Just Food: Where Locavores get it Wrong and how we can Truly Eat Responsibly by James E. McWilliams

First, let me make my biases clear: I am deeply suspicious of the locavore movement.  It seems very simplistic and impractical to me, as well as elitist: it's fine to be a locavore if you live in a place with good soil, a good climate, and plenty of water.  It's obnoxious and environmentally and nutritionally stupid to suggest that everyone should eat the way you do.  Millions of people live in places where it would be very resource-intensive to try to produce all their food nearby.  And you are necessarily limiting people to the foodstuffs that can be grown in their local climate and soil, unless we're going to start greenhouse-growing produce to avoid shipping it from elsewhere.  Personally, you will have to pry the bananas and peaches (two of my favorite fruits, and neither of them hardy where I live) from my cold, dead hands, asshole.  Further, in the past people lived mostly off of food produced locally, and malnourishment and undernourishment were disturbingly common.  The ability to easily eat a wide variety of foodstuffs is a vast improvement over the way things used to be.  I am puzzled why anyone would think it was healthier to only eat locally available products.

Also, it would cause an ecological disaster to try to feed the populations of dry states by wasting ground water on irrigating the land to grow crops there.  It is much more practical and efficient to ship food from places actually suitable for agriculture.  And as for the argument that it's important to support the local person who has always wanted to have their own farm/orchard/etc. and they deserve to make a living, so you should be willing to pay a premium to help them out -- do you think that the farmer in a relatively poor, warm country who makes their living by growing produce for export is less deserving of making a living?  They also probably have a lot fewer options than the person in the US.  (Which is not a slam on US farmers, it's just a slam on a certain sort of grower who shows up at farmer's markets, charges a lot, and opines that it's our social responsibility to help them fulfill their dream of selling organic fruits or vegetables, and the people who actually buy into it)

So, naturally I was interested in what McWilliams had to say.  I found the chapters on the locavore movement and organic foods very interesting.  McWilliams points out that food miles, per se, are not a useful indicator of how energy efficient a foodstuff is.  That, for example, "German apple juice imported from Brazil, which racks up over 10,000 miles on the odometer, is also less energy-consumptive than apples grown and processed locally."  Further, of all the fossil fuels used related to food production and preparation, transportation to market is the smallest portion -- 11%.  On the other hand, consumers making extra stops to buy their food instead of getting it all at the grocery store, consumes significant amounts of extra fuel.

McWilliams occasionally gets a bit sarcastic, which I am sure irritates some of the people whose lifestyle choices he is questioning.  Personally, I found it entertaining, but I'm not personally all that invested in locavorism.

Indeed, these findings leave one wondering how much energy could be saved if we threw out less food, cooked smaller amounts, ate less in general, used energy-efficient ovens and refrigerators, composted all organic matter not eaten, and developed more energy-efficient menus (say, by eating more meals that did not require extensive and prolonged applications of heat).  In short, if we were really paying attention to the numbers yielded by life-cycle assessments, we'd be better off focusing on what happens to our food after we buy it than on its place of origin.  But of course it's hard to turn a variety of small, energy-saving domestic tactics into a token symbol of an eco-correct food philosophy.  "Cook efficiently" just doesn't have the same rousing ring as "eat local." 

It should be clear, I think, from that paragraph that McWilliams himself is deeply interested in the environmental impact of our food choices.  He is a former local- and organic-eating person, himself, who began to question whether the things he was being urged to do were actually all that productive.  He cares, deeply.  He has looked into the real numbers, though, and drawn his own conclusions about the best way to feed our huge and ever-expanding global population nutritiously with minimal damage to the environment.

I also agree with this, from what I have seen in the people around me who espouse the local, organic, co-op and farmer's market lifestyle: "When we survey the expansive literature supporting the food-miles approach, one thing becomes evident: the prevailing argument for stressing food miles is driven less by concrete evidence of improved sustainability than by a vague quest to condemn globalization.  In this respect, buying local is a political act with ideological implications."  That is certainly evident among the local or organic cheerleaders I know.  (Of course, the other people who are totally on the bandwagon and singing its praises are the ones who expect to profit from it, and McWilliams addresses that, too.)

