http://giannini.ucop.edu/media/are-update/files/articles/v13n2_2.pdf.

  28 Edward L. Glaeser. 2011. “The Locavore’s Dilemma: Urban Farms Do More Harm than Good to the Environment.” Boston.com (April 16) .http://articles.boston.com/2011-06-16/bostonglobe/29666344_1_greenhouse-gas-carbon-emissions-local-food.

  29 Jayson L. Lusk and F. Bailey Norwood. 2011. “The Locavore’s Dilemma: Why Pineapples Shouldn’t be Grown in North Dakota.” Library of Economics and Liberty (January 3) http://www.econlib.org/library/Columns/y2011/LuskNorwoodlocavore.html.

  30 Robert Paarlberg. 2010. “Attention Whole Food Shoppers.” Foreign Policy May/June http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/04/26/attention_whole_foods_shoppers?page=full.

  31 Gary Blumenthal. 2011. “Creating False Markets.” World Perspectives, Inc. (February), p. 1.

  32 Robert Paarlberg. 2010. “Attention Whole Food Shoppers.” Foreign Policy, May/June http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/04/26/attention_whole_foods_shoppers?page=full.

  33 The Polyface website is at http://www.polyfacefarms.com/ A typical uncritical piece on Salatin’s approach is Bryan Walsh. 2011. “This Land is your Land.” Time (October 24) http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2096846-1,00.html Among other problems usually ignored by his supporters is that his grass-fed cattle requires about twice the lifespan and produces only about half of the meat of modern operations. Chicken are not raised in winter and the stock must be replenished each spring through purchases from conventional operations. Salatin also buys weaner pigs, turkey poults, and many cows from sale barns and lets them run outside together which not only exposes them to sometimes harsh weather conditions and predators, but also facilitates the transmissions of viruses such as influenza among them (to say nothing of the increased risk to the health of nearby humans). (We discuss health and safety issues on operations such as Polyface in more detail in chapter 6.) Of course, such old fashioned practices also mean that, like in the old days, Salatin’s pigs eat a substantial amount of cow manure. According to the SpeakerMix website, Salatin charges between $15,000 and $20,000 per speech http://speakermix.com/joel-salatin. Critics of Salatin’s approach include Nathan Fiala. 2009. “Recent Trip to Polyface Farms.” Post Conflicted (May 27) http://postconflicted.blogspotcom/2009/05/recent-trip-to-polyface-farms.html. and the “About Food, Inc.” webpage of the agriculture industry website SafeFoodInc.com http://www.safefoodinc.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=3&Itemid=11.

  34 Dave Lowry. 2010. “The Locavore’s Dilemma: One Critic’s Take.” StL-Mag. com (September 20) http://www.stlmag.com/Blogs/Relish/September-2010/The-Locavore-039s-Dilemma/.

  35 Greg Critser. 2001. “Mean Cuisine: Gone is the Joy of Cooking. Today’s Celebrity Chefs are Serving Up a Menu of Global Doom and Politically Twisted Snobbery.” Washington Monthly (July/August) http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2001/0107.critser.html.

  36 Dave Lowry. 2010. “The Locavore’s Dilemma: One Critic’s Take.” StL-Mag. com (September 20) http://www.stlmag.com/Blogs/Relish/September-2010/The-Locavore-039s-Dilemma/.

  37 Gary Blumenthal. 2011. “Creating False Markets.” World Perspectives, Inc. (February), p. 1.

  38 Clara Jeffery and Monika Bauerlein. 2009. “Editors’ Note: Want to Fix the Country? Fix Food.” Mother Jones (March / April) http://motherjones.com/toc/2009/03/editors-note.

  39 The USDA program website can be found at http://www.usda.gov/wps/portal/usda/knowyourfarmer?navid=KNOWYOURFARMER. The letter is available at http://www.farmpolicy.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/JM_SC_PR_Know-Your-Farmers.pdf.

