

Math Lessons for Locavores - tokenadult
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/20/opinion/20budiansky.html

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tptacek
Couple things here:

* First, it's not true that the overriding concern of "locavorism" is energy conservation. Other concerns include food quality, the survival of small farms, highlighting the bad practices of huge corporate farms, and animal welfare.

* 80-90% of the "value" of these ideas you can capture by eating only what's in season (ie, no fresh tomatos in February) and sourcing protein from small farms. Both of these things: you want to do anyways.

* "Locavorism" doesn't support the notion that we should grow oranges in Wisconsin so they can be local. No, the Alice Waters types think people in Wisconsin shouldn't be eating many oranges at all.

It's true that Locavorism is on the cusp of becoming more a yuppie religion
than a valid principle. It's certaintly true that industrial farming is more
energy efficient. Maybe it's right that the word "Locavore", which is stupid,
be tainted by association with this trend.

But let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Small family-owned farms
carefully raising high-quality cows, pigs, and lambs are a very good thing.
Restaurants that can tell you name of the farmer who raised the lamb on their
menu are a very good thing. Seasonal cuisine is a very good thing. These ideas
don't have to be "locavorism"; maybe they can just be common sense.

~~~
evgen
While "food miles" may not be the overriding concern of most locovores, it
certainly seems to be the favored argument they use most often to justify
various actions and decisions; of the various concerns you listed energy
conservation is the one that is easiest to try to quantify. Since this
particular point is one that will, by definition, almost always be won by the
locovore side they tend to drag it out more often than they should (especially
because it is a point they subsequently lose on when the bigger picture is
examined.)

Personally, I think locovorism is way past the point of no return in terms
being nothing more than a means for yuppies to distinguish themselves from the
hoi polloi. Once you could get organic veggies at Wal-Mart they needed St.
Pollan to give them a new rallying point.

I live in the bay area and from the vantage-point of this mild climate it is
very easy to enjoy local seasonal food with almost no inconvenience to my
lifestyle. I grew up on the midwest on one of those small farms you praise
(back before shipping arugala around the world for my local salad bar was
common or even possible) and I can tell you with certainty that seasonal
cuisine in that climate really sucks.

~~~
tptacek
If the point of this discussion is to stigmatize and ridicule the orthodoxy of
"locavorism", I'm on board.

If the point is to ridicule Michael Pollan and Alice Waters, to highlight the
fact that the model of production they talk about is a luxury item for the
rich and utterly untenable for most of society, I'm even on board with that.

But if the point is to make the argument that there is little benefit to
seasonal cooking or small-farm animal husbandry, you lose me completely. There
clearly is a benefit:

* Out-of-season vegetables are very often of lower quality than canned; the obvious example is tomatoes, but you're also not going to eat a ramp in December, or a high-quality parsnip in May, or a Vidalia in the fall.

* The consumer embrace of faux-fresh off-season veg actually is a bad thing; it pushes out producers who make real veg in favor of people who are selling wax veg year-round; people are still buying wax tomatoes in July.

* Alienation from seasonal cooking results in home cooks who, like me, had never tasted a ramp or a morel or a vidalia or even a real tomato; seasonal cooking is vector towards _good_ cooking, and one thing that I think is hard to argue is that America needs more and better home cooks.

* Supermarket meat is a bona fide debacle. There's universal agreement that we've managed to breed flavor and health out of pigs almost entirely. Industrial chicken is epsilon away from being grown in vats instead of farms. Beef is being treated with ammonia before grinding (the trend towards buying meat not only pre-ground but pre- _shaped_ is another pathology).

* "Local meat" is in some cases actually _cheaper_ than the supermarket crap; you have to make a lifestyle concession to get access to those prices (ie, you have to have a $150 chest freezer, and you have to be willing to actually cook), but high-quality pig and beef is _not_ out of the reach of a lower-middle-class homeowner.

* I live in the midwest. I'm not a fan of St. Pollan[1], but there are some restaurant owners here that I do admire and who make a point of sticking to midwest-seasonal. I take exception to the idea that it "really sucks". We should meet in the middle. In the colder climes, we should be shipping in "accent" products from the west coast to liven things up, but there's plenty of regional produce that can and should form the staple. Right now, we're at the other extreme: most people in Chicago are happy to eat a caprese with gassed-red wax tomatoes and mutant basil and kraft mozzeralla in the middle of January.

* And don't get me started on our access to cheese here.

[1] _Although I like his writing about plants. He's a great garden writer._

~~~
patio11
_Industrial chicken is epsilon away from being grown in vats instead of
farms._

Great line. (Apropos of nothing: when vat-grown meat arrives, I will be there
on day one, eating it off the freaking petri dish if they'll let me.)

~~~
tptacek
No. Don't. Don't eat that crap. Not because it's unhealthful. Because it
_sucks_. It's just stringy tofu. Just buy tofu; it'll be cheaper and more
versatile.

The rest of us can eat actual chicken, the kind that had feet and beaks.

~~~
timwiseman
Since we are talking about a hypothetical product that doesn't exist (at least
in a commercial way) yet, I think it is a bit premature to judge its quality.

But even if hypothetically it tasted worse then the real thing, there are
likely to be great benefits that will outweight that factor for most
occassions

\- It avoids the need to kill a normal animal that feels sensations, can
experience cruelty, and has emotions that are (debatably) similar to our own.

\- It is likely to be more affordable and more sustainable since it likely
will need less space and less energy per unit meat produced

~~~
tptacek
Unfortunately, no, we're not talking about a hypothetical product; we're
talking about an only slightly hyperbolic assessment of Tyson/Purdue chicken.

If you want to argue about the benefits of e.g. Quorn, I have no problem with
it and won't be fun to argue with; it's basically exotic tofu.

But if we're talking about industrialized factory chicken, which is tasteless
and loaded with antibiotics (because yields would dramatically drop if an
unprotected chicken organism was exposed to the chicken-raising environment)
and still arrives rife with salmonella so that cooking with it is a hazmat
operation... I think you're on shakier ground.

Better that we not cook with chicken (switch to tofu, it's cheaper) than with
crap chicken.

 _PS: for what it's worth, I don't care about the ethics of animal treatment
that much at all. I'm not a fan of needless cruelty, and I do believe that
happier animals (incidentally) taste better, but animal welfare is not one of
my animating concerns._

~~~
timwiseman
Perhaps we are talking at cross purposes, but I know that I was discussing
actual vat grown meat, and I strongly believe that is what patio11 was
referring to.

It is not yet commercially available, but it is under serious research:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_vitro_meat> has a good summary of the current
situation and
[http://www.newsdesk.umd.edu/scitech/release.cfm?ArticleID=10...](http://www.newsdesk.umd.edu/scitech/release.cfm?ArticleID=1098)
has a good laymen's summary of a recent technical paper on its commercial
feasability.

~~~
tptacek
Sorry, I think the point I'm making is: "I don't know if you're talking about
future-protein or not, but if what you're saying is, 'all progress in meat
production sounds good to me, so bring on the cheap Tyson chicken breasts!',
yeah, don't do that."

What you do with mycoprotein and cultured meat is between you and your deity.
I have no opinions about it. I'm also fine with you consuming all your meals
in tablet or milkshake form. Just leave the chickens alone!

------
kragen
At present we grow enough grains alone to satisfy the caloric needs of about
20 billion people. Agriculturally, we are living in a post-scarcity world,
unless the population triples again, and we have been for forty years. What we
need in agriculture today is not more efficiency, but more resilience and more
justice in the distribution of the results.

It is inexcusable that today, forty years since the end of food scarcity, poor
people starve to death every day while steers are fatted on corn and soybeans
for the rich. Through efficiency, we've achieved a post-scarcity world. Now we
need to achieve a post-poverty world. Efficiency is not going to get us there.

Locavorism might promote greater resiliency; but does it? Does the long-
distance and international food trade ameliorate or exacerbate the privation
of crop failures? Do small, local farms produce less fertilizer runoff per
acre than big agribusiness operations? (Historically, in first place, with the
most agrochemicals applied per acre, has been the suburban lawn.) Is
locavorism an effective hedge against new pests devastating monoculture crops?
Does it effectively break down hierarchies of richer and poorer regions by
reducing long-distance exploitation, or does it reinforce them by keeping the
money of the rich close to home?

I don't know. But when you're sitting in a fancy restaurant, pondering whether
the lamb on the menu, priced the same as 100 kilos of soybeans, comes from
Niman Ranch down the road or from a giant ranch in New Zealand — don't delude
yourself into thinking that that's a serious food policy issue.

~~~
tptacek
Let's see if we can't get locavorism to address nuclear nonproliferation,
while we're at it. Jeepers.

Whether we should be eating more or less meat, whether meat should be priced
massively higher or not, why can't we agree that most other things being
equal, we should eat _better_ meat when possible?

Cargill meat is inflicting all the same imbalances on the world food market,
_and_ loading our food with antibiotics while still increasing foodborne
illness, _and_ reducing the overall quality of our meals.

Niman Ranch, for what it's worth, is a consortium of independent small farms
spread all over the place.

~~~
kragen
As far as I can tell, there's no connection between the structure of the food
supply chain and nuclear proliferation. On the other hand, locavorism consists
of advocacy of a particular structure for the food supply chain, which
necessarily has profound implications for all attributes of the food supply
chain, including resiliency, affordability, and environmental impact. It isn't
obvious to me which way those implications run, but I am claiming that those
are the important aspects to investigate, not energy-efficiency or flavor.

I agree that big meat producers like Cargill (and, apparently, Niman Ranch)
harm resiliency and the environment.

I think that your questions, like how much fecal contamination is in your
meat, and how it tastes, are rounding errors when compared to questions like
how much farmland had to be saturated with ammonium nitrate to feed it, how
much methane it emitted, and how much downstream spinach was contaminated with
Salmonella — from a public policy perspective, that is.

As long as a substantial number of people in the world who are starving to
death, many more people are eating meals of very low overall quality and
suffering serious illness as a result. This is the important issue.

You're right about Niman Ranch. Thanks for the tip. They had me fooled; I
thought Niman Ranch was a ranch in Marin County, California. I didn't realize
they were a nationwide marketer of grain-fed feedlot-finished beef (it
explains this in the FAQ on their web site) and that Bill Niman now refuses to
eat Niman Ranch products!

~~~
tptacek
I think the Niman Ranch backlash is quite a bit overblown, but that the brand
commands a premium that the product quality doesn't justify.

Your concerns about the food supply chain are valid. I just don't think it's
reasonable to make one food issue ("locavorism: fate or fad?") a proxy for
_every_ food issue.

~~~
kragen
I didn't know there _was_ a Niman Ranch backlash; I thought it was just Bill.

I agree that different issues relate to different degrees to each other. But
locavorism is advocacy of a deeply different structure for the entire food
supply chain, and that _does_ relate to every other food issue. If we're going
to restructure the whole food supply chain, we should focus on issues that
really matter, like whether the resulting structure is just and resilient, not
on the flavor of the resulting veal.

Edit: although of course _your personal_ locavorism may _not_ be any kind of
advocacy at all, which would explain your puzzlement at political issues being
raised.

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desigooner
Another NYT Article on this theme talking about "food miles"

<http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/06/opinion/06mcwilliams.html>

Here's Will Wilkinson on why eating Local may not better

[http://marketplace.publicradio.org/display/web/2008/08/27/ea...](http://marketplace.publicradio.org/display/web/2008/08/27/eat_local/)

------
jknupp
I'm no locavore, but for an article with the word "math" in the title, the
following breakdown seems a bit silly:

 _Overall, transportation accounts for about 14 percent of the total energy
consumed by the American food system.

Other favorite targets of sustainability advocates include the fertilizers and
chemicals used in modern farming. But their share of the food system’s energy
use is even lower, about 8 percent.

The real energy hog, it turns out, is not industrial agriculture at all, but
you and me. Home preparation and storage account for 32 percent of all energy
use in our food system, the largest component by far._

Well, fine, but ceteris paribus you've just shown that transportation and
fertilization do, in fact, make up a not insignifcant percentage of food
production cost. Why would you add in the cost of home storage and
preparation, which (presumably) will be the same for everyone?

~~~
sp332
They're not the same for everyone. If you do your dishes in the sink more
often, eat your veggies raw more often, open your refrigerator more often,
your energy use might be lower than if you started optimizing for
transportation costs instead.

~~~
aplusbi
A better point would be that home storage costs are the same for local foods
as they are for shipped foods.

~~~
sprout
Actually possibly worse, since shipped foods are engineered to last longer
without spoiling, and they go through a lot more quality control than what you
pick up at the market, so the ones that spoil quickly often don't even make it
to you.

