Kennyz wrote:But the reality is that the larger and more distant meat producers are from consumers, the more likely it is that animals will be treated in ways people wouldn't tolerate if it happened in their backyard. I want to move meat production closer to everyone's backyard.

Not only animals, but human beings as well.

You all may also want to see some of the arguments put fourth in this thread

mike g, is the word "fad" what you're hung up on?

excuse me... but the topic heading is "the case AGAINST locovorism".

all context contained therein alludes (to me at least) a 'movement. do you think that ten, twenty, thirty years, ad millenia, ago, this notion of "locovorism" even existed? it is a newly made up construct of ideology, writ forward, effected to make people think better of themselves.

don't get me wrong, i came along, son of a farm gal, i did some hunting and fishing in my time and experienced many of the delights of fresh kill and garden fresh, seasonal vegetables... good food will always rule over industrial processed pap.

what i'm commenting on is what i'm seeing, BEYOND this forum... a newly risen, urban form of yokels, who garnish their insular lives with a sudden 'awareness' of the world around them.

eat what suits you... eat what's tasty... eat what's affordable.


have at it... i'm done with this circlejerk.

So you like everything about local eating except other people doing it? I guess that clarifies, somehow.

aaargh... 'just when i think i'm out of it, i get pulled back in'

no mike... i like everything and everyone - even you .

just don't make a 'crusade' of it.

Leading question:

How many people will buy local products if and when they are both of lower quality and at higher prices than non-local alternatives? Would you buy a Motorola TV made in Muskegon, say, if it was twice as expensive and not as good as a Sony made and shipped from Yokohama? (The answer was no). That does not seem like a viable business plan to me, and in fact it is one the US Automakers tried in the past without success. Remember Buy USA, brought to you by the UAW?

We all like affordable luxuries, and local food definitely falls into that category for most of us here. But is anyone here saying they really buy it just because it is local, or because it is generally much better? If the answer is that it is much better, then isn't the locavore name misleading? Isn't it the "buy better food"or buy handcrafted food movement? Yeah it is great that it also may reduce our carbon foootprint, though if and how much tends to depend a lot on what you include and what assumptions you make (you know, lies, damned lies and statistics), and it is not why we (most people) buy local anyway. Otherwise, Motorola would still be making local TVs.

But for those for whom it is not affordable, it is silly to expect they would buy it. I would love a Rolls Royce (in the spirit of this discussion, let's assume it is a hybrid Rolls, very green), but I can't afford one.

Anyway, I can see the point of those who object to the locavore movement as it is couching an affordable luxury in the cloak of righteousness. Further, I believe that many of the quality issues that we see with giant agribusiness would also begin to seep into Ann's Heirloom Tomatoes (a fictional operation) if she scaled up production from 50 bushels a week to 50 tons a week.

Eating local is good, but the more popular it becomes, the more of the benefits it currently provides (in terms of quality at least) will be lost. Big businesses are subject to pressures to operate in a certain way and definitely in a different way than little businesses. Ann's could hand pack and deliver each tomato, but that would minimize the cost reductions that come with scale and limit her growth. And we know where machine packing and trucking in large volume leads, don't we? Yes, the effects are somewhat lessened by shorter transport times, and quicker time from branch to table, but I think that most of the benefits I see result from reducing middle men, and added labor and attention to the products. All of that serves to keep quality and cost high. Can we keep the quality and bring down the cost?

Slow Foods, to their credit, acknowledge this and has begun to set up programs to work on addressing it. The Locavore movement has not done so, or at least not that I know of.

So buying local is a good thing in some ways - it certainly feels good. But with more success it would lose a lot of the benefits it offers today. For better or worse, that is not really a risk anyway, since its success is limited to those who can afford the luxury. Encouraging people to buy local is a good thing, too, so long as we are not trying to guilt them to do it, for while it is good for them if they can afford it, it will not change the world. Buying a fresh pint of delectable blueberries is a much better choice than supersizing it for the consumer, but I do not accept that the other choice is bad for the world in any significant way. Yeah, it sucks and will reduce your life expectancy, but that is your choice. Neither McDonalds or Jewel's produce are going away any time soon, and if they do I suspect the replacement would not look anywhere near as different as we hope.

