How locavores will destroy the world

by Ari LeVaux

In the last 20 years, the amount of local foods consumed in America has tripled, according to USDA, now comprising 2 percent of food consumed in the country. As with anything popular, some have seen fit to tear it down. Why? Do they find locavores to be annoying, or do they seriously believe that local food poses a threat to the planet?

Menus have become dense with information, as chefs detail the histories of every ingredient. This focus comes increasingly at the expense of the finished product, according to food critic Corby Kummer in Vanity Fair. While Kummer says he is a fan of locally sourced foods, he’s becoming weary of the “farmwashing.” He mentions a talented Silicon Valley chef, David Kinch, as an example of how less can be more. Kinch works closely with a local farm for much of his produce, but doesn’t gloat about it.

 “That’s what the future of farm-to-table should be: food that speaks for itself without having to tell you where it comes from.”

A darker side of the trend was recently exposed in San Diego Magazine, which detailed cases of menu fraud. “Sometimes it can be very blatant,” Tom Chino of the legendary Chino Farms told the magazine. “Chefs will come look (at what we’re selling that day), write down notes, leave without buying anything, and then say they’re serving our food.”

Meanwhile, another crop of opportunists is sprouting like weeds to jump on the local foods bandwagon in a different way. They’re portraying locavores as misguided at best, actual threats to society at worst.

In the book The Locavore’s Dilemma: In Praise of the 10,000-mile Diet, economists Pierre Desrochers and Hiroko Shimizu argue that if everyone focused on local foods, agriculture would do more damage to the environment than it already does. Their case rests on a widely circulated statistic that many locavores might not want to hear: transportation of food accounts for about 5 percent of food-related carbon emissions; production can create a lot more. Thus, local foods can have a larger carbon footprint than imported foods grown where they can be coaxed from the soil with less energy. Greenhouse tomatoes in the UK, for example, produce three times the greenhouse gas emissions as tomatoes imported from Spain.

The well-rounded locavore would do well to consider such nuance. But at the same time, many things about this book make it seem more opportunistic than sincere. In an interview with Grist, Desrochers admitted to writing the book primarily, “to save my marriage.”

The impetus came, Desrochers recounted, when a locavore gave a lecture in which he called Japan a parasitic society because it imports so much food. “My wife was born and raised in Tokyo. She made me promise that I would do something about it.” The book’s intro bluntly states the authors’ objective: To, “slaughter as many sacred cows in the food activists’ intellectual herd as we could.”

Similar arguments have been made in recent years. Stephen Budiansky did so in a 2010 New York Times editorial “Math Lessons for Locavores,” as have the books Just Food, An Economist Gets Lunch, and Food Police.

These economic arguments assume all advantages and disadvantages of a food chain can be accounted for. But can they?

It’s often pointed out that local food is more expensive than factory farmed. Cheaper food leaves more money in the wallets of consumers to spend elsewhere, goes the logic. But when L.A. Times writer Isabella Alsobrook tried a 100-mile diet, she found that while the produce cost more, she actually saved money overall. She had to cook more from scratch, with fresh, local ingredients and saved money. And few would argue that this is not a healthier way to eat.

Taken to their extremes, the economics-based arguments would label most gardens as inefficient. And most gardeners would agree that it would be more efficient, and even cheaper, to spend a few extra hours at work and buy all their food. But quality of life is hard to quantify.

A recent article by economics professors Anita Dancs and Helen Sharber takes the efficiency arguments to task. While California can grow a lot of produce, they point out, the economic calculations don’t account for the state’s dwindling aquifer. Florida may grow cheap tomatoes, but the calculations don’t account for the near-slavery conditions in which the workers toil. Power imbalances, they note, aren’t incorporated into the 10,000-mile diet’s calculus.

“It’s a red herring to say that because the industrial food system is so efficient and its carbon footprint is so small that it’s a good thing,” Missoula farmer Josh Slotnick says. “Agribusiness isn’t about making food and places better. It will make us better consumers, but not better people.”

Slotnick acknowledges that some foods, like wheat, oranges or mangoes, can only be grown in certain regions. And he sees nothing wrong with shipping such foods. “But everyone should be growing vegetables. Everywhere.”

Eating locally, he argues, makes you a better citizen and empowers communities. “I can’t believe that people are trying to argue that communities feeding themselves is a bad thing,” he says. “Growing food in just a few places and shipping it around the world from there doesn’t sound like efficiency. It sounds like slavery.”

However, even some economists will concede the point that local food, harvested at the peak of ripeness, will taste better. In Math Lessons for Locavores, Stephen Budiansky admitted that there are “pleasures and advantages to the palate and the spirit of eating what’s local, fresh and in season.”

Anyone who’s raised chickens will surely concede it would be more efficient to buy eggs at the store. But try telling that to my 2-year-old, whose first words in the morning are “get some eggs,” as he stumbles toward the coop in his sagging diaper. Should I tell him how inefficient that idea is?