Another Concern Troll Worries About Locavores

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Another week and another writer is wringing his hands about the contradictions and impracticalities exhibited by locavores. Writing in Saturday’s New York Times, Damon Darlin drags out the usual culprits who have instigated and promoted the preference for locally grown food: Michael Pollan, of course, but also Michelle Obama and her garden on the White House lawn. In his article titled “A Balance Between the Factory and the Local Farm” Darlin boils down the entire local food movement to this keen social observation:

‘Diners now scan the menus at their local restaurants for provenances like “Cattail Creek Ranch lamb” or “Hudson Valley rabbit.” And home cooks now await boxes of fresh produce delivered weekly from local growers.’

Well, you might ask, what could possibly be wrong with these things? Darlin helpfully points out something that perhaps locavores hadn’t thought of:

“as much of the East Coast lies blanketed beneath a foot or more of snow, it’s as good a time as any to raise a few questions about the trend’s viability.”

Doh! Weather! We completely forgot about weather!

But that’s not the only flaw in preferring locally grown food. There are also “inconsistencies in locavore behavior.” Darlin explains:

“People who eagerly order microgreens — tenderly cut with scissors by a farmer that morning — would be scandalized if a Chilean grape was served next to them… But their wine and water? Those tend to be shipped in from far-flung places. Rarely, for example, do you hear a New York restaurant bragging of its Long Island wine. Even at Chez Panisse, the Berkeley, Calif., restaurant where Alice Waters got the whole local-ingredients trend started, two out of three wines on a recent evening — the wine list changes daily — did not come from the acclaimed wine regions that begin only 25 miles away.”

“Scandalized” by a Chilean grape? Really? And actually, the one time I ate at Blue Hill, New York’s most prominent promoter of local fare, they in fact were featuring wines from Long Island (among wines from many other places). And of course, what critic of locavorism can pass up an opportunity to tweak Alice Waters again? But Darlin is not finished pointing out “inconsistencies.” Those who aspire to modify their eating habits in the hope of reducing environmental impact must also be taken down a notch:

“what started as an effort to source fresher ingredients from nearby family farms is now as much about reducing the carbon footprint and the “food miles” of food. Ordering water from the South Pacific island of Fiji or wine from New Zealand when the local stuff is quaffable seems to run counter to those ideals.”

Ah yes, typical locavores, demanding local carrots, then ordering a nice plastic bottle of Fiji water. So, locavores are impractical and inconsistent. Is Darlin done with the biting critique? No, he also frets that this trend is economically infeasible. His evidence? The following:

“People who grow vegetables in empty lots and schoolyards have a nice, wholesome hobby — but one that can make little sense economically. A few years ago, William Alexander wrote a delightful book chronicling his gardening travails, “The $64 Tomato.” He revealed a truth about do-it-yourself gardening: It is more efficient to buy a fresh tomato in the farmer’s market for $1.50 a pound.”

Maybe he was weeding his garden by leaning out the door of his Hummer as he drove up and down the rows. So, is that all that’s wrong with preferring food from small, local farms? Unfortunately, no. And this time, we need to cue the scary music, like in those election year attack ads. Warns Darlin:

“As a sustainable trend, localism bears at least some resemblance to Mao Tse-tung’s Great Leap Forward. In the late 1950s, Mao decreed that steel production be localized in backyard steel furnaces. Villagers began melting down pots and pans and creating their own steel, which amounted to low-quality and largely useless pig iron…It was a bad idea that dragged down the nation’s productivity and played a role in widespread famine.”

Next will come mandatory urban evacuation, followed by re-education camps. If you’re not scared senseless by localism by now, perhaps you’ll recall from above that the title of Darlin’s article has the word “balance” in it. And just a couple sentences from the bottom, he finally gets around to the balance part:

“But on the other extreme are the mammoth food factories in the United States. Here, frequent E. coli and salmonella bacteria outbreaks are the food industry’s version of Toyota’s sudden-acceleration and braking problems. It may be a case of a manufacturing system that has grown too fast or too large to be managed well.”

So after 18 paragraphs of concern trolling and fear mongering about the growing, but still quite small as a segment of the population, preference for fresh, locally grown food from small family farms, he gets around to mentioning things in our industrial food system that actually kill people.

I find it very interesting that articles and books criticizing the local food movement are popping up so frequently lately. Last year we had the book “Just Food” by James McWilliams, who trotted out the same strawmen that this article contains, and many more. I recently reviewed it in a previous post. He also penned an article in Forbes.com, titled “The Locavore Myth” last August that used strawmen very similar-sounding to Darlin’s, particularly regarding the fictional obsession with “food miles”. And Missouri Farm Bureau vice president Blake Hurst has written two attack pieces defending Big Agribusiness and industrial food, one titled “The Omnivore’s Delusion” in The Journal of the American Enterprise Institute, and “Farmer Knows Best” in last week’s “WeeklyStandard.com” (h/t Civil Eats).

It’s possible that these pieces are not being coordinated, and just reflect natural push-back to all the pub that Michael Pollan and Food, Inc. have generated. It’s also possible that Big Ag and Big Food are conducting a campaign to discredit all critics of industrial food. Making critics appear to be either out of touch elitists or clueless ex-hippies is stock-in-trade for corporate-driven campaigns, and sympathetic article placement has always been a key tool in the PR bag. I have a feeling we will be seeing a lot more of this stuff.

And now, you’ll have to excuse me. I must go check on the two gasoline-powered generators I run 24/7 to power a bank of klieg heat lamps in my Chicago backyard. I need the heat to help my tropical cinnamon tree grow, so I can re-stock my spice rack.