Keeping It Yokel: Debating The Religion Of Keeping Food Local
Emily Badger writes in The Atlantic about Pierre Desrochers, a man with a counterpoint to "local food's leading 'agri-intellectual'...Michael Pollan":
An economic geographer at the University of Toronto Mississauga, he has written a book (co-authored with his wife, Hiroko Shimizu), that attempts to eviscerate the movement's main arguments, from its economic rationale to its environmental one.
That book is: The Locavore's Dilemma: In Praise of the 10,000-mile Diet
Badger continues:
(Desrochers) is particularly bemused by the notion that anyone would try to produce local food "when it makes no economic sense," when we have developed over the course of centuries an international and increasingly efficient system for feeding the world affordable bananas and blueberries and lamb year-round. Locavores - and their kind have popped up throughout history - have traditionally championed local food, he says, for no reason other than that it's local....He is essentially arguing that local food is fundamentally incompatible with urbanism. Urbanization isn't possible without imported food. And urbanization is what makes it possible to raise standards of living everywhere. Historically, we have pushed the production of food out of cities as subsistence farmers have moved in. Now, instead of each tending our own plot of rural land for a living, cities have enabled us to specialize as lawyers and bakers and engineers, while we've turned farming itself into a specialty.
In the process, Desrochers points out, we've learned to produce more food on less land, the price of it has fallen, the range of it available at your local store has increased, and the malnourished percentage of the world population has declined. The problem with locavores, as he sees it, is that they want to undo all of this progress, with terrible consequences.
The most environmentally friendly food policy, Desrochers argues, is the one where agriculture consumes the least amount of land globally, and only agri-business can deliver this efficiency. Producing food also requires more energy than transporting it, he adds. He dismisses the concept of "food miles," which he says fails to take into account the mode of transit on which our bananas travel. The 2,000 miles your produce travels from Latin America to Los Angeles by freight, he suggests, may be associated (per banana) with fewer carbon dioxide emissions than the 10 miles it travels home in your car from the supermarket.
He also argues that it's less energy-intensive to produce food where regions best specialize in it, than it is to try to coax those same products out of ill-suited soil elsewhere, even if that means shipping apples from New Zealand to the U.K.
"local food is fundamentally incompatible with urbanism"
This may be about to change. I recently saw a very persuasive documentary about food production in cities. A way to provide efficient production, fresh produce and low transportation costs.
In a nutshell: build a multi-level warehouse filled with hydroponics, plants and grow-lights. We are talking many acres under one roof. Ideal growing conditions, no risk of drought or flooding, highly automated. The produce ships out of the ground floor to local supermarkets in the same city.
Coming soon to a city near you...
a_random_guy at July 3, 2012 11:43 PM
I can't remember when I did it, but few months back I did a compare of the cost of silver (the "common" grade metal) to the cost of things like hair cuts and food.
Essentially the cost of a haircut was equivalent to the "shave and a haircut; two bits" price back then.
Back then two bits was about .5 troy ounces of silver. A .5 troy ounces of silver is about $15-17 dollars.
In other words $0.50 back then is about $16 now. The true cost has not really changed for a haircut.
But when I started comparing food costs, they have dropped significantly. The 1950's "$0.10" hamburger from McDonald's should be about $8-9 now. They are about $1-2 now.
That leads to the observation that industrial farming efficiency has probably caused the change.
My worry is that there is nothing left, in the U.S., to absorb any efficiencies.
I.e. Computers will improve efficiencies, but there is no further great leap forwards. The great leap forward is done. When you can do video editing on a mid-grade laptop, there is nothing to really reach for. The 20's and 30's went from 20-30 bushels of corn per acre to 250-300 bushels of corn per acre. That is at about the max. If you look at food prices per ounce of silver and farming advances you will see a correspondence.
The domestic front used to be a fridge, gas/electric stove/oven, washer and dryer. Now those are expected and accustomed appliances. The prices have stabilized. I've seen the price of my Whopper's steadily increasing by dimes.
