A Bad Review for a Sustainable Food Book

I'd like to take a moment to talk about a bad review my book received. I'd like to bring it up not because it's a chance to discuss my book (surely I wouldn't call your attention to a bad review if that were my motive!), but because the reviewer had some preconceived notions about local and sustainable food that colored her views on the entire book. To me, that says that there are some crazy arguments against local and sustainable food getting out into the media. You can see a good review of the book here, by the way. The bad review called my book "myopic" and "shallow" and claimed that I never addressed the "costliness" and "impracticality" of eating local food (which the reviewer believed was an energy-inefficient fad).

And, actually, I've taken some time to read through the arguments of those who believe that local food is bogus - although I did so long after the book manuscript was finalized, partially because the anti-locavore arguments are quite new and they weren't on my radar yet. But I do think its important to read all sides and so I did read what I could on the subject.

The argument tends to sound very similar to something people say to me as a vegetarian, which is: "If everyone went vegetarian tomorrow, it totally wouldn't work! What would you do with all of those extra cows and pigs and chickens? Nobody would feed them if there was no beef, pork, or chicken industries! They'd starve!" The locavore parallel is to point out that if everyone went locavore tomorrow it wouldn't work. In fact, it also wouldn't work if we all decided tomorrow we wanted organic food or cage free eggs. It wouldn't work because there isn't enough of that food being produced. And even if you skip on the "organic" and just go for "local," it STILL wouldn't work. Something like half of our fruit and a quarter of our vegetables come from California. What's the rest of the nation going to do for fruit? And yet, I don't think anyone in their right mind IS calling for everyone to go locavore tomorrow. Surely they might call on people to do so, but not with the expectation that 100% of Americans will actually do so. Our food system took generations to evolve and it will take time to change. Thus, I don't see that as a valid argument.

How about the point that it's energy inefficient? Part of the "debunking" of the "eat local" idea centers around the efficiency of transporting food. If you filled up an entire Prius with oranges and drove them across several states, each orange might require less oil (on average) than, say, somebody who transported a few gallons of milk half that distance in a Hummer. Therefore, they say that we should look at more than just how many miles something traveled but also we should consider how efficiently it traveled. Another part of the anti-locavore argument comes from analyses showing that the amount of oil used in the production of a food occurs during its growth, harvesting, processing, and distribution. Thus, if you focus ONLY on the distribution piece, on buying food that used the least amount of oil to bring it from farm to fork, you might be ignoring the fact that it was an oil hog in its production stage. One anecdote I've heard is that (if you live in the UK) it requires less oil to eat grass fed lamb from New Zealand than it does to eat grain fed lamb from the UK. Sure, the grain fed lamb used less oil in its transportation BUT, it used more oil during the rest of its production. OK, fine. But what about eating grass fed lamb from the UK then? Wouldn't that be even better than the same product from New Zealand?

I don't often tell people to merely eat local when I give advice, because "eat local" can be watered down (local-washed?) easily, as Lay's Potato Chips is now trying to do. I tell people to know their farmers. Eating a Tyson chicken you bought from a Wal-Mart in Arkansas can be considered eating local, technically. But it completely betrays the spirit of the movement. To me, eating local has a lot more to do with forming relationships with people you trust whose values are similar to yours. By doing so, you can guarantee that they cared for the environment and for the people and animals who produced your food in the best way possible. Sadly, the term "greenwashing" exists because as soon as you allow marketers to come in between you and the person who produced your food, you might be getting sold on a bunch of eco-friendly ideas that don't actually represent how your food was produced. Theoretically, if you are buying from somebody you know, they won't sell you grain fed lamb because they know grass fed is better. And if they do that, the benefits extend FAR beyond just a reduction in oil usage. We should not simplify the benefits of sustainable food down to gallons of oil consumed, because truly sustainable (good, clean, fair) food provides so much more than that (like health to the eater and a fair wage to the farmer and a thriving economy and clean environment to the community).

What about the idea that it's impractical and costly to eat local? In some cases that is true and in some cases that is not true. Right now I buy my food from the farmers market. Some things cost more than others. Often I get deals by buying the last food leftover at the end of the market, when the farmers want to get rid of it. That means that I won't always get my pick of which foods I want, and the peaches left might be the mushy ones (which I can buy up for pennies on the dollar and make jam with). But at least I can afford it. At least it's real food and it's healthy.

That said, I get it - believe me I get it - how hard it can be to eat well in the modern world. Perhaps the reviewer who didn't like my book missed all of chapter 1 where I talk about that. But that's also why I am calling for policy change. No, sustainable food isn't available enough to all people yet - if it was, we wouldn't need change. Furthermore, I don't "make the perfect the enemy of the good." While I do make an effort to show where our goal is in my book, you'll find that the solutions I offer that are politically feasible now are really quite moderate and pragmatic. I think it's important to keep our eyes on our overall goal, but I get that if somebody eats no fruit, getting them to eat an apple - even if it's been shipped from New Zealand and grown with pesticides - is better than not helping them eat any fruit at all. So, to others who criticize our movement (and buckle up because they are out there and at least one of them has a book coming out), I think we need to keep in mind that we aren't the impractical hippies living in an ivory tower that they portray us to be. Just because we're imagining to what a perfect world might look like, that doesn't mean we are ignoring the realities of the world we have today and working within those boundaries to make our world a better place.