After his takedown of the automatic superiority of local eating, McWilliams then moves on to organic farming.  He points out it is less efficient and requires more land under cultivation to produce similar quantities, and that many of the fertilizers and pesticides that are acceptable in organic farming are more harmful than the newer ones used in conventional farming.  The overwhelming majority of organic food in the US is factory farmed, just like large conventional farms.  A few quotes:

Agricultural sprawl is an insidious form of development that threatens the world's remaining natural resources.  "If organic farming were to be widely adopted," write two scientists in the 2004 Proceedings of the International Crop Science Congress, "lower yields would require more land (25 - 82%) to sustain production."  The Tuskegee University plant microbiologist C.S. Prakash puts it this way: "Converting from modern, technology-based agriculture to organic would mean either reducing global food output significantly or sacrificing undeveloped land to agriculture."

 Consumers, swayed by the "chemical-free" reputation of organic foods, tend to take false comfort in the impression that organic products lack potentially harmful external inputs.  However, organic agriculture struggles with its own demons of chemical dependency.  The fact that farmers have been applying natural chemicals to agricultural systems for thousands of years does not mean that these applications are innocuous, especially when they're used to promote the interests of commercialized organic agriculture.

Organic growers are also allowed to use copper, sulfur, and copper sulfate as natural fungicides.  According to Julie Guthman, a geographer who writes extensively about California's organic culture, "Sulfur is said to cause more worker injuries in California than any other agricultural input."  Miners who harvest sulfur dust to  be sprayed on organic grapes tend to suffer chronic respiratory problems....The dust is generally harmless to land animals, but the Department of Health and Human Services has found that it is toxic to fish.

And so on.   McWilliams then moves on the genetically modified crops, which many people fear are dangerous, harmful, and unnatural.  He points out that they tend to be more disease and pest resistant, which means that they can be grown with fewer chemicals applied.  These new varieties are instrumental in being able to feed more people with less land.  He makes many good points in this chapter, but nevertheless I found it rather dull.

I was going along with him quite well until we hit chapter 4, in which McWilliams moves on to what he thinks we should do to feed the world's population with minimal impact on the earth.  By this time I was getting a bit bored and restless, and I ended up reading the last three sections, on meat, fish, and government subsidies and a fast skim.  These are important topics, just less interesting to me than the first few.

Lest anyone think that McWilliams is an apologist for big business farming, in chapter four he says that we should stop eating land-dwelling meat.  He points out the damage that livestock can do to land, the huge resources entailed in raising and feeding meat animals, the horrible living conditions in feedlots (though not all meat-producing animals come from feedlots, of course), the pollution from large animal-producing operations, and the greenhouse gas that come from the digestive tract of bovines.  In fact, if we really care about reducing carbon emissions, we should be looking at cow farts.

In terms of general biodiversity, it's also worth noting that cattle dictate the destruction of a wide range of indigenous animals, even when they do not trample riparian zones or damage grasslands.  Rangeland management, whether informal or formal, automatically threatens and often substantially diminishes surrounding wildlife....In the United States, to cite a well-documented example, ranchers have legally killed billions of animals, including prairie dogs, wolves, bears, coyotes, rattlesnakes, and, most notably, buffalo.  In 2005 alone, the USDA's Wildlife Servies killed 86,000 coyotes at the behest of ranchers grazing cattle and sheep.  From a less obvious perspective, millions of pounds of insecticides have been deployed to combat cattle ticks, fleas, and flies.  Interestingly, however, the attempt has more often than not backfired, with insects proliferating beyond their original numbers as a result of their insidious ability to resist conventional insecticides.  Either way, the ultimate result is the same: biodiversity is compromised, the predator-prey balance is upset, and the environment suffers the consequences.

All of these are valid points, but where he lost me is that I don't think eating a grain-heavy diet is all that healthy, and when he talks about a primarily plant-based diet I don't think he means we can all sustain ourselves on fruit and green vegetables.  However he has certainly given me something to think about, and it is likely that I will make some adjustments to my eating habits, consuming fewer animal products, trying to waste less, and after reading the chapter on seafood I will probably never eat it again, not that I was much of a fish-eater to begin with.  I wish that McWilliams had managed to make the later chapters as interesting and entertaining as the early ones, but still I think this is actually a quite important book that everyone who is interested in making ethically-conscious choices should read.  I think it also could be very instructive for people who aren't all that interested in the ethical choices of food, because it could lead them to think about things differently.  I certainly do not enthusiastically embrace all of his suggestions, but it was a fascinating and worthwhile read.