My point being that we now have to consider everything is at max. I will bet you that every rise in the stock market has a correspondent with general availability of a technology.
Where do we go from here?
I'm not going to ask you to do the research -- but if you know anyone to do -- or has done -- the research, I wouldn't mind a guide.
Jim P. at July 4, 2012 12:03 AM
I like local food when I can get it because it is fresh and tastes better, but I live in Colorado and, no, I don't want to live On turnips all winter.
Astra at July 4, 2012 1:20 AM
I buy local produce that's in season but I have no issues buying stuff from other places either, especially when it's the off season. I get more variety in my diet that way.
BunnyGirl at July 4, 2012 4:02 AM
Locavore or LOCOvore?
Don't import food means also not exporting food. Cranberry sauce/juice limited to Eastern Massachusetts? Potatoes limited to Idaho and Maine? Beef to the Southern States, except as a luxury item? Bananas verboten? Coffee and chocolate to become unknown? Vanilla? Lemons, oranges, melons...
John A at July 4, 2012 9:04 AM
Random Guy, I would think that growing food indoors would consume more power than growing it on a farm giving costs like electricity for the lights, climate control, and water circulation. It might make sense when growing food out of season, though.
Jim, computers aren't done improving. Moore's Law still holds as they continue to make smaller processors that are faster than their predecessors. The prices of appliances may have stabilized but the types of features have improved. Ice makers used to be an extra; now they are standard for the most part.
Locovores need to understand that agri-business isn't just about feeding them, but getting food to distant places that may not have local access to the kind of nutrition it can provide. It's not necessarily for noble purposes, but if they can make money and help people, it's all good. :)
Rob W at July 4, 2012 9:23 AM
I recently listened to a podcast episode of Freakonomics hosted by University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt and New York Times journalist Stephen J. Dubner.
The podcast was on the economics of eating locally produced food. As it turns out, transportation of food only accounts for 1% of the total energy used in producing and marketing of food.
michael at July 4, 2012 9:40 AM
Energy costs of transportation cannot be determined simply by counting miles. Hauling food by rail, for example (and there's now a company operating daily fast trains coast-to-coast for fruits & vegetables), uses far less fuel per ton-mile than does somebody's half-full old pickup truck bringing food from a local farm.
David Foster at July 4, 2012 9:46 AM
I'm not arguing that there is no room for improvements in efficiency, speed, longevity, etc. in common consumer products. I'm arguing that short of coming up with a simple brain/computer interface, an advanced power source anyone can keep in the "basement" for less than $5K a year, or something similar it is all incremental from here.
If you ever read Atlas Shrugged, the heroes or protagonists, all had come up with something that could change the world. What can you see in the near future that can change the world that hasn't been invented?
About the only thing would be a Reardon metal or a cheap room temperature superconductor.
But against the mob -- it will only buy us time, not fix the dependency issue.
Jim P. at July 4, 2012 12:42 PM
I will grant you bananas, coffee, chocolate, cranberry, and lemons being limited. But the staples of beef, pork, chicken, potatoes, tomatoes, apples, carrots, cucumbers, etc. are not really limited to any place, they are just advertised that way.
There is also a seasonal aspect to it. I can grow the vegetables and fruit I listed above pretty much anywhere in the continental U.S., but then I have to find a way to preserve them the other 7-9 months of the year; such as canning or freezing.
Fish of some type are generally available throughout the U.S. But things such as lobster, crab, etc. would be a limited resource.
But the free market system means this doesn't need to be done, in general.
Jim P. at July 4, 2012 12:58 PM
Jim/Rob...yes, computer speeds and densities will keep improving, but there's such a thing as diminishing returns. While another 100X improvement in cost-performance will do wonders for certain applications (like simulation and high-end animation), for most applications the payoff will not be all that impressive.
I think many of the potential future improvements in productivity lie in the area of management rather than technology per se. The average customer-service call center, for example, is a God-awful mismanaged mess, wasting the time of its own employees as welll as its customers.
