In Sunday's New York Times, Damon Darlin has now weighed into a debate which I am suddenly making a career of noticing, that of publicly lambasting locavores. Normally a tech writer (and perhaps better suited to it), Darlin has wheeled out some of the same tired points that others have recently, making them officially clichéd.
It takes only 12 words before he drops Michael Pollan's name, whose best-selling books argue eloquently for a better food system, and in the next paragraph he mentions Michelle Obama's organic garden at the White House, though he makes no mention of her new "Let's Move!" campaign against childhood obesity, for which this garden is a tool.
I was going to dismiss Mr. Darlin's piece as not worthy of notice despite its prominent placement in the Paper of Record and thus avoid writing my third column lamenting this misplaced disrespect for eaters who care what they eat (I swear I do have better, more enjoyable things to write about), but then he said this:
Some of these so-called locavores may think they are part of a national movement that will replace corporate food factories with small family farms. But 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.
What struck me first about this statement was that it came the same week that talking heads in the media and politics (And even Donald Trump?) were blindly arguing that all this snow was proof that climate change was a hoax (perpetrated to what end? I've always wondered). The irony is that these bigger storms are likely a symptom of that same climate change, caused in no small measure by industrial agriculture.
Then I noticed the condescension. These so-called locavores may think they are part of a national movement. Mr. Darlin, we are part of a national movement, an international movement in fact, led by dozens of very worthy organizations working hard to create a food system that is good, clean, and fair. Our current system is none of these things. I happen to sit on the board of directors of one such organization, Slow Food USA, which has 26,000 members nationwide and over 100,000 members worldwide. Pretty sure that alone qualifies as a movement, but as I said we are not alone.
What Mr. Darlin seems not to understand though is that there is so much more to this movement. We are not a bunch of yuppie foodies stuffing our craws with foie gras, as he and others might have their readers believe. The system we envision, as I said, is one that is:
1. Good - meaning that the food tastes good and is nutritious
2. Clean - meaning that producing the food has only beneficial and not negative effects on the environment in which it is produced, and that there is nothing in the food that isn't food (and if it wasn't food 100 years ago, it is not food now)
3. Fair - meaning that the people who produce the food should be justly compensated for their work.
This is not an effort to create some Utopian state, nor is it a recreation of Mao's "Great Leap Forward," (another accusation Darlin hurls). It is a wholehearted effort to improve the lives of everyone who eats. We do not say: good food for us, we say good food for all! And when Darlin states, "People who grow vegetables in empty lots and schoolyards have a nice, wholesome hobby -- but one that can make little sense economically," he needs to do a bit more research than reading William Alexander's "The $64 Tomato."
In fact, during World Wars I, II and the Great Depression, for example, more than half of America's produce came from privately held or community-based "Victory Gardens." But Americans have been sold a bill of goods, by Big Ag and other industrial interests, that has us all thinking that cooking, much less growing our own food, is a chore akin to washing windows, one to be avoided whenever possible and then done grudgingly only when absolutely necessary. In fact, cooking is far more important. It is an almost spiritual act to provide nourishment to our loved ones, yet as a society we have come to mistake frenzy for efficiency, which has led to believing we are satisfied with expedient mediocrity, and in the balance as always it's the children who suffer.
Meanwhile, with respect to making "little sense economically," I've often pointed out that where I live in Johnson County, Iowa, there are about 50,000 households. If each of them redirected just $10 of their existing weekly food budget toward getting something locally -- from a farmers market, a CSA, a local brewery, or eggs from the farmer down the road, it would keep $26 million in our economy every year. Now imagine same statistic in a major metro like Mr. Darlin's native San Francisco.
We are not idiots and none of us expects to see the brick-by-brick dismantling of McDonald's worldwide (well OK, some may wish it, but that's different). But there is a massive amount of room for improvement and we want to see it. No health care system, no matter how it is reformed, can deal with the $157 billion we spend annually in the US alone on obesity-related illness. We live in a world with a billion people starving and another billion overweight and yet undernourished. Children born in the US have a one-in-three chance of developing diabetes before they are old enough to vote, and among minorities that ratio rises to one-in-two.
Clearly the industrial model, which may work just fine for Darlin's primary field of computers, is not working for food. There must be a better way and we are out to find it. Trying to stick us with an elitist tag when we are trying to help farmers and raise healthy children simply won't wash.
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Buying locally doesn't ensure getting locally grown goods. Nor does it means that goods that are grown locally won't be grown without the very same chemical infusions that agribusiness uses on their goods, or taste any better, or be safer. What I do know is that farmers' market pricing is usually higher than equivalent goods from the supermarket--which also claims to sell local produce--and will usually go bad faster. I looked into our CSAs, and found they were boutique-priced and impractical, and seemed targeted to well-heeled goo-goo romantics.
Last, "just $10 a week" suggests that $10 a week--over $500 a year--doesn't mean that much. That defines your audience as different from the people who have food through the end of the month only because of dirt-cheap carbos made possible by large-scale food production. It's kind of hard to wash down a load of social engineering and food guilt with the 39-cent soup from the discount store.
Change, especially for the better, never comes easily; and power never relinquishes willingly.
This is such an excellent piece. And thanks for responding to the comments on the price issue. I wish folks would factor in the long-term costs of cheap, subsidized food. I also wish that people who complain about the "high" cost of local food would do a little research and make a little effort. In my house, we are still feasting off our last share of our winter CSA we got a few weeks ago (which cost only $20, a percentage of which the farm donated to Haiti this time). It included onions, carrots, turnips, rutabagas, kale, beautiful salad greens and more. Last night we had a delcious potato, rutabaga and rosemary gratin. Probably cost about $3 total. Yes, it does get a little challenging to do something different with root vegetables every night, and yes, I'm going to be happy when asparagus season arrives--but I am really going to enjoy those big, fat, not-perfectly straight green wonders when they first poke up, because I won't have been eating those ubiquitious spindly Chilean spears all winter.