Another blog I read today said that as of 2005 (I think), more than 50% of the world's population is urban. For the 20th century, this was a necessity: industry needed to be centralized, transportation hubs centralized, etc. This led to the need for bulk production of many foods to transport to the city centers. He goes on to say that we can't survive if half the world's population is doing slash-and-burn agriculture... but we can't live well on two-thirds the population living in a city center either.

This is much less a necessity in the information age: I can work anywhere, a small farm can be anywhere. I don't think *all* my food is economically sound to grow anywhere -- keep the cattle remote, and corn and wheat for starch/flour I'm happy to buy from factory farms.

But if small orchards, truck farms, poultry production etc. could be close to a more distributed workforce, that would be a good thing. It's going to take a long time -- spreading the population out is still a ways off.

it's not a new concept, but thus far missing in this discussion would be a call to the obvious...

urban farming and small livestock production, utilizing vacant industrial properties and lands. the benefits would be manifold, from providing local jobs, utilizing unused properties to satiating locovores' appetites.

dicksond wrote:We all like affordable luxuries, and local food definitely falls into that category for most of us here. But is anyone here saying they really buy it just because it is local, or because it is generally much better? If the answer is that it is much better, then isn't the locavore name misleading? Isn't it the "buy better food"or buy handcrafted food movement? Yeah it is great that it also may reduce our carbon footprint, though if and how much tends to depend a lot on what you include and what assumptions you make (you know, lies, damned lies and statistics), and it is not why we (most people) buy local anyway. Otherwise, Motorola would still be making local TVs.

Well, Dickson, I thought about this game of whack-a-mole.

The above statement suggests that there is no intrinsic value to local food. Rather, if good things happen when we eat local food, both in our mouth and in the mouth of society, it is, well you seem to suggest it, it is just, what, luck? I said up-thread that l found so often, that local was the means. Why is that? Let's look at some of the qualities of local foods/non-local foods.

- If you have to ship a fruit or vegetable many miles, it must be a version of said fruit that can withstand said shipping. Likewise, it is said version that has the best shape and size for extended travel.

- If it takes you many, many days from harvest to sale, you cannot pick at peak.

- If you need to ship your produce many thousands of miles, you need to package it in layers and layers. Often this layers are of the worst eco-friendly materials. Just pick up an imported Asian pear my friend.

- If you need to sell large quantities, you cannot offer little known objects like gooseberries. Also, is there a mass market for the hard to crack black walnut? Who wants seeds in their grapes?

- Can you trust the organic label? It's not just tainted spinach, look at the practices associated with many of the companies selling organic milk. I'm not saying that local is a panacea for all issues, but I believe it is a better indicator of sustainable and earth friendly production.

- If we can barely trust the organic label, what are we to think of the standards in other parts of the world. Do you really want your milk from China for a dollar less a gallon? Will you really be saving money?

- Food miles do matter. Yes, a New Zealand sponsored study tried to show why New Zealand lamb shipped to the UK used less petroleum than the lamb right there in merry ol' England. Ignoring the assumptions within this study, I still got to say, so what. If at best we can say that in some cases, food miles are not supreme, it does not mean that generally, it helps to reduce food miles.

- Transportation is not the biggest energy user in food production - A-ha the Freakonomics team showed. Again, I say, so what. Instead, ask yourselves which variables can you have input.

- What about meat, it uses way more energy - And...this has anything specifically to do with local. If there are generally good things to do, why not do them both? Moreover, paying the truer cost for meat, as you do when getting local meat, by it's nature tends to get you to eat less of it.

- Those pesky farmers use so much damn energy driving to the markets in their broken down pick-ups (or those farmers are such yuppies driving the latest SUVs) - A writer at Slate went to a market and seemed to find all the sellers using so much energy with their smaller cars, but I repeatedly spot the opposite. Most farmers I see, drive to the market in decent sized trucks.

dicksond wrote:So buying local is a good thing in some ways - it certainly feels good. But with more success it would lose a lot of the benefits it offers today. For better or worse, that is not really a risk anyway, since its success is limited to those who can afford the luxury. Encouraging people to buy local is a good thing, too, so long as we are not trying to guilt them to do it, for while it is good for them if they can afford it, it will not change the world. Buying a fresh pint of delectable blueberries is a much better choice than supersizing it for the consumer, but I do not accept that the other choice is bad for the world in any significant way. Yeah, it sucks and will reduce your life expectancy, but that is your choice. Neither McDonalds or Jewel's produce are going away any time soon, and if they do I suspect the replacement would not look anywhere near as different as we hope.

So, cynical are we not! What frustrates me (and I believe some others), is not the notion that we are trying to guilt people into doing something, but rather the opposite; that people want to toss aside good ideas because they do not like feeling guilt tripped. On top of that, as this thread has also shown, there seem instances where the benefits of local food can be bypassed because of the perceptions of the people who eat local or stereotypes of what eating local is all about. Listen, a good thing is a good thing.

Eating local works for me and my family, but it is not a system that is without flaws. I could catalogue the problems of trying to eat local for many more pages. Needless to say, I believe that the flaws in the system do not over-ride the reasons cited above for eating locally.

Before I end this polemic, let me also touch upon the issue of cost. I flatly reject the notion that eating locally is vastly more expensive than eating conventionally. How many of you are addressing this issue from deep experience? You see one pint of strawberries at the market and extrapolate. Do you take into account the huge decrease in restaurant meals you would have. Math question=compare the cost of a farmer's market meal to the cost of one meal for four at Chipotole or Five Guys or other moderate family restaurant. Do you know how much money prepared foods and packaged foods and junk food costs? Do you think you would spend less on that if you ate local? If you found tomatoes at their surplus, bought many, and canned them, do you think you would be spending the same as if you need to shop for those things now? If you spent a few hundred dollars and invested in a freezer, could you not buy meat by the quarter or side and spend less that $3/lb for it?

What ever "locavore movement" exists is you and me. There is no club. No sticker we put on our cars. We do not demand adherence to strict guidelines. If you select Michigan apples but Washington pears at Costco, I'm happy you got part of it right instead of dwelling on the other half. Take things one step at a time. Find what works. Find what is doable. There are many, many reasons to eat local, including many, I am sure I have not even realized yet.

all lampooning (not really) aside on my part, i still can't get any of this 'blunderbuss' defense for "locovorism" to sink into my thick skull....

to wit: local? (read parochial). varietal? (read parochial again). seasonal? (depends on hemisphere of origin ). fresh? (we have ironhorses and areoplanes now). cheaper? (no but maybe yes, wait no, oh nevermind). carbon footprints? (damned statistics seem to work both ways, those pesky pencilpushers).

i'd be willing to wager that any 'actual' local farmers/ producers willing to weigh in on the subject here, would say they don't give a butthoot who buys their produce, only that they can sell it off.

JoelF wrote:Another blog I read today said that as of 2005 (I think), more than 50% of the world's population is urban.

This is much less a necessity in the information age: I can work anywhere, a small farm can be anywhere. It's going to take a long time -- spreading the population out is still a ways off.

whats interesting is that some think that living in cramped, sometimes polluted cities(which overcrowding and urban development can cause), having all their goods shipped into them is somehow good for the environment. Because they may bike to work, ride mass transit, eat organic, visit farmers markets regularly, and dont need to own/drive a car, or god forbid and SUV.

different strokes.

If the answer is that it is much better, then isn't the locavore name misleading? Isn't it the "buy better food"or buy handcrafted food movement?

All this is a couple of carts before a couple of horses.

For thousands of years, people bought local because, other than a few things that transported well like spices or Port, there was no other choice. Regions developed cuisines based on what they had. Obviously some of those were glorious-- France's, Italy's, India's, Thailand's. Others... well, they tried. This has certain benefits-- great taste, depth of culture, the indefinable pleasure of being able to leave your grimy city and find land and people growing things not far away. That this is romanticized by city folks is not contemptible, even if it's sometime naive.

Within living memory, a different system developed. This too had certain benefits. You could get anything anytime, and you could grow stuff dirt cheaply in certain parts of the world and ship it to its market. It turned out to have certain drawbacks as well. Tomatoes suck in January. Tomatoes suck when they're picked too early, gassed to turn red, and shipped to Jewel hard as a fist. Millions have never tasted a tomato that didn't suck.

Now, a lot of people in this thread seem to want to pick the movement back toward Method #1 apart. Aha, you're interested in taste, so what if the better tomatoes are 401 miles away? Gotcha! But I don't think any card-carrying, Party-meeting-attending locavores see it as something where they grabbed one thread and the whole fabric followed. They see Method #1 as a whole to be aspired to. The more you eat like that, the more often you will be satisfied by things in their prime, cooked in a time-tested way that suits them especially well, and quite possibly, costing less in their high season than they do in December with a Product of Chile sticker.

In some ways it reminds me of the discussion of chain restaurants a couple of years back. Someone said something like, "If Applebee's could make food as good as Alinea's, I wouldn't care if they were a chain or not." But the point is, being a chain is what makes them Applebee's and not Alinea. Likewise, it's not a choice of the good Jewel tomato versus the bad farmer's market one. Because the nature of the respective systems makes it almost impossible for you to ever face that choice.

In short: it's a guideline for smart shopping and good cooking, and it may have other social benefits as well. It isn't a religion. The only people who seem to be trying to make it a moralistic issue are the ones against it.

Eating local is good, but the more popular it becomes, the more of the benefits it currently provides (in terms of quality at least) will be lost. Big businesses are subject to pressures to operate in a certain way and definitely in a different way than little businesses.

I don't think anyone sees Angelic Organics being ADM-sized. I think they see creating a market for more small farmers to do what Angelic Organics does, if they're sure there's a place to sell what they grow that way. Again, how screwed up is it that we talk of the way farming worked for 10,000 years as some sort of weird yuppie indulgence that could never be practical on a wide scale?

i'd be willing to wager that any 'actual' local farmers/ producers willing to weigh in on the subject here, would say they don't give a butthoot who buys their produce, only that they can sell it off.

One weighed in here: http://www.vimeo.com/1856092
Another weighed in here: http://www.vimeo.com/3093533

You tell me if they're as cynical about it as you are.

Mike G wrote:

i'd be willing to wager that any 'actual' local farmers/ producers willing to weigh in on the subject here, would say they don't give a butthoot who buys their produce, only that they can sell it off.

One weighed in here: http://www.vimeo.com/1856092
Another weighed in here: http://www.vimeo.com/3093533

You tell me if they're as cynical about it as you are.

Not only that, but as Michael Pollan points out, eating local, shopping at farmer's markets and the like puts you in touch with farmers. Pollan points out that that interaction that takes place benefits all. I may be a yuppie suburbanite, but my love of local has brought me in much contact with farmers and other interesting producers in ways that I would not have otherwise had the chance. Likewise, I constantly pip in on CSA discussion to say that one of the the true values of being in a CSA is not the food delivery but the food relationship developed. Not every CSA subscriber wants to make a farm visit, but the opportunities are there for you.

The list for eating local grows bigger.

Vital Info....

i suppose this arguement all comes down to this inherent need we all feel to create something there that wasn 't there before (locovorism).... for me at least.

in the meantime, i gotta eat. it'll never be always a matter of conscious choice.


re; examples given: the world doesn't turn on exceptions.

____________________
smoke 'em if you got 'em

arkay wrote:Vital Info....

i suppose this arguement all comes down to this inherent need we all feel to create something there that wasn't there before (locovorism).... for me at least.

I've been following this conversation with some fascination. Most of my thoughts have been articulated by VI and Mike G. and eatchicago but this one comment really got to me. I find here the true weakness in arkay's argument...the assumption that "locovorism" is a new movement. What I think is truly new is the wide spread awareness that there are benefits to eating locally produced and fresh foods. Those of us who like the taste of tomatoes have probably always disdained supermarket tomatoes. Personally I've been freezing and drying tomatoes for 30 years to capture that real flavor all year. I am certainly not the only person who's been shopping farmers markets most of her life in search of high quality ingredients. As a college student in Iowa in the late '70s and a graduate student in Arizona in the early '80s I shopped markets supplied by local farmers. I stood over bushels of fresh tomatoes, blanching, peeling and preparing them for the freezer. I teamed up with friends to buy 1/2 a cow and store it in the meat locker in town. We got eggs from chickens who lived nearby. They were fresher and cheaper than at the supermarket.

Indeed I garden as did my father and both grandfathers so that we would have produce both in season and out. They wouldn't have called themselves "locovores" but they knew that even if they could buy a tomato in January, it wouldn't have 1/2 the qualities of a locally grown August one.

The organic farming movement didn't start yesterday or last year, its roots are rather deeper than that. My cousin has operated an organic farm/CSA for nearly 20 years. Even then her farm is rooted in a deeper tradition of regional farmers supplying food to regional markets. Does anyone else remember the macrobiotic movement? I see ties between this and how we think about food today.

Another point I think could use more emphasis: as a cook, I want the freshest, best tasting ingredients I can obtain. For most vegetables, that means I want ripe ones. For most vegetables, ripe doesn't travel well. Therefore I want vegetables that didn't have to go far to get to me. Hence I want things grown near me.

Eating locally, organically, and sustainably has been around for a long time. We are hearing a lot more about it because more people are writing about it--in forums that are more wide reaching--than ever before. I think this is a good thing. I think we all should be aware of where our food comes from...but that's another rant.

re; pro arguements:

but of course... to each and almost every one of them... but it comes down to practicality in the end.

locovorism has existed since time immemorial... from primitive hunter/gatherers, to hunched over gruel soppers tilling the fiefdom... to todays well fed foodies looking to enhance their gustatory experience.

look, i know that no one is advocating locovorism with 'peta' like zeal and i'm laying on the hyperbole a bit heavy here, but to put a tag on something that has always existed and eventually passed over, thereby helping the advancement of western civilization... and then indulging in endless repartee promoting it, borderlines the ridiculous.

_________________
no tomatillos for you!

ok, i think i've figured what's bugging me about this topic.

it's the actual labeling of 'locovorism'... i hate labels.

from a subject so innocuous as 'locovorism' to those so polarizing as such, found in the news these days. it's become a game with me to to try and shoot them all down.

no harm or ridicule intended to those i've disagreed with.... peace out.

_______________________________________________________
the verdict is in your honor... guilty of multiple counts of kneejerkism.

ok, i think i've figured what's bugging me about this topic.

it's the actual labeling of 'locovorism'... i hate labels.

Funny, if you'd actually read what the "locavores" in the thread said, you might have seen this:

eatchicago wrote:This question (and this thread as a whole) perfectly captures why I try not to use the word "locavore" at all. I don't use it in describing my website, I try not to use it to describe myself.

The whole thread was started by a non-locavore. Every point advocating eating local was made in response to at least a question about, if not an attack on, local eating. And yet you felt the need to smear local eaters for talking too much, among other things:

yet another fad in self indulgence.... started by the birkenstoced anarcho-primitivists and now taken up by a subset of commercialists catering to gasbags with a self inflated sense moral superiority.

a newly risen, urban form of yokels, who garnish their insular lives with a sudden 'awareness' of the world around them

i'd be willing to wager that any 'actual' local farmers/ producers willing to weigh in on the subject here, would say they don't give a butthoot who buys their produce, only that they can sell it off.

And as soon as someone answers your points, thoughtfully and sincerely, you try to end the discussion:

have at it... i'm done with this circlejerk.

no harm or ridicule intended to those i've disagreed with.... peace out.

Here's another label to hate, but you tell me why it shouldn't apply. Troll.

MikeG wrote:For thousands of years, people bought local because, other than a few things that transported well like spices or Port, there was no other choice. Regions developed cuisines based on what they had. Obviously some of those were glorious-- France's, Italy's, India's, Thailand's.

From an academic perspective, this is patently false. Are you claiming to know what the pre-trade ("what they had" / "local") cuisines of France, Italy, India, or Thailand were like? The very concept of "cuisine" resides in a cultural context involving dynamic social processes. The very concept of "bought" hinges on transregional trade; it's "barter" or "produce" before that. There were ideas, artifacts, and food items moving from one end of Eurasia to the other in the (forgive my use of these problematic terms) Late Bronze Age for certain, and according to some scholars with which I camp, the Neolithic. And we're coming to understand that this was not just an pattern of circulation of goods among the elite.

No "glorious" society developed in a vacuum. For all the ills of imperialism and colonialism (from British back to the Banu Hilal back to Roman back to Hittite), most cultural vestiges we cherish were produced by interacting or colliding forces, concepts, flavors. Some regional traditions we draw our delight and pride from were not even rooted in a state or monolithic society, but broad cultural phenomena like Mochica and Celtic.

Much of what you love in regional Italian is transplanted from the New World or China. Much of what you love in coastal Mexican is rooted North Africa and the Philippines. Most of the items we grow "locally" did not evolve right here; our very ability to cultivate them relies upon a total transformation of the landscape. Don't get me started on terroir.

And eat your pawpaws.

