Math Lessons for Locavores
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
* First, it's not true that the overriding concern of "locavorism" is energy conservation. Other concerns include food quality, the survival of small farms, highlighting the bad practices of huge corporate farms, and animal welfare.
* 80-90% of the "value" of these ideas you can capture by eating only what's in season (ie, no fresh tomatos in February) and sourcing protein from small farms. Both of these things: you want to do anyways.
* "Locavorism" doesn't support the notion that we should grow oranges in Wisconsin so they can be local. No, the Alice Waters types think people in Wisconsin shouldn't be eating many oranges at all.
It's true that Locavorism is on the cusp of becoming more a yuppie religion than a valid principle. It's certaintly true that industrial farming is more energy efficient. Maybe it's right that the word "Locavore", which is stupid, be tainted by association with this trend.
But let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Small family-owned farms carefully raising high-quality cows, pigs, and lambs are a very good thing. Restaurants that can tell you name of the farmer who raised the lamb on their menu are a very good thing. Seasonal cuisine is a very good thing. These ideas don't have to be "locavorism"; maybe they can just be common sense.
Personally, I think locovorism is way past the point of no return in terms being nothing more than a means for yuppies to distinguish themselves from the hoi polloi. Once you could get organic veggies at Wal-Mart they needed St. Pollan to give them a new rallying point.
I live in the bay area and from the vantage-point of this mild climate it is very easy to enjoy local seasonal food with almost no inconvenience to my lifestyle. I grew up on the midwest on one of those small farms you praise (back before shipping arugala around the world for my local salad bar was common or even possible) and I can tell you with certainty that seasonal cuisine in that climate really sucks.
Highlighted for emphasis. Virtually every trend in marketing food to the middle class is "Don't eat that. Poor people eat that. You don't want to eat like a poor person, do you?"
The big picture reasoning for that is here:
http://www.ers.usda.gov/AmberWaves/September08/Findings/Char...
The dollar cost of the inputs to what might be called "traditional food" is cratering, due almost entirely to technological improvements. A 2010 tomato resembles a 1970 tomato, but costs much less. If you ate like someone in the 1970s ate, you would spend much less of your total income on food than they did.
That would be a very negative outcome for some players in the food industry.
Hence, trying to tell you that your 2010 tomato is not really the same tomato as that 1970 tomato your mother used to make pasta sauce with. It is a magic poisoned GMO tomato. Your mother, if she was still making you pasta sauces, would certainly be using good natural organic local tomatoes.
Since your mother doesn't still make you pasta sauces, you can pick up a morally appropriate pasta sauce at Trader Joes for a mere five times the price of the same ingredients with a different label at WalMart. (The change in who cooks and how much is the story behind the story of American food consumption in the last two generations.)
The problem is that huge companies have conditioned the market to believe that tomatoes are something you get in the bin 15 steps forward and 5 steps sideways from the entrance to the supermarket, in the big bin labeled "vine-ripened tomatoes", when in fact tomatoes don't work that way, and anything you put in a bin labeled like that must, by necessity because of the way supply chains work, be a fake wax replica of a tomato even when good tomatoes are available.
The problem is not that poor people eat tomatoes. The Fresh Markets supermarket 3 blocks north of me serves a solidly lower-lower class market (I live next to Austin, one of the poorest neighborhoods in Chicago, a "food desert") has better produce than Whole Foods does. Poor people, particularly Hispanic poor people, do veg really well.
The problem is that the Del Monte's of the world are replacing real tomatoes with fake tomatoes. That is bad. It's not a class warfare issue.
The tomato you see in the bin at a major supermarket chain was picked when it was green and hard as an apple. To get it to the soft consistency and reddish color you expect it was bathed in ethylene gas during shipment or while it was sitting around in a warehouse somewhere. This gas causes the tomato to soften and turn red, but it does not cause the tomato to create the sweet sugars and pleasant consistency that are the hallmarks of a freshly picked ripe tomato. It is this waxy/mealy consistency of a gassed mass-market tomato that was being noted.
If you don't like "mass market" tomatoes, you don't have to buy them. But I do and I will. Implying that I'm ignorant for my choice or that the world would be a better place if my snack of choice didn't exist doesn't strike me as kindness. Seems more likely to be rooted in pride.
Food evangelists always strike me as pride all dressed up as virtue, anyway. If they were really out to make the world a better place, shouldn't they be building technology, fighting for just laws, healing the sick and poor, that kind of thing? Children are starving in Africa and they're bothering rich people about not eating sufficiently expensive tomatoes.
If the point is to ridicule Michael Pollan and Alice Waters, to highlight the fact that the model of production they talk about is a luxury item for the rich and utterly untenable for most of society, I'm even on board with that.
But if the point is to make the argument that there is little benefit to seasonal cooking or small-farm animal husbandry, you lose me completely. There clearly is a benefit:
* Out-of-season vegetables are very often of lower quality than canned; the obvious example is tomatoes, but you're also not going to eat a ramp in December, or a high-quality parsnip in May, or a Vidalia in the fall.
* The consumer embrace of faux-fresh off-season veg actually is a bad thing; it pushes out producers who make real veg in favor of people who are selling wax veg year-round; people are still buying wax tomatoes in July.
* Alienation from seasonal cooking results in home cooks who, like me, had never tasted a ramp or a morel or a vidalia or even a real tomato; seasonal cooking is vector towards good cooking, and one thing that I think is hard to argue is that America needs more and better home cooks.
* Supermarket meat is a bona fide debacle. There's universal agreement that we've managed to breed flavor and health out of pigs almost entirely. Industrial chicken is epsilon away from being grown in vats instead of farms. Beef is being treated with ammonia before grinding (the trend towards buying meat not only pre-ground but pre-shaped is another pathology).
* "Local meat" is in some cases actually cheaper than the supermarket crap; you have to make a lifestyle concession to get access to those prices (ie, you have to have a $150 chest freezer, and you have to be willing to actually cook), but high-quality pig and beef is not out of the reach of a lower-middle-class homeowner.
* I live in the midwest. I'm not a fan of St. Pollan[1], but there are some restaurant owners here that I do admire and who make a point of sticking to midwest-seasonal. I take exception to the idea that it "really sucks". We should meet in the middle. In the colder climes, we should be shipping in "accent" products from the west coast to liven things up, but there's plenty of regional produce that can and should form the staple. Right now, we're at the other extreme: most people in Chicago are happy to eat a caprese with gassed-red wax tomatoes and mutant basil and kraft mozzeralla in the middle of January.
* And don't get me started on our access to cheese here.
[1] Although I like his writing about plants. He's a great garden writer.
Great line. (Apropos of nothing: when vat-grown meat arrives, I will be there on day one, eating it off the freaking petri dish if they'll let me.)
The rest of us can eat actual chicken, the kind that had feet and beaks.
But even if hypothetically it tasted worse then the real thing, there are likely to be great benefits that will outweight that factor for most occassions
- It avoids the need to kill a normal animal that feels sensations, can experience cruelty, and has emotions that are (debatably) similar to our own.
- It is likely to be more affordable and more sustainable since it likely will need less space and less energy per unit meat produced
If you want to argue about the benefits of e.g. Quorn, I have no problem with it and won't be fun to argue with; it's basically exotic tofu.
But if we're talking about industrialized factory chicken, which is tasteless and loaded with antibiotics (because yields would dramatically drop if an unprotected chicken organism was exposed to the chicken-raising environment) and still arrives rife with salmonella so that cooking with it is a hazmat operation... I think you're on shakier ground.
Better that we not cook with chicken (switch to tofu, it's cheaper) than with crap chicken.
PS: for what it's worth, I don't care about the ethics of animal treatment that much at all. I'm not a fan of needless cruelty, and I do believe that happier animals (incidentally) taste better, but animal welfare is not one of my animating concerns.
It is not yet commercially available, but it is under serious research: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_vitro_meat has a good summary of the current situation and http://www.newsdesk.umd.edu/scitech/release.cfm?ArticleID=10... has a good laymen's summary of a recent technical paper on its commercial feasability.
What you do with mycoprotein and cultured meat is between you and your deity. I have no opinions about it. I'm also fine with you consuming all your meals in tablet or milkshake form. Just leave the chickens alone!
He seems to say the opposite. He praises fresh food and praises eating seasonally for its flavor and other benefits. What he objects to is eating locally in a dogmatic way and he objects to trying to use transportation costs as a justification for that. He largely debunks the transportation cost argument and says that forcing crops to grow in inappropriate places (like tomatoes in the Hudson Valley) is worse than shipping them.
one thing that I think is hard to argue is that America needs more and better home cooks.
I would argue that, at least in dense urban areas. There are enormous economies of scale in storing and preparing more food communally. If you look at a college dorm or military barracks, they generally do not have the facilities to store or cook food (I'm excluding pure microwave cooking) in each room, but instead have some form of caffeteria. Thus, they save a huge amount of space in the rooms by not having a kitchen, energy since the refrigeration is done in large, effecient units and so is the cooking, and time for the people living there. I think there would be a cultural resistance to moving this model into a lot of apartment buildings, but there would be a lot of advantages to doing so.
There are huge economies of scale to delivering food through McDonalds and Burger King. Unfortunately, those economies are self-evident and effective and are very successfully displacing real food. It's worth some effort to come up with a cost-effective alternative based on actual food, especially if it empowers families with two working parents to actually prepare food with real ingredients.
It's hard to do that, but it can be done, and technology is going to make it easier over the next 10-15 years.
One point you sort of touch upon is a constant mystery to me. Canned/frozen/preserved fruits and veggies have come a long way from the cooked-to-mush-during-canning state I remember from my childhood, but there seems to be some "freshness" fetish that was drummed into the collective consciousness during the 80s and 90s which is no longer serving us very well. I am a fairly sophisticated and knowledgeable customer when visiting the market, but I still find it hard to not be influenced by this fresh > preserved idea. For most tomato use cases a high-quality canned variety will taste better than a "fresh" tomato that was shipped more than 200 miles, but it has taken me quite a while to feel comfortable avoiding the produce section and head for the canned vegetable aisle during large swathes of the year.
[And I agree about you about Pollan; he is much like Jared Diamond IMHO, great when doing science/history reporting and it goes downhill fast when they venture closer and closer to politics and policy.]
Yes! For example: I live in western Illinois, and my seasonal eating involves summers with lots of fresh local fruits and veggies, reserving the jars of pasta sauce and much of the meat for the winter. (Meat, if you think about it, is the original preservative: no need to refrigerate until you kill it, you just need to "fuel" it through the winter.) I certainly don't forsake things that can't be made locally but I try to mostly eat them during the times when the things that can be grown locally are offline. Hence I now think of orange juice and mangoes and such as "winter fruit". :)
From what I understand, food-miles is being used as a proxy for carbon output (and associated pollution), under the assumption that it takes fuel to move things, so food that travels a long way must use a lot of fuel.
A much more direct measurement of carbon output is "food cost", since the fuel used to move the food -- as well as the energy used to grow the food -- has to be paid for, and the people bringing the food to you price it high enough to cover those costs. It turns out, shipping food thousands of miles by train or barge doesn't use much energy relative to the amount of food shipped; as the article mentioned, most of the energy usage comes from the consumer, not the grower or shipper.
It's also important to put money back into your local community. If I spend $50 at a chain grocery store, very, very little of that is going into the local economy. If I spend $50 on meat from a local farm, all $50 is going to the local economy.
PS How's the 1/2 pig?
I can't recommend Slagel Family Farms highly enough; they were just awesome to deal with.
My monthly CSA is Cedar Valley Sustainable Farm and I supplement from Mint Creek (amazing lamb) and some others from around the area.
But that aside: a small, high-quality farm in Nebraska is just as worthy of support as a small, high-quality farm in Wisconsin.
The problem is, a small, high-quality farm anywhere is more worthy of support than Cargill.
Patronizing local farms instead of supermarkets means less of your money goes to Cargill. That's a good thing.
Sure! So can large farms owned by huge companies raising high-quality cows, pigs and lambs. And small family-owned farms raising crappy animals are a bad thing. I'm not sure why we should be focusing on the size and ownership of the farm at all.
It is inexcusable that today, forty years since the end of food scarcity, poor people starve to death every day while steers are fatted on corn and soybeans for the rich. Through efficiency, we've achieved a post-scarcity world. Now we need to achieve a post-poverty world. Efficiency is not going to get us there.
Locavorism might promote greater resiliency; but does it? Does the long-distance and international food trade ameliorate or exacerbate the privation of crop failures? Do small, local farms produce less fertilizer runoff per acre than big agribusiness operations? (Historically, in first place, with the most agrochemicals applied per acre, has been the suburban lawn.) Is locavorism an effective hedge against new pests devastating monoculture crops? Does it effectively break down hierarchies of richer and poorer regions by reducing long-distance exploitation, or does it reinforce them by keeping the money of the rich close to home?
I don't know. But when you're sitting in a fancy restaurant, pondering whether the lamb on the menu, priced the same as 100 kilos of soybeans, comes from Niman Ranch down the road or from a giant ranch in New Zealand — don't delude yourself into thinking that that's a serious food policy issue.
Whether we should be eating more or less meat, whether meat should be priced massively higher or not, why can't we agree that most other things being equal, we should eat better meat when possible?
Cargill meat is inflicting all the same imbalances on the world food market, and loading our food with antibiotics while still increasing foodborne illness, and reducing the overall quality of our meals.
Niman Ranch, for what it's worth, is a consortium of independent small farms spread all over the place.
I agree that big meat producers like Cargill (and, apparently, Niman Ranch) harm resiliency and the environment.
I think that your questions, like how much fecal contamination is in your meat, and how it tastes, are rounding errors when compared to questions like how much farmland had to be saturated with ammonium nitrate to feed it, how much methane it emitted, and how much downstream spinach was contaminated with Salmonella — from a public policy perspective, that is.
As long as a substantial number of people in the world who are starving to death, many more people are eating meals of very low overall quality and suffering serious illness as a result. This is the important issue.
You're right about Niman Ranch. Thanks for the tip. They had me fooled; I thought Niman Ranch was a ranch in Marin County, California. I didn't realize they were a nationwide marketer of grain-fed feedlot-finished beef (it explains this in the FAQ on their web site) and that Bill Niman now refuses to eat Niman Ranch products!
Your concerns about the food supply chain are valid. I just don't think it's reasonable to make one food issue ("locavorism: fate or fad?") a proxy for every food issue.
I agree that different issues relate to different degrees to each other. But locavorism is advocacy of a deeply different structure for the entire food supply chain, and that does relate to every other food issue. If we're going to restructure the whole food supply chain, we should focus on issues that really matter, like whether the resulting structure is just and resilient, not on the flavor of the resulting veal.
Edit: although of course your personal locavorism may not be any kind of advocacy at all, which would explain your puzzlement at political issues being raised.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/06/opinion/06mcwilliams.html
Here's Will Wilkinson on why eating Local may not better
http://marketplace.publicradio.org/display/web/2008/08/27/ea...
Overall, transportation accounts for about 14 percent of the total energy consumed by the American food system.
Other favorite targets of sustainability advocates include the fertilizers and chemicals used in modern farming. But their share of the food system’s energy use is even lower, about 8 percent.
The real energy hog, it turns out, is not industrial agriculture at all, but you and me. Home preparation and storage account for 32 percent of all energy use in our food system, the largest component by far.
Well, fine, but ceteris paribus you've just shown that transportation and fertilization do, in fact, make up a not insignifcant percentage of food production cost. Why would you add in the cost of home storage and preparation, which (presumably) will be the same for everyone?