The Attack of the Heirloom Tomatoes!

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Or I should say, the attack of the misguided and dangerous beings who feed on those farmer’s market favorites. As described by James McWilliams in his book ”Just Food”, there are people lurking among who us who pose a threat to our food supply. McWilliams has given them a name: Locavores. He helpfully describes their characteristics and behaviors so that we can be on the lookout.

At first, they sound harmless. According to McWilliams, they apparently like to “produce and consume locally grown food”. They seem to gather at “local farmers’s markets”. As stated above they feed on “heirloom tomatoes and baby squash”, but also on “Berkeley microgreens”. They can be overheard speaking in code words such as “sustainability”, “foodshed”, “agroecology”, and “carbon footprint”. They seem to have allegiance to a leader they call “Alice Waters.”   Their social rituals are driven by a “fetish of localism”. And they frequently dress as if were “Haight-Ashbury circa 1968″.

Are you getting a clear picture of these Locavores? Well, wait, because it gets more complicated. They apparently also assume many different shapes and sizes. Depending on which chapter in “Just Food” you have strained to get to, Locavores may also appear as “”The Organic Lobby”, “NGO’s”, ”Environmentalists”, the “International Slow Food Movement” and “Greenpeace.”

All snark aside, two things could have made this book semi-useful: 1) Different ordering of the chapters; and 2) an author with a different agenda. Lacking these two things, the book is a 222-page effort at personal branding to advance the author’s career as a supposedly “moderate” food pundit. He calls this brand “The Golden Mean.”

“Just Food” is promoted as a problem/solution book. In this genre it is most logical to begin by comprehensively defining real problems, prioritized by their seriousness. Next should come proposals to solve the problems. Only after these steps have been accomplished should an author who is genuinely concerned with solving the identified problems attempt to critque alternate solutions.

If McWilliams had followed this logical approach, his fourth chapter, titled “Meat—The New Caviar” would have been first. This chapter—by far the strongest in a weak book—is the closest he comes to illuminating the breadth and depth of industrial food’s destructive effects. He provides detailed metrics of the damage to land, water resources and air caused by industrially raising such mind-boggling numbers of animals for food. Additionally, he reviews the related animal welfare and human disease risks of CAFOs. Ultimately, the chapter stops far short of building a complete picture of our global food system. Unlike Eric Schlosser’s classic, “Fast Food Nation”, or Michael Pollan’s “The Omnivore’s Dilemma”, McWilliams does not place industrial livestock farming into the larger agribusiness and food processing picture.

But had “Just Food” begun with this description of factory farming, McWilliams would have quickly found common ground with many food policy critics and activists. Perhaps he could have built sufficient trust and authority so that good faith critiques he offered could add value to food debates. But he obviously has no interest in finding any common ground with the existing movements that oppose the oligopoly of the global ag and food companies. In fact, his only use for this diverse movement of food system critics is to serve as the naive, misguided and anti-capitalist strawman contrast to his reasonable  ”Golden Mean” persona. That is why “Just Food” does not begin by defining big problems.

Instead, it starts by going after the Locavores. The pattern begins in the Introduction, and continues through the first three chapters by building Locavore strawmen. He uses a pile of buzz words he has collected by apparently clicking through blogs and reading popular food books. Each custom-assembled strawman then becomes the “extreme”, “naive”, or “romantic” foil for McWilliams’ Golden Mean position. The Locavore strawman–whether it’s the strict “food miles” worshipper, the chemical-free purest of small organic farming, or the paranoid anti-GMO obstructionist–is then shown to be incapable or unwilling to comprehend the big-system scalability required to feed the nameless billions of the world’s poor. Any real person who prefers locally-grown, sustainable food, prefers organic methods when practical, is concerned about world hunger, and worries about the environmental degradation caused by our food system will not recognize themselves in McWilliams’ distorted caricatures.

In addition to his own mocking putdowns, McWilliams draws heavily on outside sources to belittle the Locavores, and promote his supposedly middle-ground Golden Mean. These sources should be judged by their entire body of work, but a few samples of their work–some used in the book, some not– should give you a hint as to whether they truly represent the ”middle-ground”. Here is a small taste:

UCLA Professor, Bob Goldberg: “The Hypocrisy of Organic Farmers”

Microbiologist, Dr. Elizabeth Finkel: “Organic Food Exposed”

Ron Bailey, deployed here by McWilliams to glorify the “father of the Green Revolution”, Norman Borlaug. Bailey, a journalist with Reason Magazine, has authored these aidditional titles, not referenced in “Just Food”:

“ECOSCAM: The False Prophets of Ecological Apocalypse”

“Global Warming and Other Eco Myths: How the Environmental Movement Uses False Science to Scare Us to Death”

“Liberation Biology: The Scientific And Moral Case For The Biotech Revolution”

UC Berkeley Molecular Biologist,  Bruce Ames, a controversial figure with a large body of work, but best known in the general media as the guy who advocates the application of synthetic chemicals in agriculture to promote the yield and consumption of more cancer-preventing fruits and vegetables. His work in this area is best evaluated at length,  not as a provocative poke-in-the-eye snippet against organic, as used here by McWilliams.

C. S. Prakash, Professor in Plant Molecular Genetics at Tuskegee University, Alabama. Dr. Prakash is a tireless propagandist for GMO through AgBioWorld, the advocacy group he co-founded with heavy funding from CEI, a rightwing corporate-funded think tank.

One of the few direct interviews McWilliams conducted for this book was with two Monsanto guys, Roger Beachy (now with the USDA) and Ernie Jaworski. The only direct quote included in the text is Jaworski’s answer to the question of who will supply the unprofitable, niche “public domain” GE technology and material to the poor: “Bill Gates!, Bill Gates! The Gates Foundation!.”

And my favorite, Molecular Biologist Nina Federoff, who made this statement ridiculing people who are suspicious of GMO’s in a Seed Magazine interview last year (not referenced in this book):

“And the anti GM-ers circulate some pretty odd stories: Monsanto’s going to “force” farmers to buy its seeds. If farmers keep their seeds to plant next year, Monsanto is going to come and get them. (Um, how’s it going to do that?) A little common sense, please.”

I’ll bet Federoff wishes she had seen Food, Inc. before making that assinine statement. Her question is answered in the segment on Moe Parr, the guy who cleaned farmers’ seeds to enable re-use, and was sued and put out of business by Monsanto, after their private investigators forced testimony from Parr’s lifelong farmer friends and customers.

Having beaten down the Locavores with such moderate “middleground” arguments, McWilliams turns to his “solutions”. But wait, you might be thinking. If the Golden Mean is in the middle, what about the other side? The industrial food system status quo? Doesn’t he spend time beating that up? Well, as I pointed out above,  his fourth chapter about meat does physically describe damage being done by factory farming.  But his criticism seems framed as just a bunch of bad choices made by reckless and greedy “ranchers” who have allowed their herds to get too big to manage. He makes no connection between subsidized monocropping of commodity corn, CAFOs and Taco Bell’s multimillion dollar ad campaign to get us to go pick up a cheap “4th Meal”.

Perhaps he feels any such critical analysis of the food system power structure would make him sound too much like a Locavore. After all, early on he assesses  ”Locavorism” as having “political motivations”, with “the ulterior motives driving the cultural process of localizaton having academic roots”.  He presents his damning evidence via quotes he pulls from a collection of academic essays, such as this: “A group of established academics present ‘civic agriculture’ as an antidote to ‘commodifying, concentrating, and globalizing forces’ that drive ‘the corporate trajectory of the current agrifood system.’” Having busted these academic Locavore sympathisers, it’s not surprising that he steers far clear of anything smacking of such subversion. He sums up their criticism concisely, asserting that

“their prescriptions, which typically involve taking a steamroller to capitalsm, tend to alienate the wavering while preaching to the convinced. The person who works hard, tries to be a good citizen, and is concerned with food production is hardly going to be swayed by an argument insisting that he abandon his faith in the free market economy.”

Needless to say, these ground rules hobble McWilliams’ attempt at “solutions.” When he finally prescribes them, they turn out to be a jumble of approaches.  Specifically, he wants us to forget “food miles” and instead focus on “life cycle assessments” (already being embraced by some in sustainable farming). He also wants us to drop our obsession with pure organic methods and get comfortable with the use of synthetic chemicals. In addition, he wants us to loose our fear of GMOs, especially now that he implies the Gates Foundation will beneficently be providing all of the technology to the developing world with no strings attached.

He also proposes a radical culinary change:  to drastically reduce our consumption of meat. This position, of course, puts him right in tune with a significant segment of the people he has spent the entire book insulting. But the primary protein source he advocates we substitute for land animals is probably not so compatible: freshwater farmed fish. In support of this food source, McWilliams does a little cutting and pasting from aquaculture trade association web sites that extoll its virtues. I predict a few obstacles to broad adoption of this food source, however, based on this apparently common practice in trout farming described by McWilliams: “…some trout farmers will spike water with doses of testoterone in order to alter the sex of male fish, which don’t fatten as well as females.” And while McWilliams’ case for freshwater aquaculture is mostly based on its potential to be an ultra-efficient source of “global protein”, he does not touch on the rest of its nutrional profile. Results from a Wake Forest University Study “revealed that farm-raised tilapia, as well as farmed catfish, ‘have several fatty acid characteristics that would generally be considered by the scientific community as detrimental.’ Tilapia has higher levels of potentially detrimental long-chain omega-6 fatty acids than 80-percent-lean hamburger, doughnuts and even pork bacon.”  Yum.

After presenting these food production “solutions” McWilliams runs into the wall he himself built by earlier declaring that harsh criticism of the food system’s corporate power structure is off limits. The last full chapter of “Just Food” attempts to describe how all of these necessary changes to our food system can be made to happen without any direct challenge to corporate power. This is how he sees it happening: first, all “perverse subsidies” (a term he repeats robotically 20 times in one chapter) must be made public knowledge. Then the magic happens. Says McWilliams,

“Once properly exposed, subsidies are—with enough consumer awareness and resistance—bound to shame large producers into righting the rules of the game so as to eliminate the merest whiff of a word that’s pretty close to socialism in the public mind-set: welfare.”

You read that right. McWilliams thinks that large global corporations can be shamed into voluntarily giving up profitable subsidies. Oh, and he also proposes a sweeping set of taxes meant to disincentivize companies from dirtying up the environment, that would no doubt sail right through Congress. Why didn’t someone think of this stuff before?

I have barely scratched the surface of how dreadful this book is. It’s a shame, because all of its main topics are worthy of healthy debate, but only when the parties are acting in good faith. There is almost none of that in “Just Food.” But the book is apparently having its intended effect on McWilliams’ career: he is popping up as a go-to guy for food system punditry, like this recent NY Times article, in which he…you guessed it: defends GMOs. Meanwhile, the science of GMOs is clearly not settled, the road from Monsanto to the Gates Foundation has been busy, and in Obama’s USDA, Big Ag still rules. The Golden Mean at work.

Cross-posted at La Vida Locavore.

Tags: Agribusiness, CAFO, GMO, Local Food, locavore, organic, Sustainable Farming