A Paradox For Locavores

I was reading through Pierre Desrochers and Hiroko Shimizu's provocative book The Locavore's Dilemma (I highly recommend it to readers interested in giving their critical thinking skills a workout) when I stumbled onto a fascinating question. I'm paraphrasing:

If we decide to embrace locavorism across the country, how many millions of acres of forest and wildlife habitat should we therefore sacrifice to do so?

I never really thought about this aspect of the local food debate, but this is a serious paradox. It's a terrible conundrum for locavores who also care about the environment.

Here's why: You don't want to use land that just happens to be located within 100 miles (or whatever arbitrary distance you choose) of a given major population center. You want to use the most productive and most efficient land you can for farming. By using the most productive farmland available, almost regardless of where it is, you'll be able to use less land per unit of food.

Think back to 200 years ago. Back then, we pretty much didn't have a transportation infrastructure to transport anything... anywhere. It's quite striking to read how it could take weeks, even months, to get from, say, Boston to Philadelphia--a drive that you can do today in a matter of hours. And in wintertime, forget about it. (Read, for example David McCollough's excellent biography of John Adams, or his recent book 1776, for striking anecdotes on how impossibly time-consuming travel was in the early days of the USA).

In those days, by definition, all food had to be local. That's why we essentially clear-cut all of North America, denuding it of trees, habitat, whatever. Habitat didn't matter to anyone back then, simply because people needed to use all land--even the most rocky, unfit, and poorest quality land--to feed themselves. And keep in mind: in 1800 we had a measly population of just 5.3 million, 1/58th of our current population of 309 million!

Whether we liked it or not, we were all locavores back then. Every community needed to grow whatever it could to survive.

Enter our transportation system, which started initially with the use of waterways and canal systems, and then with the dramatic expansion of railroads. In a matter of just a few decades, you could begin to get food not just locally, but from practically anywhere across the east, south and midwest regions of the continent. Suddenly, that crappy, rocky soil in Vermont, with its short growing season and unpredictable early and late frosts, just wasn't worth plowing any more.

This is why, when you drive across Vermont, New Hampshire, and Upstate New York, you see a tremendous amount of forest. Everywhere. That's land that long ago was completely stripped of trees to be farmed, but has since fully returned to basic forest habitat. Yes, of course, there is also some agriculture in these regions, but it's centered mostly around foods that these regions produce best (to give a few examples, apples, dairy and sweet corn among many others). There's no longer any necessity for each of these regions to grow everything they eat, and that's why they no longer use all the available land to do so.

Instead, we can use far more productive farmland in the midwest, in California--or in other places all over the world--to grow far more food with far less land.

So what's important to you? Locavorism? Or prudent, efficient land use? Are you willing to sacrifice forest and habitat in order that you and others can eat local?

Readers, please share your thoughts!

Related Posts:
Ending Overeating: An Interview With Former FDA Commissioner David Kessler
Interview with Jayson Lusk, Author of "The Food Police"
A Cup of Morning Death? How "Big Coffee" Puts Profits Before People
Consumer Empowerment: How To Self-Fund Your Consumer Products Purchases




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But What If Your Farmer Doesn't Want To Know YOU?

The First Lady has planted a garden, organic, of course, and the Department of Agriculture is spending 50 million or so on a program called Know Your Farmer. The effort is likely to disappoint: in fact, a suburban housewife determined to know this corn farmer is likely to be mortified by my looks, the way I smell, and my opinions. I can't imagine why any resident of Manhattan would want to know me, and, trust me, some of my neighbors are even worse.

...One of the assumptions implicit in all this local food stuff is that we farmers are dying to make a connection with our customers. In many cases, nothing could be further from the truth. All we want is to sell corn and to be left alone.
--Blake Hurst, farmer and president of the Missouri Farm Bureau

I borrowed this striking quote from The Locavore's Dilemma, partly because it had me laughing out loud, but also because it illustrates an intriguing point about the food and ag business.

Take a Brooklyn hipster (no, really, take one!). Imagine her, freshly done reading one of Michael Pollan's books, and deciding, firmly, that she wants to get "close" to her food. She’s gonna know her farmer, man. Now she'll make regular trips to the Grand Army Plaza Greenmarket, take a weekly subway ride to Manhattan's Union Square Farmer's Market, and maybe even once a month line up a Zipcar Prius to drive up the Hudson Valley (staying within 100 miles of course) to visit an actual organic farm!

Hipsters are usually quite good at irony. But there's one question, ironically, that this hypothetical Brooklyn hipster never thought to ask: what if her farmer doesn't want to know her back?