  40 Quoted in Linda Baker. 2002. “The Not-so-sweet Success of Organic Farming.” Salon.com (July 29). http://www.salon.com/technology/feature/2002/07/29/organic/print.html.

  41 See Corby Kummer. 2010. “The Great Grocery Smackdown.” The Atlantic (March) http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/03/the-great-grocery-smackdown/7904/ Wal-Mart’s Heritage Agriculture initiative is aimed at farms located within a day’s drive of its warehouses and currently account for between 4 and 6% of its produce sales.

  42 For a recent debate over this issue, see the commentary section of Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems 22 (4), 2007.

  43 See, among others, Robert Paarlberg. 2010. Food Politics. What Everyone Needs to Know, Oxford University Press; Thomas de Gregori. 2002. Bountiful Harvest: Technology, Food Safety and the Environment. Cato Institute; Dennis Avery. 2000. Saving the Planet with Pesticides and Plastics. Hudson Institute; Alex Avery. 2006. The Truth about Organic Foods. Henderson Communications http://www.thetruthaboutorganicfoods.org/; and Nina V. Fedoroff and Nancy Marie Brown. 2004. Mendel in the Kitchen: A Scientist’s View of Genetically Modified Foods, Joseph Henry Press. A recent re-statement of the main points made by such authors, but filtered through the eyes of a former food activist who still clings to a number of misconceptions and ultimately
refuses to follow his argumentation to its logical conclusion, is James McWilliams. 2009 Just Food. Where Locavores Get It Wrong and How We Can Truly Eat Responsibly. Little, Brown and Company.

  44 Molly Watson. Eight Reasons to Eat Local Foods. Straight-Forward Benefits of Eating Local Foods. About.com Guide http://localfoods.about.com/od/finduselocalfoods/tp/5-Reasons-to-Eat-Local-Foods.htm.

  45 See, for instance, Michael Pollan. 2008. “Farmer in Chief.” New York Times Magazine (October 9) http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/12/magazine/12policy-t.html. A typical statement in this respect is by Ferd Hoefner, the policy director of the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, who mentioned in an interview that getting the “Department of Defense or the VA hospitals” to change their purchase would obviously be beneficial to his movement. Quoted by Paul Roberts. 2009. “Spoiled: Organic and Local Is so 2008: Our Industrial Food System Is Rotten to the Core. Heirloom Arugula Won’t Save Us. Here’s What Will.” Mother Jones (March/April) http://motherjones.com/environment/2009/02/spoiled-organic-and-local-so-2008 One of the few locavores (at least in season) and alternative food supporter we know who has written explicitly against mandatory purchases and taken an explicitly “live and let live” approach to the issue is Canadian libertarian lawyer—and personal friend—Karen Selick. See Karen Selick. 2008. “The Buy-Locally-Owned Fallacy.” Library of Economics and Liberty (November 3) http://www.econlib.org/library/Columns/y2008/Selicklocal.html.

  46 Thomas Hudson Middleton. 1923. Food Production in War. Clarendon Press. p. 324.

  47 Katherine Kemp, Andrea Insch, David K. Holdsworth and John G. Knight. 2010. “Food Miles: Do U.K. Consumers Actually Care?” Food Policy 35 (6): 504–513.

  Chapter 1

  1 Russell Smith’s classic text is available at http://www.archive.org/details/worldsfoodresour00smituoft.

  2 Branden Born and Mark Purcell. 2006. “Avoiding the Local Trap: Scale and Food Systems in Planning Research.” Journal of Planning Education and Research 26 (2): 195–207.

  3 To give but one illustration, in a survey conducted at the request of North Carolina State University researchers, 74% of the polled public answered “no” and 17% “yes” when asked “If the U.S. could buy all its food from other countries cheaper than it can be produced and sold here, should we?” In Ronald C. Wimberley et al. 2003. Food for our Changing World: The Globalization of Food and How Americans Feel about It http://faculty.chass.ncsu.edu/wimberley/Global-Food/foodglobal.pdf .

