The Locavore's Dilemma

by Pierre Desrochers

  2 Interview with Michael Pollan. 2008. Bill Moyers Journal. (November 28) http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/11282008/transcript1.html.

  3 Michael Pollan. 2008. “Farmer in Chief.” New York Times Magazine (October 9) http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/12/magazine/12policy-t.html.

  4 Leah Bloom. 2010. “Comment on Steven Landsburg’s ‘Loco-Vores’.” The Big Questions (August 23) http://www.thebigquestions.com/2010/08/23/loco-vores/.

  5 Frédéric Bastiat. 1848. “What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen.” In Selected Essays on Political Economy (nonpaginated) http://www.econlib.org/library/Bastiat/basEss1.html#Chapter%201,%20What%20Is%20Seen%20and%20What%20Is%20Not%20Seen.

  6 Center for Consumer Freedom. 2009. “Come On Down to the Farmers Market (Bring Your Wallet and Your Food Orthodoxy), (September 17) http://www.consumerfreedom.com/news_detail.cfm/h/3992-come-on-down-to-the-farmers-market-bring-your-wallet-and-your-food-orthodoxy.

  7 Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon. 2005. “Living on the 100-mile Diet,” The Tyee (June 28) http://thetyee.ca/Life/2005/06/28/HundredMileDiet and Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon. 2007.The 100-Mile Diet. A Year of Local Eating. Random House Canada.

  8 Adam Smith. 1776. An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Vol. 1, Book IV, chapter II: Of Restraints upon the Importation from Foreign Countries of Such Goods as Can Be Produced at Home http://oll.libertyfund.org/?option=com_staticxt&staticfile=show.php%3Ftitle=237&chapter=212328&layout=html&Itemid=27.

  9 See, among others, Tom Philpott. 2011. “Freakonomics Blog: Still Wrong on Local Food.” MotherJones.com (November 18) http://motherjones.com/tom-philpott/2011/11/freakonomics-blog-still-wrong-local-food.

  10 See Peter Garnsey. 1988. Famine and Food Supply in the Graeco-Roman World: Responses to Risk and Crisis. Cambridge University Press, pp. 54–55.

  11 Michael Pollan. 2008. “Farmer in Chief.” New York Times Magazine (October 9) http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/12/magazine/12policy-t.html.

  12 See, among others, Laura Miller. 2002. “Duck Power and a Tale of Success: From Six Acres to an Ecosystem.” Leopold Letter (Spring). Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture. http://www.leopold.iastate.edu/news/leopold-letter/2002/spring/duck-power-and-tale-success-six-acres-ecosystem.

  13 For a more detailed introduction to the topic, see the FAO webpages devoted to the topic at http://www.fao.org/sard/en/sard/754/946/index.html.

  14 FAO. 2002. “Spotlight: Agricultural Heritage System.” FAO Magazine (November) http://www.fao.org/ag/magazine/0211sp1.htm.

  15 Peter Garnsey. 1988. Famine and Food Supply in the Graeco-Roman World: Responses to Risk and Crisis. Cambridge University Press, p. 49.

  16 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.

  17 Idem.

  18 Barbara Kingsolver (with Steven L. Hopp and Camille Kingsolver). 2007. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Local Food. HarperCollins, p. 3.

  19 Blake McKelvey. 1940. “The Flower City: Center of Nurseries and Fruit Orchards.” The Rochester Historical Society Publications 18: 121–169. Nonpaginated version available at http://www.history.rochester.edu/flowercity/frontier.htm.

  20 George Richardson Porter. 1838. The Progress of the Nation, in Its Various Social and Economical Relations from the Beginning of the Nineteenth Century to the Present Time: Sections III and IV: Interchange, and Revenue and Expenditure. Charles Knight & Co., pp. 82-83 http://books.google.ca/books?id=908KAQAAMAAJ&source=gbs_navlinks_s.

  21 Idem, p. 83.

  22 John Page. 1880. “The Sources of Supply of the Manchester Fruit and Vegetable Markets.” Journal of the Royal Agricultural Society of England 16 (2nd series), pp. 477-480 http://books.google.ca/books?id=epoEAAAAYAAJ&source=gbs_navlinks_s.

  23 See, among others, G. Ronald White. 1932. “Live-Stock By-Products and By-Product Industries.” Journal of the Royal Statistical Society 95 (3): 455–497, p. 466.

  24 Barry Estabrook. 2011. “The Santa Barbara Syndrome: Evidence of a Broken Food System.” The Atlantic (February 14) http://www.theatlantic.com/life/archive/2011/02/the-santa-barbara-syndrome-evidence-of-a-broken-food-system/71244/ .

