The Locavore's Dilemma (4 page)

—LUCIUS JUNIUS MODERATUS COLUMELLA
De Re Rustica
(On Agriculture), approximately 65 AD.
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I
n the early 1970s, a young New York City chef enrolled in the French Literature Ph.D. program of Columbia University, in the hope of eventually moving into the more respectable halls of academia. Things turned sour when he suggested a rather unusual dissertation topic: the history of French food as revealed through the writings of some of the country's literary giants, such as Ronsard, Proust, Voltaire, Zola, and Balzac. His would-be adviser shot down the proposal on the grounds that food was too trivial a subject to serve as the basis of a
dissertation. Fortunately for America, Jacques Pépin had by then already decided to give up on academia and return to the kitchen.
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What a difference a few decades make! Food history, production, and policy are now the bread and butter of numerous professors of social and cultural studies and rapidly expanding cohorts of graduate students. Policy analysts and essayists write reams on food security and sustainability, and some prominent practitioners of this genre, the premier example being journalism professor Michael Pollan,
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have become intellectual rock stars.

In an age where in the United States both lawyers and prison inmates outnumber full-time farmers, working to familiarize urbanites with some of the intricacies of modern food production and politics is a valuable endeavor.
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Unfortunately, a lot of recent scholarship and the smorgasbord of television reports, magazine cover stories, popular books, and shock documentaries it has inspired are largely built on older and more questionable muckraking, populist, protectionist, pastoral nostalgia, “small is beautiful” and “vitalist”
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traditions. The result is a one-sided narrative that decries our industrial food system as being rotten to the core without acknowledging some of its very tangible benefits when compared to older practices. To give but one illustration, a professor at a well-respected American university proudly states that his course “Food: A Critical Geography” does “not attempt to provide ‘both sides' of the food system story” as his students are allegedly being “inundated” with the corporate perspective on a daily basis, often “without being aware of it.” Those who would like to hear or feel something different can simply “turn on the TV, go to the supermarket, or eat at McDonald's!”
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Sure, Pollan and his disciples grudgingly admit, thanks to large firms and technical advances “edible foodlike substances” and “nutritional simulacra” are now more abundant, consistent, convenient, and (much) cheaper than ever before. But look at the downside. Food, “something that nourishes people and provides them with secure livelihoods,” has been transformed into a “commodity for speculation and bargaining.”
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“Hungry for profit” agribusiness has created a “globesity pandemic” because “stuffed but starved” children of the corn and their fossil-fuel fed parents ingest chemical residue-ridden processed meat, grains, fruits, and vegetables that have the taste, consistency, and nutritional value of cardboard. Dangerously unstable monocultures (the practice of growing a single crop over a large area) created through carpet bombing the soil with harsh chemicals and the depletion of aquifers are triggering massive erosion while drastically reducing biodiversity. Animals pumped full of antibiotics are raised in cramped quarters that breed super bacteria. Migrant farm workers are paid slave wages to toil in a chemical stew that freely seeps into nature where it triggers all kinds of dangerous mutations. And, unlike supermarkets, which only care about making money, local family farmers feed local people first. Then there are the concerns about bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), salmonella,
E. coli
, mercury, superweeds and superbugs, terminator genes, soaring cancer rates, food safety crises, foreign oil dependence, increased greenhouse gas emissions, declining rural communities, marine dead zones, and neo-colonial land grabs in poor countries. . . . As activists see it, our modern-day genetically-modified “corn-utopia” is soaking up a rapidly vanishing petroleum pool while delivering junk food, rural poverty, and agricultural pollution.