Cooking with local food also requires, well, actual cooking--time spent preparing a meal, actually exercising a little creativity. It requires making your food and your well-being a priority. It all depends on what you want out of life.
Thanks for your efforts, Kurt.
Some things are well suited to having professionals do for us, and it depends on each persons abilities. i for example don;t know how to change the oil in my car. Probably could learn, I think I'm intelligent enough, but the pros at the dealership do it faster cheaper and better than I would, and they look for other issues while they're at it.
Not so with food though. Cooking is not like changing the oil in a car or repairing a computer. It is about procuring and preparing sustenance for ourselves and our loved ones - something which demands far more of our personal resources than most seem willing to use.
I don't live in Iowa, and rarely see farmers in my midst, especially off season. But I know what it is to be an urban parent, beat down by the recession, facing the challenges of eating well and locally in the dead of winter, as does the NY Times. I'm not yet convinced that the ONLY possible way to get there is going local all the time. Meaning, I have questions. In this environment, however, I'm afraid to ask.
As the mother and aunt of 11 young women, not to mention food professional, I'm well aware of the incredible anxiety all this heated debate stirs. I don't need a study to tell me this discourse contributes to eating disorders, my family is living it quite specifically. So please, everyone, chill out and be reasonable so we can create lasting change in our very broken food system.
Questions about scaling up efficiency are fine, but to often as I said we mistake frenzy for efficiency. Just watch the behavior of people in a farmers market compared to in a large grocery store. In the farmers market we are engaged, social, thoughtful, considerate. In the grocery we are detached, unengaged, and being herded through the checkout like cattle. As for winter, his suggestion that there is little to eat locally in winter is well taken but no longer entirely accurate, and for those of you in big cities please keep in mind that the customary definition of "local" is usually somewhere around 100-150 miles. I promise, even though farms are dwindling at an all-too-rapid rate, there are farms within 150 miles of you....
I am no expert on eating disorders, but I can see from empirical evidence that it is caused far more by the media (see: http://www.lavidalocavore.org/diary/3264/its-not-the-tv-its-the-commercials) than it is by wholesome local food or my essays refuting unfounded allegations.
And you are right, there are many farms with 100 miles of NYC. I visit the ones in LI every season and support them at markets, and on my video blog However, what I think is hard to understand outside of NYC is the density of population, not to mention the huge variations in lifestyle, that exist in the 150 miles from my door to a rural farm. 13 million or so in the tri state area. So, sometimes I hear ideas and points that don't resonate. Everyone likes the idea, it's the logistics that are hard. But 10 dollars is a good start.
In terms of eating disorders, again you are right, the media has the greatest impact, and parents for sure, but that does not mean the current go green/slow food movement is not a concern. When I see a healthy kid panic, literally panic, over food choices or a young woman say her anorexia started with trying to go green and be healthy, it bids me pause. Food is tricky business. Thanks. Take care, hj
All of this was made a bit easier by having a grocery store in town that doesn't equate valuing local food with snobbery or elitism. The guy in front of me paid with food stamps, the granny behind me paid in change. Mine was the only bumper sticker covered hybrid in the parking lot. It's funny when the snobby elitists at the NYT accuse me of living in a fantasy world, or of being an unrealistic food snob. Last week I bought my groceries at an indoor farmers market where there were 35 local producers. I don't think there was anything elitist about people with dirt under their nails making a living. The farmers market took place in our high school that's a crumbling piece of crap. Most people around here buy local because it's quality, we support one another, and it's not made hard by a lack of opportunities to do so.
That last factor would make interesting reporting for the NYT...if they did that anymore. Can't see why anyone pays to read a bunch of self-important opinion anymore. Unless they need the clean paper to wrap some nice, delicious spring lamb chops....
I grew tired of being alternately ignored by (as far as my demographic and viewpoints) and offended (or really, patronized as you point out) by the NYT years ago. When I visit my parents I read it for free to remind myself of what I'm not missing.
We all want to move away from monocultures and pesticides, but we can't reform our agricultural system on the backs of the poor. Big Agriculture makes for cheap green beans and, whatever your thoughts about Big Agriculture, cheap green beans are an unalloyed good.
Locavores talk a lot about what's to be gained by growing, shopping, and eating locally, but I have yet to hear a viable plan for how they're going to keep produce affordable.
It is a commonly held misconception that this form of eating is more expensive, but I would direct you first to the recent Leopold Center study that refutes this @
http://www.leopold.iastate.edu/news/newsreleases/2009/121409_prices.html
And then to a piece I wrote for Grist.org a while back debunking KFC's $10 meal deal challenge @
http://www.grist.org/article/colonel-of-truth/
Then consider that cheap food is only cheap because of massive tax-payer funded subsidies to massive corn and soy producers (and wheat, and rice, and cotton). A reexamination of that would help put out prices in line.
And all of this does not yet touch on the true, hidden costs of cheap food. Might be cheap at the check-out counter, but you pay later in health care costs and environmental damage.
Yup but they are only the canned or frozen variety (yecch) and that's only the best Big Ag can do.
Buying the fresh ones in the produce section of the market isn't profitable for Big Ag.
JScott -- Yes, freezing vegetables (ripe, at their nutritional peak) is one way to make produce affordable. And if you think you can't make excellent food out of frozen vegetables (I don't defend canned), come to my house for dinner and I'll show you different. The Trader Joes' haricot vert in my freezer are way better than the woody, tasteless local beans I paid $6 a pound for over the summer.