You'd think this imaginary friendly farmer, if he really wanted to know this hipster and others like her, would take a job where he'd actually get to meet hipsters. He wouldn't farm at all! He'd work at the Apple Store. Or at Whole Foods.

If you take Blake Hurst's word for it, most farmers just want to farm. They didn't sign up to meet hipsters and agri-intellectuals. That's the reason other people sell, distribute and retail their food: because selling, shipping, distributing, retailing and hipster-meeting isn't farming.

Think about this a little bit. Does your farmer want to know you?

Are you sure?


Related Posts:
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An Interview with "Appetite For Profit" Author Michele Simon
A Cup of Morning Death? How "Big Coffee" Puts Profits Before People
Did Newark Mayor Cory Booker Really *Try* With His Food Stamp Challenge?



How can I support Casual Kitchen?
Easy. Do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site! You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.

How To Help the World... By NOT Going Local

"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function."
--F. Scott Fitzgerald

Sometimes it can be deceivingly easy to do things that feel ethical and right that actually aren't that ethical and right. Sometimes, things are not always as they seem, and the right thing is sometimes the wrong thing.

Today I'm going to address the most sacred of all the sacred cows in the food world: the local food movement. And what I want to show my readers is that, sometimes, it's actually more ethical to buy your food from far away.

But first a quick tangent, to make sure we're all on the same page of intellectual honesty about local eating in the first place. The first thing I want to do is make sure my readers wrap their minds around four key potential flaws of locavorism:

1) The cost and the carbon footprint of transporting food is a lot lower than you'd think--even when that food is shipped enormous distances.

2) Depending on the food, some of worst fossil fuel use comes not from food transport, but from the growing, picking and processing of food. Thus it saves more carbon to grow some foods on a large, more efficient scale, even if that means bearing incremental transport costs.

3) The largest source of fossil fuel waste in the entire food supply chain comes from your car when you make a trip to buy goods. This might be one of the most powerful ironies of the entire food industry.

4) Finally, as long-time CK readers well know, eating a meatless meal two or three times a week has a far greater impact on the environment than eating local.

At this point, I know I'll get some severe pushback from a few readers who are either emotionally invested in feeling good about themselves because they eat locally, or who simply can't handle the counterintuitive nature of this debate. To those readers I say this: please reread the quote at the beginning of this essay.

To the vast majority of my readers who can handle opposing ideas, feel free to explore the bibliography below for more on how going local isn't always as clear-cut as you'd think.

However, what you've read so far is all preamble. I want to use this as a starting point for an idea that should really bake your noodle:

It would be better for the world if we all purchased more food from developing countries.

Remember last week's article, where I talked about armies of perfectly nice church ladies sending free clothes to Africa--and unknowingly annihilating the textile industries in several countries? Well, instead of sending free stuff out to countries that...

a) aren't as poor as we think anymore,
b) don't necessarily need the things we send, and
c) should be building their own self-sufficient industries to help improve their standard of living,

...why not purchase more good and services from those countries and directly help them raise their living standards?

I'll give an example. Every year in late winter, you can buy clementines in our grocery stores here in New Jersey. Usually they come from Spain. But this year, for the first time, I saw clementines imported from Morocco, Spain's neighbor across the Strait of Gibraltar.

At first, I was racking my brain trying to think if I'd ever bought anything from Morocco, ever. Heck, the closest I've ever been to Morocco was watching The Bourne Ultimatum. But then I thought through it. Spain is a rich country, Morocco is not. In fact, Spain's GDP per capita is six times Morocco's.

The people who are picking clementines, the people who packing and processing these fruits, and an entire ecosystem of entrepreneurs who are investing in the future of Morocco's ag exports--why not support all of these people? Why not help this ecosystem, when it's likely that my support will make a more significant difference for the people of Morocco than it ever would for Spain?

This is why I look carefully at the country of origin labels on my foods, and I keep in mind this list of countries ranked by GDP per capita. And when I'm in my grocery store making a purchase, and I have a choice between a food from a rich country and a poor country, I try to bias my purchase to the poor country.

Readers, what are your thoughts?


Resources/Bibliography:
Food That Travels Well (New York Times)
Math Lessons for Locavores (New York Times)
Food Miles (Wikipedia.org) Note this particularly useful money quote: "Food miles also ignore benefits gained by improving livelihoods in developing countries through agricultural development."
Food, Fuel and Freeways: An Iowa perspective on how far food travels, fuel usage and greenhouse gas emissions.


How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by purchasing items from Amazon.com via links on this site, or by linking to me or subscribing to my RSS feed. Finally, you can consider submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon. Thank you for your support!