The path out of this agricultural wasteland, we are told, boils down to consumers paying more and eating less, a wholesale rethinking of the way everything is done from “plough to plate,” and promoting regional food economies both in America and around the world.
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Crucial steps in this respect involve a carbon-fuel detoxification diet and a radical reduction, if not an outright ban, on the consumption of meat products and foreign food. Ultimately, corporate agriculture must be put to death by thousands of sustainable, organic, local, and ethical (SOLE)
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food initiatives whereby increasingly self-reliant communities escape from the grips of the “Monsatans” of this world through their support of small-scale rural operations and the conversion of suburban crabgrass wasteland and urban rooftops into edible bounty. While this “Delicious
Revolution” may add a few digits to our collective grocery bill, more sustainable practices, increased quality and safety of food, healthier bodies, and improved spiritual well-being make it worthwhile.
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From our perspective, the most fascinating aspect of the SOLE narrative is how quickly it displaced once widespread fears about the imminent detonation of the (over)population bomb. After all, it was less than five decades ago that Harry Harrison published his dystopian novel
Make Room! Make Room!
(the inspiration behind the 1973 movie
Soylent Green
), in which food shortages were addressed through covert cannibalism. In a world where no good deed goes unpunished, the individuals who actually defused the P-bomb
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—from large scale farmers, professional plant breeders, and manufacturers of synthetic pesticides and fertilizers to agricultural equipment and packaging manufacturers, commodity traders, and logistics industry workers—became increasingly demonized as poor stewards of the Earth and public health threats. The nature of the foodstuffs being supplied, rather than their potential shortages, became the new focus for food activism in advanced economies.

Of the four SOLE components, “local”
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—the idea that an ever-growing portion of our food supply should be produced in close physical proximity to the consumers who will eat it—has made the greatest gain in popularity in the last two decades and is now, not surprisingly, being endorsed by influential political figures such as the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture, Tom Vilsack, who stated:

In December 2010, President Obama signed into law the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act, which contained a provision to bolster farm-to-school programs through the government-subsidized National School Lunch, School Breakfast, Special Milk, Child and Adult Care, Fresh Fruit and Vegetable, and Summer Food Service programs. As a follow-up on this legislation, in April 2011, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced that it had introduced a new rule that will give preference in contract bidding for school meals to local farm products.
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In November of that year, Senator Sherrod Brown and Congresswoman Chellie Pingree introduced the Local Farms, Food, and Jobs Act, a series of measures to support local farm programs worth approximately $200 million, intended to “increas[e] access to fresh, local foods” while “creating jobs and strengthening [local] econom[ies]. . . . Making it easier for farmers to sell food locally and easier for consumers to buy it translates directly into a more healthy economy and more jobs in our communities,” Pingree said, adding that consumers “want to be able to buy fresh, healthy food that doesn't have to travel halfway around the world to get to them.”
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There is, however, still no agreement on the true meaning of “local food” (or “foodshed” or “regional food system”) among its various proponents. While apparently nobody thinks of it in terms of a single household or farm, is it (or should it be) limited to within a few miles of one's residence, as was often the case for most of human history? Within 100 miles (160 kilometers) from consumers in our car-dominated era? Within the larger confines of a modern metropolitan area and its surrounding countryside? Perhaps even a day's drive from a locavore's home or a distribution warehouse? Or even “less than 400 miles from its origin, or within the State in which it is produced,” as stated in the 2008 U.S. Farm Act?

Adding to this confusion are a few other issues. For instance, what about food grown or caught near its final point of purchase but then trucked, shipped, or flown over significant distances in order to be processed in a large manufacturing operation or inspected in a central
distribution hub, before being shipped back to a store near its production site? (For instance, squids caught on the California coast are now reportedly sent to China in order to be cleaned and frozen before being shipped back to California.
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) Should one also care about the geographical origins of the electricity, gasoline, diesel, packaging material, computers, fertilizers, pesticides, and even the seeds and embryos used by “local” producers?

Another paradox is that, as a result of thousands of years of agricultural diffusion and adaptation, “local” agriculture has long been based for the most part on nonnative species while all “national” culinary traditions rely to a large extent on once foreign ideas and commodities, ranging from grilling, baking, and confectionary techniques to sugar, coffee, chocolate, chili pepper, citrus fruits, and tomatoes. For instance, Indian curries, Hungarian paprika, and Korean kimchee did not exist before the introduction of the American chili pepper. Staple American crops such as soybean, corn, and wheat are native to China, Mexico, and the Middle East, respectively. In fact, if modern-day activists were to cling to any consistent notion of “local” food, a truly “made in the USA” agricultural diet would be limited to turkeys, some farmed native fish and shellfish (including Atlantic salmon and Brook trout), sunflowers, blueberries, cranberries, Jerusalem artichokes, and some varieties of squash.

Leaving aside the complexities of properly defining the term “local,” the case put forward by local food activists can be divided into five broad arguments.
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To summarize: