The Food Police (20 page)

THE LOCAVORE’S DILEMMA

In the summer of 2008, Barack Obama traveled to Denver amid much hype and fanfare to accept the Democratic nomination for president. While most will probably remember his soaring rhetoric set against a backdrop of adoring fans packed into a football stadium, fewer will recall that Obama’s belly was probably full of local food. Food local to Denver, that is. Denver welcomed fifty thousand nonnative people to Colorado for the Democratic National Convention, but nonnative
food
wasn’t invited. The greening director of the DNC required caterers to ensure that 70 percent of their food had been grown either locally or organically. He was apparently sufficiently empowered not only to bar Nebraskan and Californian delicacies but fried foods, too. Fortunately there were plenty of good restaurants outside the convention center where people could get a tasty meal.

The consequences of the local-foods policy were as predictable as the media’s reception of Sarah Palin. One local caterer confessed, “We all want to source locally, but we’re in Colorado. The growing season is short. It’s dry here. And I question the feasibility of that.” With so many contractors chasing so few local and organic foods, the result was inevitable: higher food prices for Coloradans and lower profits for local caterers. Even Denver’s greening director recognized the problem: “The organic and local route may be more costly, but the committee thinks caterers will find ways to comply and still make a profit … It takes some creativity because some of these things are more expensive.”
¹
With lower profits for suppliers, higher prices for consumers, and questionable environmental and health benefits, the DNC inadvertently offered up exhibit number one in the case against the food elite’s trendiest policy.

Once the food elite learned they couldn’t keep agribusinesses out of organics, a new system advancing the anticapitalist food agenda had to be found. In 2007,
Time
magazine printed the answer right on its cover: “Forget Organic; Eat Local.”
²
It is the purported answer for every fashionable food problem. After
The Omnivore’s Dilemma
romanticized the alternative food system, Pollan wasn’t content to let us consider his arguments on their own merits. Local foods had to be thrust upon us by federal policy. He later wrote, “In the same way that federal procurement is often used to advance important social goals (like promoting minority-owned businesses), we should require that some minimum percentage of government food purchases—whether for school-lunch programs, military bases or federal prisons—go to producers located within 100 miles of institutions buying the food. We
should create incentives for hospitals and universities receiving federal funds to buy fresh local produce.”
³

As if we were still driving carts and buggies and our kids weren’t competing in a global marketplace against the tech-savvy Japanese, Kim Severson, former food writer for the
New York Times
, imagines rewriting school curricula to require that “students learned math by laying out garden plots and biology … taught as students prepared soil, gauged the weather and harvested food … Recipe writing might become an English lesson. Digging weeds and building fences would count as physical education.”
⁴

Local foods aren’t just promoted as good economic policy; they represent a worldview. Alice Waters believes “that the most political act we can commit is to eat delicious food” produced in a way consonant with her vision of the world.
⁵
James McWilliams, author of
Just Food
, reveals that “buying local is a political act with ideological implications.”
⁶

The politicians are on board. After U.S. Democratic representative Chellie Pingree introduced the failed Eat Local Foods Act, which would have subsidized local foods in school lunches, she teamed up with fellow Democratic senator Sherrod Brown in an attempt to include the more ambitious Local Farms, Food and Jobs Act in the 2012 Farm Bill. The Obama administration has signed into law a rule giving preferential treatment to local suppliers in contracts for school-lunch purchases. Forty-five state governments fund farm-to-school programs, encouraging cafeterias to buy from local sources. The USDA has unveiled the Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food initiative, offering grants, loans, and other support for local foods, and spends $10 million annually on the Farmers
Market Promotion Program. And of course, Michelle Obama spent our tax dollars digging up her back lawn to feed the White House.

Too bad nobody’s stopped to ask what business Uncle Sam has telling us where to buy our food. Don’t get me wrong. Fresh fruits and veggies are tasty in the summer. When the season rolls around, I’m a regular at my local farmers’ market. As a kid, I spent many a summer day in kind neighbors’ fields picking surplus peas, corn, and squash. But somehow the personal pleasures that come with the harvest season have been twisted into an argument that I have to pay for others’ local-food purchases. Maybe you think it would be a good idea to persuade folks to eat more veggies. Fine. But why
local
veggies? The locavore’s answers hold about as much water as a colander.

In 300
AD
, Christian leaders met in Nicaea to develop a creed, a list of tenets one must believe in order to be fully considered a member of the faith. The Church of Locavore likewise requires adherence to a set of core doctrinal beliefs. Worthy converts who have attained the title of locavore must place their faith in the Church’s doctrines, and with continual chants and incantations, the worthy can hope to accept them as truth. Fortunately, the Age of Enlightenment confronted the Christian Church and brought about less dogmatism and more tolerance. By confronting the veracity of their tenets, I hope to have the same effect on locavorism.

Michael Pollan recently told Bill Moyers, “Let’s require that a certain percentage of that school lunch fund in every school
district has to be spent within 100 miles to revive local agriculture, to create more jobs on farms, to, you know, rural redevelopment.… You will have, you know, the shot in the arm to local economies through helping local agriculture.”
⁷

I don’t doubt such a policy can enrich
your
local farmers—at least temporarily. But at a cost to whom? Let’s say the city of Northville requires that its schools and hospitals buy only local food. That’s good for the farmers of Northville. Farmers of Southville are hurt, however, when they can no longer sell to Northville. And when Southville foodies get around to enacting their own local-food laws, Northville farmers now lose a market, too. Locavores only imagine the first step and never stop to consider what happens when everyone is pursuing their own inward-looking food policies.

