I’m a bit late to the punch, but I heard an interview with James E. McWilliams today on July 22’s edition of Q, and it reminded me why his his Forbes treatise bugged me so much last year.
James E. McWilliams is a hardcore liberal freemarketer, essentially a personification of The Economist, whose polemical arguments tend to revolve around making “gotcha” shots in out-of-context arguments that get primarily consumed by those looking to reinforce views that largely conform to his ideas already. Generally, he’s a technophile consumerist who likes the way things are and is trying to convince people that there’s nothing wrong with the way things are, and that advocating for change is unethical.
In the Forbes article, he argues that locavores are focused primarily on the transportation component of food production. This basically means he’s not paying attention: most of the local food movement is more concerned with supply-chain — the improvement of the connection of consumers with the food they eat in every way. Reducing transportation as a percentage of energy invested in food production is only a part of that concern.
He’s also not seeing the forest for the trees in terms of the sustainability arguments ringing throughout most of food politics:
A 2006 academic study (funded by the New Zealand government) discovered that it made more environmental sense for a Londoner to buy lamb shipped from New Zealand than to buy lamb raised in the U.K. This finding is counterintuitive–if you’re only counting food miles. But New Zealand lamb is raised on pastures with a small carbon footprint, whereas most English lamb is produced under intensive factory-like conditions with a big carbon footprint. This disparity overwhelms domestic lamb’s advantage in transportation energy.
The failure here is that the obvious answer — that Brits should stop eating lamb — never gets a mention. It’s the obvious answer to any unconcerned observer reading this paragraph. But his argument instead is that consumers should remain ignorant of the origins of their lamb, lest their local-production prejudices result in more British-produced lamb, which in turn will harm the environment because it is more carbon-intensive. He’s first assuming that there is no legislative attempt to reduce that carbon footprint, such as banning factory-produced British lamb, and that people will eat the exact same amount of lamb no matter where it’s from. In fact, if people do really prefer to buy local lamb, and it’s more carbon-intensive, it’s likely that the carbon inputs will be reflected in the price when demand goes up, futher affecting consequent future demand.
Of course, Britain could also ban lamb because it’s too carbon-intensive. The point is, McWilliams takes a single chain of causality and excludes all other modifiers. Industrial ag apologists do this a lot.
Next he attacks British (those poor harassed Brits) green beans:
The U.K. buys most of its green beans from Kenya. While it’s true that the beans almost always arrive in airplanes–the form of transportation that consumes the most energy–it’s also true that a campaign to shame English consumers with small airplane stickers affixed to flown-in produce threatens the livelihood of 1.5 million sub-Saharan farmers.
One reason the local food movement has gained traction is related to mankind’s innate tribalness. Generally, people care more about their neighbors than they do distant strangers. If you are able to locate the farm that grows your beans on a map, or able to visit it, or get to know the actual land owner and his family, you have an emotional and intellectual investment in the success of that farm greater than easily econometricized factors like cost or aggregate carbon intensiveness. It means more, so you can fairly easily morally condone the fact that those 1.5 million Kenyans will need to find other people to buy their stuff.
McWilliams is basically making the most moralistic type of neoliberal arguments: if you really wanted freedom and prosperity for all, you’d give up Differentiator X — with Differentiator X essentially being any local variation anywhere. The argument is typical of corporate apologists who point to things like every Sunbelt city being exactly the same and having the same mall, suburb layout, and Cheesecake Factory, and calling that “progress” or “development”.
Local economies produce differentiation for the sake of local needs. