More thoughts on McWilliams' "A Moveable Feast"

[Update: The Epicurian has posted a rebuttal to the much-mentioned New Zealand study. The response was contributed by Michael Shuman, the author of "The Small-Mart Revolution: How Local Businesses Are Beating the Global Competition." You can find it here. They also provide a link to the original study. Oh, and they mention yours truly!]

I stated yesterday that it is time for the eat-local movement to evolve, to reach the mainstream, to cut out the extremes. But I don’t believe that the movement should simply transition to a hub-and-wheel system as McWilliams suggests. A fellow blogger responded to my original post:

"Ecology of scale would seem to demand that we concentrate production of goods in one/few places, at which point there might be some diversity/monoculture worries - when new zealand falls into the ocean, meat-eaters will have no lamb; if there's a potato blight in idaho, there'll be a run on spuds."

Well said, Cathal.

There are many positive reasons to eat locally (some of them I stated yesterday), including preserving open space from sprawl, building a community, and eating with a good conscious. So, if hub-and-wheel isn’t such a great solution, what is the future of the eat-local movement? What will it really take to evolve and still stay relevant?

I’ve come across several other possible solutions (not my original ideas) that I’d like to see people in the movement start to consider seriously.

The first, and more radical, is to support the development of a regional cuisine. It’s not necessary to grow something in a place just because you can. A farmer may be able to force a plant to germinate in a place less condusive to it, but it also may take more work and possibly much more fossil fuel usage to pull it off. What about the thousands of species that we have disregarded, sticking to our 20 or so staples? I think we should start cultivating equally nutritious and varied cuisines that thrive in our regions and therefore can grow efficiently and inexpensively.

The second is to force the local farmers to become more efficient. The New Zealand study found lamb grown in New Zealand and shipped to England used less fossil fuels than that grown and shipped within England. Okay, well what if the processes used in New Zealand simply are more efficient than those used by the English? Could it just be that a review of efficiency is all that’s required to revitalize an underproductive industry?

The third is to start dealing with all of this at the legislative level. It's cheaper for us to purchase goods from those large agri-businesses for a good reason - the government is subsidizing it. Demand of our policymakers that subsidies be distributed in a more equitable manner.

Any thoughts?

News: James McWilliams "A Moveable Feast": The debate in full swing

I’ve been mulling over the Texas Observer article Moveable Feast by James McWilliams (and it's New York Times synopsis Food That Travels Well) that I first posted about earlier this week. The eat-local community has jumped on the defensive all over the blogosphere, just as McWilliams predicted. Many have dismissed his article as completely irrelevant (after all, it’s only based on one study) and therefore declared it unimportant, but I think it should be thoughtfully considered. Assume for a few moments, as I do, that McWilliam’s article is important if only because it has the large-scale distribution to influence thousands of people in the way they think about eating locally, and at the same time give “proof” to those cynics who dismiss the eat-local movement as a bunch of hypocritical do-gooders.

I have approached my year of eating locally from an investigative view and, as you no doubt have recognized by the tone of my blog, I am no eat-local crusader. You will not hear any "shoulds" or "ought to-s" here. Before I started, I really had no idea how big the movement was. I had wanted to learn about food – in a crash-course of sorts. The process of food arriving on my plate is very complicated, so what better way to undertake my food project than within the framework of the eat-local movement, which encourages face-to-face time with real farmers and growers, gives the motivation to try out new foods, and encourages the learning of food skills such as old fashioned preserving and gardening?

I started seeing the eat-local slogan everywhere. I found that there was an identical formula of reasons people around the nation have embraced the eat local mantra, some with which I agreed, but others I couldn’t care less about. I accept the “eat local because it tastes better” reason whole-heartedly. And I love the idea of eating in season. I also agree that looking my local farmer in the eyes and learning how he produces his food provides a wonderful personal connection with the process. I’ve liked the fossil fuel argument, although it’s turned out to be little complicated. But, when it comes to supporting the local economy, championing smaller farms, etc., that motivation never even occurred to me, and still does not factor into my motivations (I can hear the groan from the eat-local crowd already). Over the last month or so, when faced with the dilemma of choosing organic over local or choosing local over sustainable, I have randomly bought whichever “cause” seemed most important to me at that moment, local winning out the most often if only because of the vow I made at the beginning of this year and the accountability garnered by this blog.

That said, I don’t in anyway think the eat-local movement is irrelevant. I believe that positive change often arises from the actions of a passionate, outspoken minority, who can bring truly important issues – such as environmentally friendly food production – into the public eye where they can be addressed. The movement is merely dealing with the growing pains that come from widespread criticism. In the case of McWilliam's article, it should be considered construction criticism, and an opportunity to reassess purposes and motivations. Certainly, the die-hard eat-localers (those who follow the examples of Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon, or those who stopped reading this blog when I stated that supporting local economy was not terribly important to me) will mourn the presumed watering-down of the original concepts, but the time for extremes has passed. The outspoken minority has made it - the very fact that it is being criticized means it's worthy of being noticed at all. Now is the appropriate time to develop a widespread appeal, to find the balance in the argument, to accept that some things, such as food miles, are not as clear-cut as we would like, and find a way to change the manner in which we eat anyway.

News: Eating locally and saving the environment: Not such great bedfellows after all?

Recently I wrote about one of the economic arguments against buying locally (and therefore, eating locally). There is also an environmental argument which is expertly discussed by James McWilliams, an eat local faithful himself, in an article titled Moveable Feast in the Texas Observer.

One of the trumping reasons for buying local is that it allows the consumer to cut back on the negative environmental impact of fossil fuel usage (I use this one myself), but McWilliams writes that while some of the other reasons we use to justify eating local such as taste, connecting with the community, and purity are fairly irrefutable, the fossil fuel argument may not be so solid. And further, the new idea of tracing “food miles” may not be the best way to judge environmental impact (see A new kind of labeling).

McWilliam’s conclusion: If your ultimate motivation for eating locally, and the reason you can sleep well at night, is to minimize your personal environmental footprint, you would be better off supporting sustainable production (another catch word in the movement) regardless of where it is in the world than choosing to eat locally.

If you’re short on time, a briefer version of McWilliam’s article showed up in the New York Times today titled Food That Travels Well.

News: A new kind of labeling

One of the most challenging elements of this project has been determining exactly how far my food has traveled to get to me. But what if it was right on the package at the store? A Kansas grocery, the Community Mercantile Co-Op, is doing exactly that.

The store's "Miles to the Merc” program labels how many miles food travels to get to the store. Because the definition of "local" can mean different things to people, stating the food miles on the product lets the consumer decide if its local and then make their food choices accordingly (Lawrence Journal-World & News).