In
Grand Pursuit
, Sylvia Nasar summarized the views of great economists from Keynes to Hayek on international trade when writing, “Erecting trade barriers, and clamping controls on capital outflows might be effective for reducing balance-of-payment deficits … and pumping up government revenues. But if everybody adopted the same tactics, the eventual result would be universal impoverishment and unemployment.”
⁸
Economists of all stripes have known for decades that such isolationist policies are terrible ideas for governments trading across imaginary lines defining countries, but there is no fundamental difference when it comes to policies that try to restrict trading across the imaginary lines that define local towns, cities, and states.

A policy that aims to enrich local farmers (even if temporarily successful) keeps some people on the farm who would have found their skills more usefully employed elsewhere.
This might be good local development policy for Northville, but national economic policy should do anything but direct people toward industries where less labor is now needed.
⁹
Unless the aim is to go back to a system where feudal lords kept their serfs confined to fiefdoms, entrepreneurial farmers will move themselves and their skills (rather than their food) to the locations where they can earn the biggest buck. It is naive to assume that current local farmers are the same people who will ultimately benefit from local-food policies, and it is wishful thinking to presume that successful local farmers won’t consolidate and adopt cost-saving technologies to drive the inefficient out of business.

Local-food policies also completely ignore the undeniable fact that Northville is relatively better at growing some things than Southville, and vice versa. Forcing Northville agencies to buy only food grown in Northville means making them pay more for certain types of food than they otherwise would—and when Southville enacts the same policy, it keeps Northville farmers from being able to take advantage of their ability to grow some foods more efficiently.

This is the stuff of Econ 101, and no matter where the subject is taught, whether it be Harvard or South Plains Junior College, a student is almost certain to learn about the wonders of specialization and comparative advantage. Economists may disagree on whether stimulus spending is needed to jumpstart an ailing economy, but outside of a few cranks, you won’t find many denying the advantages of free trade—that by letting people specialize in making those things they are relatively good at making and then trading with others, we’re all
richer than we would be in a world where Northville consumers buy only from Northville producers.

Another lesson of Econ 101: economies of scale. Because of the need to buy tractors and other large pieces of equipment, the larger a farm grows, the more efficient it tends to become. The per-unit costs are often much lower on larger farms. One study of Illinois farms showed, for example, that average total costs were 82 percent lower on soybean farms and 38 percent lower on corn farms that were larger than nine hundred acres as compared with those that were smaller than three hundred acres.
¹⁰
Another study showed that average incremental costs were 85 percent lower on dairies with herd sizes greater than 2,000 head as compared with dairies with fewer than 30 cows.
¹¹
What does this have to do with local foods? In order for farms to take advantage of these economies of scale, they need a large market. Policies that restrict sales to certain locations are policies that limit the size of the market. And policies that aim to support smallness per se are policies that tend to promote inefficiency.

Pollan probably knows that local foods cost more, which is why he encourages us to “pay more, eat less.”
¹²
What he doesn’t admit is that local foods often cost more because their production is less efficient. Less-efficient production obviously doesn’t bode well for the environment; it means we’re using up more inputs to create the same amount of output. But it also means that, as consumers, we are poorer than we would otherwise be. So,
even if
local-foods policies enrich local-foods producers, they impoverish local consumers.

Sure, many people are willing to pay more for local foods,
but if their willingness to pay extra was greater than the cost difference, there would be no need for all the cajoling and restrictions on where schools and other institutions can source their foods. By forcing policies that consumers aren’t fully willing to pay for, the locavores are doing the equivalent of burning dollar bills. That’s hardly a prescription for economic development.

Yet the locavores insist that local foods are somehow more efficiently produced.
¹³
In
The Omnivore’s Dilemma
, Pollan tries to illustrate the productivity of a small, “sustainable” farmer who works night and day to avoid buying off-farm inputs and sells locally. In what can only be seen as an attempt to overwhelm the reader with the “impressively efficient” farm, Pollan tells us that, in a year, the Virginia-based Polyface farm produces 30,000 dozen eggs, 12,000 broilers, 800 stewing hens, 25,000 pounds of beef, 50,000 pounds of pork, 800 turkeys, and 500 rabbits.
¹⁴
Add it all up and it amounts to about 300,000 calories per acre produced. Impressive! Or is it?

When an efficient large-scale farmer plants his field with corn, he yields over 15 million calories per acre. That’s over 5,000 percent more calories per acre than the Polyface farm! And with a lot less labor. In fact, the locavores’ arguments about efficiency tend to treat the most precious of all resources, our time and labor, as if they were worthless and had no value outside the farm. If you like the guys at Polyface and want to visit them by exporting yourself to the food on their farm (even though they won’t, ironically, do the reverse), I’m all for it. But don’t tell me their system is more efficient or will somehow enrich our nation if mimicked everywhere.