No "glorious" society developed in a vacuum.

Santander, really, do you honestly see no distinction between wheat being cultivated in an ever-widening swath of Eurasia over a thousand years, and a pallet of tomatoes leaving Mexico in the morning and being trucked to the Lincoln Park Costco in the afternoon? I'm not an academic, but I have read a book or two too, and I would have thought it was obvious in the context-- not least from the reference to Port, say, one of the original volume-reduced-for-shipping foodstuffs-- that I was referring to the shipping of actual produce grown elsewhere, a modern phenomenon in the main, and not to the transmission of species, which obviously enough goes quite a bit farther back and yes, obviously has had huge influence on those food cultures-- but on a rather longer timescale than the average cargo flight.

Mike G wrote:

No "glorious" society developed in a vacuum.

Santander, really, do you honestly see no distinction between wheat being cultivated in an ever-widening swath of Eurasia over a thousand years, and a pallet of tomatoes leaving Mexico in the morning and being trucked to the Lincoln Park Costco in the afternoon?

No - I'm just problematizing "regions developed cuisines based on what they had," which I think is a red herring in the current debate.

I like buying local, but am aware that this is an illusion depending on where you draw the line in your mind about the relationship between what is currently being produced on a given acre of land and what grows there easily (or "historically") in the first place. Hence, I'm more excited about local ramps and corn than I am about brussels sprouts and edamame, which take a significant modern modification in the land to produce. My hypocrisy lies in my operating definition of "easy," "modern," and my sense of what is grown here because it's part of our "local cuisine" as opposed to what is grown here because the government or postmodern international production network needs it to be grown here. Hence, I dig heirloom crops (even the most heirloom-y of which required hundreds or thousands of years of mostly pre-colonial genetic experimentation to become highly and completely consumable), and most importantly, I dig what tastes good. I like being friendly to farmers who care about connecting with individual consumers, stewarding the land sustainably, and cooking good food themselves, but there are so many layers of middle-class illusion in the whole locavore chic I usually don't even participate in the debate. Not to say it's not a worthy debate, it's just one I can't find a consistent position or view in, other than "please don't close the farmers markets, I love them, and wish there were more of them accessible to consumers in every tax bracket."

Wow.

Let me just say that there are many sound reasons to be conscious about the foods that are grown around us, and to support local agriculture. At the top of my list is cooking with fresh ingredients, cooking (versus heating), access to foods that can't be found anywhere else, chatting with farmers and milling about under the summer sun with kids and spouse in tow.

Contrast that with an alternative food lifestyle where the modern food shed (Jewel's and Dominick's) facilitates the creation of products like microwaveable pasta entrees (oh my god!) and a step or two backward to get our bearings may not be such a bad thing.

I may have restarted this discussion a couple of nights ago and my intent was to respectfully advocate on behalf of conventional farming -- IN ADDITION TO LOCAL PRODUCTION -- and certainly not to offend nor to lead to exchanges that might be offensive.

I like a good debate, but I like much more to learn what others are thinking and why.

And frankly, this board has caused a shift in my thinking on an issue related to agriculture. Not this exchange, but some months ago another poster asked the question (my paraphrase), "isn't reducing food miles a good thing in the end."

I'd previously done the New Zeland lamb thing but with Michigan vs. California peaches or some such. (how does one spell NZ?) Anyway, the simplicity of the question couldn't be beat and has truly caused me some sleepless nights. From a macro perspective modern food has gone a little haywire and the waste is unfathomable. And so while the food complex can more efficiently deliver Midwest fruits that are grown in California more cheaply than Midwest fruits that are grown in the Midwest (I get that apples are really from Afghanistan and peaches from Assyria but you get the point) perhaps a local focus would provide important benefits.

But my argument starts with mircrowaveable pasta and all of the other high sodium, high sugar, excess packaging prepared foods (except for unfrosted cinnamon poptarts) that lessen our relationship with our families because we're doing less together. And those other benefits I mentioned but can't remember and won't scroll up to reread.

Locovorism can stand on its own and isn't helped by attempting to show that it promotes a superior form of agriculture.

When pasteurized milk was being introduced there were some areas that passed legislation outlawing the product. "Natural, uncooked milk from my local dairy will suffice." Which resulted in 10's of thousands of deaths.

Some of this industrial and conventional stuff exists for very sound reasons and so let's be super careful about being too critical about things we're not expert.

BUZZ KILL ALERT....LOCOVORES SHOULD"T READ ON

I understand that Walmart is focusing on Chicago expansion and looking to put greenhouses on its roofs so that they can grow tomatoes and other veggies.

Thanks to all who have posted constructively.

Santander, I think you're problematizing everything a bit too much. So you're the third person in this thread who objects to the term but seems to be all for all of the benefits. Fine, don't wear the hemp T-shirt. Nobody wants to force you to be part of (shudder) a middle class trend. Just know where to get the good peaches. You'll be glad you did, and we won't tell anyone that you're having the middle class illusion that paying a farmer for them was better than paying Omnimegaglobocorp ("We make the chemicals that make the food that feeds America without you even knowing it").

Alvy Singer: You, you, you're like New York, Jewish, left-wing, liberal, intellectual, Central Park West, Brandeis University, the socialist summer camps and the, the father with the Ben Shahn drawings, right, and the really, y'know, strike-oriented kind of, red diaper, stop me before I make a complete imbecile of myself.
Allison: No, that was wonderful. I love being reduced to a cultural stereotype. --Annie Hall

And so while the food complex can more efficiently deliver Midwest fruits that are grown in California more cheaply than Midwest fruits that are grown in the Midwest (I get that apples are really from Afghanistan and peaches from Assyria but you get the point) perhaps a local focus would provide important benefits.

A couple of years ago I was in Tiburon, in Marin County. 30 minutes away were some of the freshest most gorgeous tomatoes in the world, ripening at that very moment. 15 minutes away, in either direction, was a place to buy them-- the Ferry Market in San Francisco, or the Marin Farmer's Market. And a block from my hotel were the two grocery stores in Tiburon. And the only tomatoes for sale in either one were rockhard, expensive as hell, and from Mexico.

The insults, name-calling, and long-winded pontificating in this thread by BOTH sides - even though the sides seem to agree on most points, apart from the nettlesome 'Locavore' labeling, which many people find pretentious - would seem to point to this thread being locked ASAP. Mods, have you an opinion?

Hey there, I am limping back into the fray, quietly but not trying to railroad the discussion. I just received my latest copy of Yes! magazine. Do you know it? Its a nice somewhat liberal-slanting social justice sort of rag but what I like about it is that it is always positive/empowering rather than shrill and finger pointing. (Really.) The theme for this quarter is Food for Everyone -- How to Grow a Local Food Revolution. On the cover is Will Allen from Growing Power with his daughter Erika. I think many of you involved in this discussion would find the contents compelling (even if you don't agree with the ideas) especially the inner spread "How a Community-Based Food System Works--Everybody Eats" which has the third (I know wordy) subtitle: "It begins with small farms working with natural cycles and and ends with fresh food and stronger communities in nearby cities." It tracks the energy, the cycles, the long-haul and short-haul distribution, regional processing and local markets in a really user-friendly way. It reminds me of school-house rock for those of who want to know how it looks.

Here's a link to the on-line magazine, although you can't read all of the articles there. [http://www.yesmagazine.org/foodsystem]

By the way, I love the article on Will Allen of Growing Power which starts with "Healthy food is the foundation of social justice, says Will Allen. And he knows, because he grows a lot of both."

Peas. Peace.

bjt

dicksond wrote:How many people will buy local products if and when they are both of lower quality and at higher prices than non-local alternatives? Would you buy a Motorola TV made in Muskegon, say, if it was twice as expensive and not as good as a Sony made and shipped from Yokohama? (The answer was no). That does not seem like a viable business plan to me,...

True enough, but this isn't an important question to me. Sure, if you must have a big screen Motorola TV, buy the one that's cheaper even if it comes from Yokohama. But if you already have a decent TV, maybe you don’t need a new one at all. If your financial situation allows you to either buy a brand new Motorola big screen, or take a family vacation this year, you might very well choose the latter. Similarly, if you absolutely must have fresh asparagus in late August, go ahead and get the tasteless crap from Chile. But if your choice is between asparagus from Chile in August and peaches from Illinois in August, that's a whole different question. Locaphiles like me don't exclude goods produced elsewhere, and we don't ask ourselves where to buy the cheapest Motorola TV or August asparagus. We ask completely different questions: What are the best products my region has going right now, and what can I do to get the most possible enjoyment out of them?