  25 David A. Cleveland, Corie N. Radka, Nora M. Müller, Tyler D. Watson, Nicole J. Rekstein, Hannah Van M. Wright, and Sydney E. Hollingshead. 2011. “Effect of Localizing Fruit and Vegetable Consumption on Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Nutrition, Santa Barbara County.” Environmental Science & Technology (45): 4555–4562.

  26 The meat-packing industry got its name from the practice of early settlers of curing, smoking and packing pork domestically, a practice that was later commercialized. Other past cases of external economies of scale are discussed in 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.

  27 As we further discuss in chapter 6, criticisms of the sanitary character of American meatpacking operations predated by at least three decades the publication of Sinclair’s fictional work. Besides, in his novel Sinclair also described (or rather indicted) the government inspectors who were already working on the premises at the turn of the twentieth century.

  28 George Powell Perry. 1908. Wealth from Waste, or Gathering Up the Fragments. Fleming H. Revell Company, pp. 74–75.

  29 There were also a number of “long drives,” some of which came to be immortalized in famous Western movies, but many of these took place after the conclusion of the Civil War and ended up at a railroad terminal. Apart from its economic benefit, shipping cattle by rail also add the advantage of avoiding damages to farmland located between the pastureland and the slaughterhouses.

  30 In business jargon, “forward integration” refers to a business strategy whereby activities are expanded to include control of the direct distribution of a firm’s own products while “backward integration” involves the purchase of suppliers in order to reduce dependency.

  31 David Ames Well. 1889. Recent Economic Changes and their Effect on the Production and Distribution of Wealth and the Well-Being of Society. D. Appleton and Company, p. 98 http://books.google.ca/books?id=LG2oz49UcykC&dq=Recent+Economic+Changes&source=gbs_navlinks_s An independent restatement of this position several decades later can be found in John Ise. 1950. Economics , revised edition. Harper & Brothers, p. 111.

  32 Rudolf A. Clemen. 1927. By-Products in the Packing Industry. University of Chicago Press, pp. 2-3, 27 http://chla.library.cornell.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=chla;idno=3081287 .

  33 William Cronon. 1991. Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West. W. W. Norton, p. 242.

  34 See, among others, Janet Blackman. 1963. “The Food Supply of an Industrial Town: A Study of Sheffield’s Public Markets, 1780–1900. Business History 5: 83–97, p. 89; Robert Scola. 1992. Feeding the Victorian City. Manchester University Press, Chapter IV: Dairy Products.

  35 Donald Boudreaux and Thomas J. DiLorenzo. 1993. ‘The Protectionist Roots of Antitrust,’ Review of Austrian Economics 6(2): 81–96.

  36 Fred A. Shannon. 1963. The Economic History of the United States, Volume V: The Farmer’s Last Frontier. Agriculture, 1860-1897. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, p. 235.

  37 For a concise overview of the validity of American agricultural producers’ complaints against packers and railroad operators, see James Stewart. 2008. “The Economics of American Farm Unrest, 1865-1900”. In Robert Whaples (ed.) EH.Net Encyclopedia http://eh.net/encyclopedia/article/stewart.farmers.

  38 The Editors. 2010. “Making it Easier to Eat Local Food.” New York Times (April 19) http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/19/making-it-easier-to-eat-local-food/.

  39 Katie Zezima. 2010. “Push to Eat Local Food is Hampered by Shortage.” New York Times (March 27) http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/28/
us/28slaughter.html?pagewanted=1&ref=style.

  40 Michael Pollan. 2008. “Farmer in Chief.” New York Times Magazine (October 9) http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/12/magazine/12policy-t.html.

  41 Steve Landsburg. 2010. “Loco-Vores.” The Big Questions (August 23) http://www.thebigquestions.com/2010/08/23/loco-vores/; See also Steve Landsburg. 2011. “D’Oh—Second in a Series.” The Big Questions (May 2) http://www.thebigquestions.com/2011/05/02/doh-second-in-a-series/.

  42 American Farmland Trust. Growing Local: Sustaining Farms and Farmland for the Future http://www.farmland.org/programs/localfood/planningforagriculture/Sustaining-Farms-Farmland-Future.asp.

  43 For a more detailed presentation of his own work, see Despommiers’s website at http://www.verticalfarm.com/ and Dickson Despommiers. 2011. “Vertical Farming.” In Cutler J. Cleveland (editor). Encyclopedia of the Earth http://www.eoearth.org/article/Vertical_farming.

  44 D.V Marino, Tilak Ram Mahato, John W. Druitt, Linda Leigh, Guanghui Lin, Robert M. Russell and Francesco N. Tubiello. 1999. “The Agricultural Biome of Biosphere 2: Structure, Composition and Function.” Ecological Engineering 13: 199-234. To be fair, the designers of such schemes are more nuanced on this issue than their supporters. For instance, in his encyclopedia entry on vertical farming (ff209), Despommier writes that his scheme promises to “eliminate external natural processes as confounding elements in the production of food,” but he only claims that his proposal “reduces the risk of infection from agents transmitted at the agricultural interface,” not that it would be pesticide-free. In other words, his proposal would deliver no additional benefits over conventional greenhouses.

  45 For a concise description of the project, see Marc Lostracco. 2007. “Grow Up.” Torontoist.com (June 15) http://torontoist.com/2007/06/is_toronto_a_fu.php.

  46 Dennis Avery. 2010. “City Farming—Pigs in the Sky” Center for Global Food Issues (October 19) http://www.cgfi.org/2010/10/city-farming%e2%80%94pigs-in-the-sky-by-dennis-t-avery/.

  47 We discuss the issue in more detail in chapter 4.

  48 The issue is particularly significant in the Greater Toronto area because of a massive 1.8 million “Green Belt” initiative on prime farmland, an area larger than Prince Edward Island. The case for it and descriptions of local food initiatives to support local producers can be found on the Friends of the Greenbelt’s http://www.greenbelt.ca/ and the Ontario Greenbelt Alliance’s http://www.greenbelt alliance.ca/ websites. The policy enjoyed much support from urban dwellers (who were not asked to pay for it) and environmentalist groups. The opposition was spearheaded by farmers whose property rights, most notably their ability to sell their land for development, were curtailed without fair and proper compensation. For a critical academic study of this particular policy, see B. James Deaton and Richard J. Vyn. 2010. “The Effect of Strict Land Zoning on Agricultural Land Values: The Case of Ontario’s Green Belt.” American Journal of Agricultural Economics 92 (4): 941–955.

  49 Holly Hill. 2008. Food Miles: Background and Marketing. ATTRA—National Sustainable Agriculture Information Service, p. 9 http://attra.ncat.org/attra-pub/PDF/foodmiles.pdf.

  50 Michael Pollan. 2008. “Farmer in Chief.” New York Times Magazine (October 9) http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/12/magazine/12policy-t.html.

  51 Gove Hambidge. 1929. “This Age of Refrigeration.” Ladies’ Home Journal (August): 103.

  52 Mario Polèse. 2009. The Wealth and Poverty of Nations. Why Cities Matter. University of Chicago Press, p. 134.

  53 Rob Lyons. 2010. “The Tarantino of Food Writing.” Spiked (September 3) http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/9485/.

  54 Jacques Redway. 1907. Commercial Geography. A Book for High Schools, Commercial Courses, and Business Colleges. Charles Scribner’s Sons, p. 5. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/24884/24884-h/24884-h.htm.

  55 Bloomberg News. 2011. “China’s Soybean Imports in 2011 May Decline, Shangai JC Says.” Bloomberg.com (November 24) http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-11-24/china-s-soybean-imports-in-2011-may-decline-shanghai-jc-says.html In 2010, the USA, Brazil, Argentina and China produced respectively 35, 27, 19 and 6% of the world’s total production (“World Statistics” at soy stats.com http://www.soystats.com/2011/Default-frames.htm ).

  56 Quoted in Alan L. Olmstead and Paul W. Rhode. 2008. Creating Abundance. Biological Innovation and American Agricultural Development. Cambridge University Press, p. 381.

  57 Adam Smith. 1776. An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Vol. 1, Book I, chapter 8: On the Wages of Labour http://oll.libertyfund.org/?option=com_staticxt&staticfile=show. php%3Fti tle=220&chapter=217399 &layout=html&Itemid=27.

  Chapter 4

  1 See, among others, Dennis E. Jelinski. 2005. “There is no Mother Nature—There is no Balance of Nature: Culture, Ecology and Conservation.” Human Ecology 33 (2): 271–288.

  2 The ancestors of today’s large African animals who had co-evolved with them, on the other hand, had long learned to be more careful around these seemingly puny creatures. Animals such as cats, rats and pigs whose arrival was directly linked to that of humans also proved significant in the disappearance of bird species in island environments.

  3 In Australia, this practice has been labeled “firestick farming.”

  4 For a more elaborate discussions of these issues, see Michael Williams. 2003. Deforesting the Earth. From Prehistory to Global Crisis. University of Chicago Press. See also Erle C. Ellis. 2011. “Anthropogenic Transformation of the Terrestrial Biosphere.” Proceedings of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Science 369 (1938): 1010–1035.

  5 Knut Faegri. 1988. “Preface.” In Hilary H. Birks, H. J. Birks, Peter Emil Kaland and Dagfinn Moe (eds). The Cultural Landscape. Past Present and Future. Cambridge University Press, pp. 1–2.

