The Food Police (22 page)

Fresher often tastes better, but local food does not axiomatically mean fresh food. The fish in the city center of Paris is typically considered fresher than what can be found even a few miles in from the coast. (It goes to show the drawing power of a big consumer market.) Even in the landlocked Midwest, the best seafood restaurants fly in fresh catch. Want fresh peaches from Georgia or South Carolina? Thanks to the Internet and FedEx, you can have them sitting on your doorstep the next day.
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That’s as fresh as you’ll find at any farmers’ market.

Almost anything can be justified if it’s for the kids. Alice Waters wants us to invest in local foods for schools because “[c]ertain things are just too important to compromise on. I just cannot compromise on what children are fed in school … I cannot compromise on the purity and nutrition and tastiness of the food. Children should have the very best of everything.”
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It is interesting that Waters says she can’t compromise for
my
kids, because I have to do it every day.

The reality is that even Bill Gates has to compromise. Nobody’s income is unlimited. Our wants will always outstrip
our capacity to supply them. That’s a fact of life—one that has escaped Waters, who apparently presumes schools have budgets more akin to those of the sheikhs of Saudi Arabia than administrators in the Bronx. Schools face real budget constraints that force real trade-offs. If schools are forced to spend their budgets on more local foods, that means less money spent on healthy foods. A school can try to maximize nutrient intake for a given budget or it can maximize the amount of local food. The outcomes are not the same. Personally, I’d rather schools tried to maximize what my kids learned.

Why should we promote policies that take fruits and veggies, which are often the farmers’ most highly valued commodities, and give them to the people who value them least? Most kids don’t want veggies—local or not. I’m all for local schools thinking about creative and cost-effective ways to improve the quality of schoolchildren’s diets, but simply requiring schools to buy things kids won’t eat isn’t helpful. Even if we could increase local food consumption through subsidies, that doesn’t make it an economically efficient thing to do. Giving out local food to seven-year-olds is about as smart as handing out T-bone steaks at a PETA convention.

W
hen all is said and done, the locavores don’t have a truly compelling answer for why we should all eat local. I once co-wrote an article with the tongue-in-cheek subtitle “Why Pineapples Shouldn’t Be Grown in North Dakota,” and received a retort from a locavore saying they never claimed that pineapples should be grown there. “So, what do you claim?” I asked. The answer, in not so many words, was that people in North Dakota shouldn’t
want
pineapples. There we have it.
Locavores don’t care what we want. It’s all about what
they
want us to eat. The food elite want us to become something different from what we are. Unless, ironically, a North Dakotan can export himself to where pineapples are local.

In the end, the locavores want to supplant our wants and desires with theirs. Art Salatin, a local-food advocate and farmer, says, “We have to battle the idea that you can have anything you want any time you want it.”
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This is an interesting position for someone in the business of trying to please the customer. At least Salatin’s cause is a personal one that doesn’t entail government regulation. That’s not the same as Pollan, who says: “People will have to relearn what it means to eat according to the seasons.”
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Our modern economy allows us to eat tasty fruit from South America in the off-season, but if Pollan’s crusade to have us eat more local food is to succeed, then our preferences must change. In fact, he argues, “[a]ll we need to do is empower individuals with the right philosophy and the right information to opt out [of the industrial food chain] en masse.”
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Apparently, according to Pollan, whatever philosophies are currently guiding food decisions are wrong.

Local-food advocates tend to be the exact same folk who promote cultural diversity and relish their adventures to Europe and Southeast Asia. Pollan himself traversed the United States to make the case that we should stay at home to eat. Locavores use populist language to extol the virtues of local producers, all the while smugly praising exotic foreign foods and spending their vacation money elsewhere. Despite the populist overtones, locavorism is but another form of elitism—even though locavores can’t bring themselves to admit it. We have one group of people claiming to know better
than the rest of us where we should get our food, all the while exempting themselves from the same requirements. The irony is lost on the locavores, who, in one breath, claim it is a myth that “eating local (organic) food is elitist,” while, in the next, encourage fellow locavores to “continue enjoying your delicious Green Zebra and Brandywine tomatoes with a little bit of extra virgin olive oil, homegrown basil, and sea salt without the slightest bit of guilt.”
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Most of us have more to worry about than the distance zucchinis travel. If your goal is to minimize nutrient loss, buy frozen veggies. If your goal is to feed kids cheaply and more nutritiously, buy canned. If you want to minimize your carbon footprint, ride your bike and stay off airplanes. If you want to help local farmers, give them a donation or fight to remove the trade barriers that keep them from selling to consumers in other countries. If you want to ingest fewer pesticides, pay more for the organic. Local has nothing to do with it.

The locavores have taken a movement designed to satisfy the whims of foodies with time and money on their hands and turned it into a national cause with the growing support of politicians. I happily buy from folks I know at the farmers’ market when a ripe tomato is needed for fresh salsa, but I can’t possibly imagine why everyone has to. As the award-winning author Charles Mann put it in a
New York Times
interview, “If your concern is to produce the maximum amount of food possible for the lowest cost, which is a serious concern around the world for people who aren’t middle-class foodies like me, [local food] seems like a crazy luxury. It doesn’t make sense for my aesthetic preference to be elevated to a moral imperative.”
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THE FUTURE OF FOOD

A couple years ago, I had the pleasure of giving a speech about the economics of the U.S. beef industry to a group of visiting Vietnamese businessmen and government officials. In the course of my talk, I showed two maps of the United States, to illustrate where cattle are raised and subsequently processed. At the conclusion, I received several questions from members of the audience wanting to know
why
cattle were raised all over the country and then shipped to feedlots and packing plants primarily located in a relatively small geographical area spanning the panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma and extending up into Kansas and Nebraska. I answered with all the economic rationalizations I could muster, citing weather, corn prices, transportation costs, and economies of scale.