  4 For a broader overview of the various subjects discussed in this section and additional references, see among others Kenneth F. Kiple and Kriemhild Coneè Ornelas. 2000. The Cambridge World History of Food. Cambridge University Press; Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat. 1994/1987. History of Food (translated by Anthea Bell). Blackwell Publishing; Vaclav Smil. 2010. Prime Movers of Globalization. The History and Impact of Diesel Engines and Gas Turbines. MIT Press; and Robert P. Clark. 2000. Global Life Systems. Population, Food, and Disease in the Process of Globalization. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.

  5 Adam Smith. 1776. An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Vol. 1, Book I, chapter II: Of the Principle which gives occasion to the Division of Labour. Available at http://www.econlib.org/library/Smith/smWN1.html#B.I, Ch.2, Of the Principle which gives Occasion to the Division of Labour.

  6 Gisday Wa and Delgam Uukw. 1989 The Spirit in the Land. Reflections, p. 44.

  7 For genus Homo as a whole, this would amount to 99% of its record.

  8 In the last several decades, X-rays, gamma rays, fast neutrons and thermal neutrons were used to cause mutations in plants. Among other cases, the Rio Red grapefruit was created in 1968 by exposing grapefruit buds to thermal neutron radiation. Much pasta today is made from an irradiated variety of durum wheat. Golden Promise, a variety of barley popular among organic brewers, was created in an atomic reactor in the 1950s. Nasty chemicals such as ethyl methane sulfate and mustard gas were also used to cause mutations and to allow the hybridization of varieties that would not otherwise crossbreed. A case in point is triticale, a cross between wheat and rye that, without the use of the toxic natural product colchicine, could not naturally hybridize. It is now popular in “natural” health food stores because of its higher percentage of higher quality proteins than its parent seeds. See, among others, Nina Fedoroff and Nancy Marie Brown. 2004. Mendel in the Kitchen: A Scientist’s View of Genetically Modified Foods. Joseph Henry Press.

  9 See, among others, Adi B. Damania. 2008. “History, Achievements, and Current Status of Genetic Resources Conservation.” Agronomy Journal 100: 9–21.

  10 Alan W. Olmstead and Paul W. Rhode. 2008. Creating Abundance. Biological Innovation and American Agricultural Development. Cambridge University Press, pp. 3 and 140–141.

  11 For a more detailed discussion of this issue, see Pierre Desrochers and Samuli Leppälä. 2010. “Industrial Symbiosis: Old Wine in Recycled Bottles? Some Perspective from the History of Economic and Geographical Thought.” International Regional Science Review 33 (3): 338–361.

  12 Xenophon. Early 4th C BCE. Cyropaedia, The Education Of Cyrus. 1914 edition, F. M. Stawell (translated by Henry Graham Dakyns) http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/2/0/8/2085/2085.txt.

  13 Edward Glaeser. 2011. Triumph of the City. How our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier. Penguin Press, p. 7. See also Mario Polèse. 2010. The Wealth and Poverty of Regions. Why Cities Matter. University of Chicago Press.

  14 For a more detailed discussion of the issue, see Pierre Desrochers. 2001. “Geographical Proximity and the Transmission of Tacit Knowledge.” Review of Austrian Economics 14 (1): 25-46.

  15 United Nations. 2008. World Urbanization Prospects: The 2007 Revisions. United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division http://esa.un.org/unup/. For a concise overview of recent global trends, see Anonymous. 2008. “Cities and Growth: Lump Together and Like It.” The Economist (November 6) http://www.economist.com/node/12552404 For a much more comprehensive historical perspective on the issue, see Paul Bairoch. 1988. Cities and Economic Development: From the Dawn of History to the Present. University of Chicago Press. A recent concise analytical discussion of the issue can be found in Mario Polèse. 2009. The Wealth and Poverty of Regions. Why City Matters. University of Chicago Press, chapter 5.

