Another “Simple Fix”

For many of us, Michael Pollan was the first to articulate the concept that, when given a choice, buying your food from local producers is a healthier and more environmentally friendly way to shop. In The Omnivore’s Dilemma Pollan explored the pros and cons of buying and eating locally grown food. He discussed the overall costs, the transportation costs, quality issues, social value, and the enhanced healthfulness of locally purchased food. But what he talked mostly about was the restoration of trust between the consumers of food and the purchasers of food. My reading of Pollan’s book, and other like authors was that buying and eating locally is first and foremost a way to counter the lack of trust created by the faceless agribusiness and shady advertisers who have led us to our current food crisis.

Before we abdicated the procurement of our food to corporations, everyone knew where their food was coming from, who raised the food, and the way the food was being produced. The system was structured so that these things could not be kept secret.  Personal relationships between consumer and producer created a quality of trust that can not be approached by modern-day agribusiness.

Of course, like the concepts of organic, free range, and cage free, it has taken only a few years for the idea of eating locally to be dumbed down, cooped, and elevated to an unrealistic messiah status. If only the answer to our food problem, with its associated environmental, health, and social problems were as easy as simply eating locally! Sadly, it is not. For instance, one of the great claims of the eating local disciples is that transportation costs in terms of greenhouse gasses will be phenomenally reduced. It could be so, but the carbon foot print of food is a very complicated calculation and the ecological damage that can be done is equally complicated. Driving an imported car to the farmer’s market for a couple heads of lettuce can easily negate the potential gains. And, if that lettuce is grown with irrigation water channeled from distant mountains, or deep wells drilled into mysterious aquifers, the entire equation explodes; not to mention the environmental consequences of eco-systems and species that suffer due to creating this unsustainable Garden of Eden. Cutting down the number of miles that food travels is a good idea of course, but very few people in America live in a place where enough healthy, diverse food is available all year long. No large population centers could survive on what is grown just in the surrounding countryside. For most of America, growing seasons are far too short to keep us healthy without a major population correction or an unacceptable life style alteration. The Midwest would have to get used to eating mostly meat. We would have to forget about coffee, tea, almost all fish, and anything green in winter. Even California, with its immense population and borrowed water supply, would be hard-pressed to feed its people locally. Forget about the economic, social, psychological, and environmental value of some foods that exist only beyond the imaginary line that demarcates “local”.

All of us who have trouble breaking through the surface tension of this complicated question should go back to Michael Pollan’s book. He dives deep and understands that there is nothing simple about any of this. In the chapter on grass-fed he says clearly that the eat-local movement was never meant to exclude trade in foods that cannot be produced locally. In many ways “eat locally” has become just another marketing slogan, a balm for the troubled psyches of all of us who understand our role in the unsustainable life style we have found ourselves party to. We want to believe that there is an easy way back from the ecological and health crisis that looms ahead – that has, indeed, already begun. Eating locally is a good idea when it is possible but, with the exception of the trust that can be established between producer and consumer, it is naive to believe that shopping at the local farmer’s market is much more than a gesture to solving the gigantic problems that face us. The danger is that the gesture of eating locally could pass as a real solution and stifle greater ingenuity. It is already showing signs of becoming a sophomoric shortcut to salve the consciousnesses of very well-meaning Americans. It helps to play us all back into the hands the same clever marketers who have been so instrumental in creating the perilous lack of dependability in our current food system.