| McWilliams begins by pointing out how poorly it would work if everybody went locavore tomorrow. Oh my god! It totally wouldn't work! Can you believe that? 50% of the nation's fruit and 25% of our vegetables come from California, so immediately the rest of the country will face an enormous fruit and veg shortage. Most of our chicken come from several southern states, North Carolina and Iowa are some of our top pork producers, and dairy is concentrated in states like VT, NY, WI, CA, and ID. And that's just the production side of things - what about distribution, retail, processing, and everything else? What a mess.
Yet, I don't think that any advocates of local food expect change to happen overnight. Nor do they expect it to happen in some kind of top-down, centralized way like the communes of Chairman Mao's Great Leap Forward in China. The Great Leap Forward resulted in a widespread famine, in fact. The local food advocates I know understand that change is gradual. We realize it must happen - pardon the pun - organically, and from the ground up. They don't call it the grass roots for nothing.
In San Diego, a group is trying to work towards a goal of 10% local food by 2010, which is an ambitious goal given the fact that our county's population far exceeds its capacity to feed everyone (mostly because of lack of water). Another issue is that 70% of San Diego County's farms produce non-edible crops, like plants for nurseries. We're also a major producer of avocados and strawberries for the whole country. We've got a vibrant agricultural sector but very little of it is devoted to feeding our local area. Furthermore, if I understand right, we lack infrastructure for processing and distributing food (a terminal market, a USDA-inspected slaughterhouse, etc). But we're starting with - again excuse the pun - the low hanging fruit. We're starting new farmers markets and making sure they accept WIC and food stamps. We're helping people start their own gardens and teaching gardening and food preparation and storage classes. We'd like to start more community gardens and educational farms too, although that's a little bit more complicated than helping people garden in their own yards because it involves more government regulation and more costs. But we're doing what we can, as we can do it.
The next argument by McWilliams involves food miles. He reduces the argument for eating local entirely to food miles and gives examples why buying a food from nearby that has higher energy requirements for production can use more oil than a food from far away with lower energy needs for production. For example, a Brit can actually save oil by purchasing grass-fed New Zealand lamb over grain-fed UK lamb. Well, fine. But why can't they buy grass-fed UK lamb? Wouldn't that use the least amount of energy of all? Isn't this example just an illustration of why we should raise lamb on grass instead of grain (not an illustration of why buying local doesn't work)?
My blog may be called La Vida Locavore, but I am not a purist about buying local. For example, I am not about to give up coffee. I buy coffee from Divine Madman when I'm home, and another favorite is Just Coffee. But neither of these coffee roasters violate my values of buying local. That is because the roasters have relationships with the growers in these cases. My goal in buying local isn't merely saving the oil needed to transport food (although it's nice if that's my overall impact when I buy local). Most important to me is having a relationship with the people who produce my food.
This weekend, I've stayed with a friend in Boston who graduated Tuft's Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy. She told me about a paper she wrote comparing local and mainstream yogurt. For the local yogurt, she called the farmer who makes Butterworks Yogurt, a favorite brand of yogurt here in New England. He lives in northern Vermont, near the farm I visited and posted pictures from. When she called him, he answered the phone and spoke to her for 3 hours, giving her all kinds of details about the yogurt industry, his farm, and his yogurt. He invited her to his farm, too. When she called Dannon, Colombo, Yoplait, etc, she had a hard time even getting a human on the phone. When she did speak to a human, they told her that the answers to her questions ("How do you make your yogurt?") were proprietary, and that all of the available answers were on their website. In other words: consumers are not allowed to know how their food is made, yet they are expected to eat it.
I'd prefer to buy my yogurt from the guy who is willing to tell me how he makes it and let me visit his farm. Buying local puts the transparency back into our food system. I'm not sure if the result is always a savings in oil, but I think that by and large, when you ask a farmer how he or she produces food, and when you get an answer, you are going to choose the farm that was more humanely and sustainably produced. In some cases, these wonderful products are distributed beyond a small, local area, and you can access them nationwide. However, the easiest way to find ethical foods from ethical people is to look for local food, like at farmers' markets. Long story short, it's not just about food miles and it's not just about oil used in transportation. And McWilliams and the Wall Street Journal should stuff it. |