Historical precedent: GM under Roger Smith spent billions on a massive and largely-disappointing effort at roboticization...while Toyota addressed the procedural and human aspects of manufacturing with its Lean production system, and did much better.
david foster at July 4, 2012 2:18 PM
I remember thinking, as a child, that there was nowhere for technology to go. TVs all came in color (although we had an old B&W). You could now get phone service in you CAR of all places. We had, cars, trains, planes, phones, dishwashers, washing machines, all sorts of fun things that weren't strictly necessary, but mighty nice. I couldn't even think of a way to improve upon or add to what society had.
Since then, humanity has invented: LCD screens, cell phones, the internet (ok, it sort of existed, but it wasn't an every-man kind of thing), computers went from being luxury items with 16 KB of memory at the HIGH end to having 32 GIG (probably more now). According to my mechanic, the fluids used in cars have improved a lot in the last decade leading to increased performance and high mpg. Then there's improvements in medical science ranging from new techniques to new drugs, improved imaging devices, dissolving sutures, dissolving stents...
I'm sure I don't know all the improvements since I had that thought around age 8. But over twenty years later, we have CLEARLY made massive strides. Now, I don't know what the heck we need. Pretty much all industries are specialized at some level. But there are people out there who think about what would improve their area of life and who MAKE things that will improve it.
Just because we don't see room for improvement, it doesn't mean it's not there.
Who's to say somebody won't invent Rearden Metal?
Shannon M. Howell at July 5, 2012 5:47 AM
when we have developed over the course of centuries an international and increasingly efficient system for feeding the world
While I can sympathize with the overall economics argument here, that sentence could only have been written by someone who's never had a _real_ (not cooled to stop ripening) tomato.
Unix-Jedi at July 5, 2012 8:10 AM
I agree with Shannon -- just because we can't imagine what's left to change the world doesn't mean someone won't come up with something. Affordable solar film you can roll out on your roof? affordable portable desalination & water purification? Advanced battery technology - charge your laptop for weeks with one small cell? smart paper? Mr Fusion? (did anyone notice the back to the future date was last week?) Or most likely something we have not even considered . . . I'm already amazed by smartphones, just what I wished for 20 years ago, and I hope I'm around long enough to find out what's next.
Lynn at July 5, 2012 1:16 PM
Centralized food production has it's perks but the food is blander and has been shown to have nutrient deficiencies due to hot housing and the use of some fertilizer. Fertilizer use can strain natural resources and cause natural shit storms in the form of red tide among others.
I joined the local CSA farm because it's cheaper and it fucks over Bank of America. I pay up front and the farmer doesn't need to get loans at the start of the season. So BOA and the rest of those congress buying cock sucker lose money. Plus the food is delivered to work saving me time.
One thing I can envision that will revolutionize life would be long lived 85% efficiency solar cells. The best we have right now is 45 and my understanding is they have a very short life span. Poof 1st world carbon emissions go to zero and we can tell the UN Enviro committee to go fuck itself. Anthropogenic global warming get definitive results, Al Gore rejoices or weeps. A decentralized power grid that is not vulnerable to attack, human or natural. Power failures won't cause city wide riots. Middle East is back to fighting with sticks and stones. I'm a dinner Jacket (Iran's pres.) get his wish, first world nations leaving. Three days later is lynched by hordes of his own people when Iran can't even buy Ramen since their sol export is gone.
BTW the next big thing will probably be Space Mining which to my surprise is slated for the next decade or less. http://io9.com/5904599/its-official-james-cameron-and-google-unveil-plans-for-asteroid+mining
vlad at July 6, 2012 8:22 AM
Our local berries, especially strawberries, are abso-freak-amazing. They also don't travel well. You can get other berries further in a truck but they will never come close to a good, local berry.
Grow my wheat wherever and toss it in a truck. No biggie. Wheat travels well.
LauraGr at July 6, 2012 7:41 PM
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