My answers were apparently unsatisfactory, because the queries persisted. Finally, the interpreter—a Vietnamese native
who had spent several years living in the States—stopped me, switched to English, and said, “You have to remember they live in a Communist country. The government decides where firms locate.” Suddenly I realized that my listeners had no conception of how this sort of efficient outcome could have resulted from the free interaction of ranchers, feedlot owners, and agribusinesses all trying to make a living satisfying consumers’ preferences for beef. These Vietnamese businessmen wanted to know
who
decided. I had to reveal that we have no cow czar, but I could tell they were still a bit bewildered. It was beyond their worldview to consider the possibility of a prosperous and successful agricultural economy running on the backs of unplanned markets coordinating people’s free choices.

This experience opened my eyes to how strongly our beliefs and perceptions are influenced by the culture in which we live, and how, over the course of several decades, entire worldviews can change. The free-market apologist and queen of individualism, Ayn Rand, immigrated to the United States in the 1920s as the Communists began overtaking Russia. She left behind a sister for whom she had fond memories. In 1973, after years of believing her sister had died, Rand learned that she was in fact alive and well, and arranged for her to visit New York. Rand, who fondly remembered her older sister as spirited and enamored of Western fashion, was dismayed at the changed woman who arrived. Rand’s sister, who by now had lived a near-lifetime under Soviet rule, “disliked American conveniences, which left her nothing to do all day; she preferred her old routine of waiting in the food lines and gossiping with her friends.” She was also overwhelmed at the variety offered by American grocery stores. Like the Vietnamese I addressed,
Rand’s sister was perplexed by choice. She “went into a store to buy a tube of toothpaste and found herself overwhelmed by the number of brands and sizes and became angry when a clerk wasn’t willing to help her choose.”
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Two sisters who had once rejoiced in their similarities found they had little in common, in no small part because such divergent cultures and ideas had permeated their thinking.

One of the ways we make it through life with even the tiniest sliver of sanity is by adopting ways of thinking to give order to the capriciousness that surrounds us. Some folks spend years trying to develop a view on life, a worldview, to make sense of their happenings. But no matter how reflective or thoughtful, we are all unconsciously influenced by the culture in which we live. Yet ideologies and worldviews have real implications for how we interact in our world and the outcomes we can expect to enjoy.

I write about the food police because they have been spectacularly effective in influencing how our culture thinks about food. A generation of Americans far removed from the farm is one that lacks the tangible hands-on experience to judge for themselves the veracity of claims about modern food. Missing is the connection required to know whether a worldview should be kept or checked at the door.

It’s hard to know what to believe about food, and sometimes it’s easier to take our cues from those around us than to think deeply about controversial issues. I write to those who, perhaps unconsciously, have absorbed the messages of celebrity chefs, urban journalists, and daytime talk show hosts and who have adopted certain attitudes toward food and agriculture without previously having stopped to think. Charles
Mackay, writing about the
Madness of Crowds
, argued that “[m]en, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, one by one.”
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Sometimes it is useful to stop, look up, see where the crowd is heading, and ask if you still want to be on board.

I grant that among the folks I’ve called the food police there are many intelligent, well-meaning people who truly care about our health and the environment. Here’s the thing. I care about these, too. It isn’t a question of who is more compassionate; it is a question of
how
we can best achieve the things we all want. It is a question of costs. It is a question of who is best suited to make decisions about the tough trade-offs. It is a question of the kind of future we hope to create. It is a question of worldview.

A danger embedded in the worldview of the progressive food elite is romanticism with nature and the past. The food progressives reject modern, technologically advanced food for older, slower, more “natural” food. The answer for the future of food, in their assessment, lies in the past. This mind-set is destructive because how we view our future affects not only who we are but what we eventually will be. We travel to Athens and Rome to admire who they
were
and what they
did
, but seldom do we think they represent what we should become. According to the economist Deirdre McCloskey, the modern Western world is incredibly wealthy today not so much because of the industrial revolution and capitalism per se but because of changes in how we came to
think
about commercialism, private property, innovation, and trade.
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Aspirations are more than wishes—they affect who we become.

A worldview that celebrates naturalism in food as a core tenet is one inherently hostile to innovation, growth, and progress, even if those things reduce poverty and bring about improved food safety, quality, health, and environmental outcomes. The food police type away on their iPads and Tweet to followers. Yet, ironically, they have rejected biotechnology, irradiation, cloning, synthetic fertilizers, and all kinds of technology, mechanization, and innovative processing in agriculture. Each of these developments admittedly has risks and downsides, but all can make food more abundant, more convenient, more consistent, sometimes less reliant on input use (especially labor), and sometimes more environmentally friendly.