  6 For a popular treatment of the issue, see Charles C. Mann. 2002. “1491.” The Atlantic (March) http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2002/03/1491/2445/ and his book of the same title, Charles C. Mann. 2005. 1491. Alfred A. Knopf http://www.charlesmann.org/Book-index.htm. For a relatively accessible survey of the academic literature, see Michael Heckenberger and Eduardo Góes Neves. 2009. “Amazonian Archeology.” Annual Review of Anthropology 38 (October): 251-266 http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev-anthro-091908-164310?prevSearch=%28amazon%29+AND+[journal%3A+anthro]&searchHistoryKey.

  7 A vascular plant possesses a well-developed system of conducting tissue to transport mineral salts, water, and sugars.

  8 Ronald Bailey. 2010. “Invasion of the Invasive Species! Local Biodiversity is Increasing because of Man, Not Despite Him.” Reason (November) http://reason.com/archives/2010/09/19/invasion-of-the-invasive-speci.

  9 Mark Davis et al. 2011. “Don’t Judge Species by their Origins.” Nature 474 (7350): 153–154.

  10 Paul J. Heald and Susannah Chapman. 2011. Veggie Tales: Pernicious Myths About Patents, Innovation, and Crop Diversity In The Twentieth Century. Illinois Program in Law, Behavior and Social Science Paper No. LBSS11-34 http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1928920.

  11 Mark Davis et al. 2011. “Don’t Judge Species by their Origins.” Nature 474: 153–154.

  12 Nina V. Fedoroff and Nancy Marie Brown. 2004. Mendel in the Kitchen: A Scientist’s View of Genetically Modified Foods, Joseph Henry Press, p. 315.

  13 While the debate between proponents of less productive but more diverse agricultural production systems and defenders of large-scale monocultures is long-standing, our reading of the available evidence suggests that it was won by the latter group. See Pamela Matson and Peter Vitousek, 2006. “Agricultural Intensification: Will Land Spared from Farming Be Land Spared for Nature?” Conservation Biology 20 (3): 709–710.

  14 For more detailed discussions of these issues and additional references, see Paul E. Waggoner. 1996. “How Much Land Can Ten Billion People Spare for Nature?” Daedalus 125 (3): 73-93; and Pierre Desrochers. 2010. “The Environmental Responsibility of Business is to
Increase its Profits (By Creating Value within the Bounds of Private Property Rights)”Industrial and Corporate Change 19 (1): 161-204.

  15 Plato. 360 BCE. Critias (translated by Benjamin Jowett) http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/critias.html .

  16 See Michael Williams. 2003. Deforesting the Earth. From Prehistory to Global Crisis. University of Chicago Press, p. 96.

  17 G. V. Jacks and R. O. Whyte. 1939. The Rape of the Earth. A World Survey of Soil Erosion. Faber and Faber Ltd. The title of the American edition was the more prudish Vanishing Lands: A World Survey of Soil Erosion. The notion of the Earth (a female entity) being raped by industry (a male entity) is now a mainstay of so-called ecofeminism.

  18 G. V. Jacks and R. O. Whyte. 1939. The Rape of the Earth. A World Survey of Soil Erosion. Faber and Faber Ltd, p. 21.

  19 G. V. Jacks and R. O. Whyte. 1939. The Rape of the Earth. A World Survey of Soil Erosion. Faber and Faber Ltd, p. 26.

  20 Dennis Avery. 2000. Saving the Planet with Pesticides and Plastics. Hudson Institute, pp. 7 and 201–202.

  21 Several 19th and early 20th-century French writers who made such comments are discussed in Pierre Desrochers and Hiroko Shimizu. 2010. L’autosuf-fisance 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.

  22 Karl Kautsky. 1899 (1988). The Agrarian Question in Two Volumes.Zwan Publications, p. 254.

  23 A. Y. Hoekstra (ed.). 2003. “Virtual Water Trade: Proceedings of the International Expert Meeting on Virtual Water Trade.” Value of Water Research Report Series No.12, UNESCO-IHE http://www.waterfootprint.org/Reports/Report12.pdf.

  24 Michael Williams. 2003. Deforesting the Earth: From Prehistory to Global Crisis. University of Chicago Press.

  25 Pekka E. Kauppi, Jesse H. Ausubel, Jingyun Fang, Alexander S. Mather, Roger A. Sedjo and Paul E. Waggoner. (2006). ‘Returning Forests Analyzed with the Forest Identity’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 103 (46): 17574-17579 http://www.pnas.org/content/103/46/17574.full.pdf+html The term forest transition as used in this essay is based on the Scottish geographer Alexander Mather’s concept of a reversal or turnaround in land-use trends for a given territory from net deforestation to net reforestation in times of economic and population growth. As such, it differs from the notion of forest transition commonly used by landscape biologists and physical geographers that describes landscape changes between different ecosystems such as grassland or tundra and forest.