  16 Jane Jacobs. 1969. The Economy of Cities. Random House, p. 7.

  17 Plato. Around 360 BCE. The Republic, Book II http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/republic.3.ii.html.

  18 For a popular history of these latter developments, see Susan Freidberg. 2009. Fresh. A Perishable History. Belknap Press (Harvard University Press). For a more concise discussion of these advances in the French context, see Pierre Desrochers and Hiroko Shimizu. 2010. L’autosuffisance alimentaire n’est pas gage de développement durable. Cahier de recherche de l’Institut économique Molinari http://www.institutmolinari.org/IMG/pdf/cahier1010_fr.pdf.

  19 George Rogers Taylor. 1951. The Transportation Revolution, 1815–1860 (Volume IV: The Economic History of the United States). Harper Torchbooks, p. 160.

  20 Oscar Diedrich von Engeln. 1920. “The World’s Food Resources.” Geographical Journal 9 (3): 174. For an introduction to the academic literature and debates on the subject along with further references, see, among others, C. Knick Harley. 1988. “Ocean Freight Rates and Productivity, 1740–1913: The Primacy of Mechanical Invention Reaffirmed.” Journal of Economic History 48 (4): 851-876.

  21 Stanley Jevons. 1905. The Principles of Economics : A Fragment of a Treatise on the Industrial Mechanisms of Society and Other Papers, MacMillan, p. 28 http://www.archive.org/details/principlesofecon00jevouoft.

  22 Christian Wolmar. 2010. Blood, Iron & Gold. How the Railroads Transformed the World. PublicAffairs, p. 223.

  23 In the middle of the 19th century, Parisian truck farmers worked between eighteen and twenty hours a day during the seven busiest months and between fourteen and sixteen during the rest of the year. These lon
g hours could be traced back to “normal” agricultural chores in light of the technologies of the time (for instance, controlling pests and weeds, irrigating crops and trucking produce to market and manure back to production grounds were much more labor intensive practices than they would later become), but also to the fact that because these producers were growing things in what was for most of the year an unsuitable climate, they made an extensive use of protective devices like cloches, cold frames and unheated greenhouses and had to ensure almost daily that plants would not overheat in the sun or freeze at night. For instance, because cloches and hotbeds could overheat on sunny days, growers would spend hours manually propping them open in the morning and closing them at night. See J. G. Moreau and J. J. Daverne. 1845. Manuel pratique de la culture maraîchère de Paris. V. Bouchard-Huzard, p. 84 http://books.google.ca/books?id=YclBAAAAIAAJ&source=gbs_navlinks_s.

  24 For an introduction to the topic, see G. Stanhill. 1977. “An Urban Agro-Ecosystem. The Example of Nineteenth Century Paris.” Agro-Ecosystems 3: 269–284.

  25 J. G. Moreau and J. J. Daverne. 1845. Manuel pratique de la culture maraîchère de Paris. V. Bouchard-Huzard, p. 85 http://books.google.ca/books?id=YclBAAAAIAAJ&source=gbs_navlinks_s.

  26 Avant l’introduction des cultures forcées dans les marais de Paris, la classe maraîchère… ne jouissait que d’une faible considération… aujourd’hui il n’en est plus ainsi » and « leur seule ambition… est de chercher les moyens d’arriver les premiers à porter des primeurs à la halle” J. G. Moreau and J. J. Daverne. 1845. Manuel pratique de la culture maraîchère de Paris. V. Bouchard-Huzard, pp. 85 and 83 http://books.google.ca/books?id=YclBAAAAIAAJ&source=gbs_navlinks_s.

  27 Of course, these numbers are only rough estimates. See Alberto Zezza and Luca Tasciotti. 2010. “Urban Agriculture, Poverty and Food Security: Empirical Evidence from a Sample of Developing Countries.” Food Policy 35 (4): 265-273.

  28 Lorian P. Jefferson. 1926. “The Balance of Trade in Farm Products.” Journal of Farm Economics 8 (4): 451–461, p. 451.