If not agonizing over the socio-economic, philosophic, historical, cultural and racial implications before I buy a local peach at the Green City Market makes me wrong, or worse, a deluded middle-class trendster, then I don't want to be right. I probably only have 35 or more so years on this earth, I want the good peach grown nearby, dammit, sans the middle class guilt.

Kennyz,

A belated thank you for your Friday morning note which I thought made great sense and added a lot to the conversation.

Ten or so years ago I read a Wall Street Journal article about the Pacific Northwest apple producers confronting a huge crisis. For years they had developed their "product" to meet retailer demand. The product highlighted was a red delicious #95 apple. They had become incredibly efficient at growing the perfect LOOKING apple, which fit perfectly into the trays and boxes, arrive at retail unscathed and displayed extremely well.

There's a saying that nothing kills a bad product faster than good marketing and the apples had it in spades. They were the featured product coast to coast so we all bought them, tasted them and came to learn first hand that while they looked great, they had no taste.

We stopped buying them (which in part fueled the farmer market explosion) which brought a lot of farms up to and past the brink of financial disaster. Orchard fruits is a tough business because if you get it wrong, its years to fix (can't grow a tree like corn).

"Big agriculture" invests a lot of time and money improving plants. An ear of corn -- even the sweet corn at the farmers market -- today looks dramatically different than versus only 50 years ago. It's been meticulously bred to have huge fruit, and to concentrate the plants resources on that fruit. Our corn today will look old in another 50 years.

Red delicious is an example of food taking a stupid turn (which is different than a wrong turn ). The apple had the same amount of calories, nutrients, etc., but its "appleness" had been diluted to the point of being unappetizing.

If we think of agriculture on a continuum of improving science, the products that I see at my farmers market are timeless examples of what agriculture did right, arrested in time. It's a good and necessary thing to have clearly articulated examples of what we want out of that continuum and I do believe that they are interrelated. It matters to the molecular breeders working on apple varieties that we'll see 20 years from now, food preferences demonstrated at farmers markets. The small, local farmers are verifying a market and preference for a whole range of products that otherwise would gradully fall off the map.

But the small, regional growers and ranchers aren't producing calories in any sort of manner that addresses broad demand. I just don't see that happening in the future and I'm not sure that it should. Not because I'm a proponent of big agriculture, but because I think what is already a wasteful system will become logarithmically more wasteful.

Our food challenges are going to increase, not decrease. We need guys and gals in white lab coats walking through fields of peppers and other veggies, tagging for desirable phenotype and otherwise using technology to improve our ability to more sustainably produce more calories. By definition, small producers won't improve plants. They've plucked out of the continuum plants that had been profoundly improved, and will continue to be improved to make a small market for themselves.

What small producers do, I would argue, is irreplaceable, as are the farmers markets. The former supply innovative concepts and the latter prove concepts. Big agriculture, industrial agriculture, whatever we want to call it would be smart to watch and listen, which I believe is happening.

To address the original post, locovorism is necessary to the extent it demonstrates the demand for new concepts (some of them old) and informs broad food production. On this basis, and this basis alone, I would argue that we can't do without it.

Mike G wrote:Santander, I think you're problematizing everything a bit too much.

Fair enough. You unintentionally pushed the only button I had thought about deeply, and I meant to depart the last post after the red herring comment but had a Josh Lyman (Season 1) moment in the subsequent paragraph. I really admire the content in this thread on both perspectives (which don't actually seem that far apart).

A clarification - "it's just one I can't find a consistent position or view in, other than "please don't close the farmers markets, I love them, and wish there were more of them accessible to consumers in every tax bracket" should read, "it's just the one I cant find MY own consistent position or view in." This is a debate in which my own position is defined by where I make the exceptions; I tried to point out that hypocrisy or inconsistency above. I fully enjoy and seek out every opportunity to eat local, with people who are doing a much better job of it, and am sad to think that opportunity is not currently open to everyone, as it probably should or could be, as to me it has clear benefits. But the Wendy / Klas school of thought (it's later than you think) has its merits, including a calming of indigestion.

Hi all,

We have reopened this discussion which has been -- for the most part -- productive, interesting and informative. Please, let's keep it that way by focusing on the topic at hand and refraining from any personal attacks or name-calling.

Thanks,

=R=
for the moderators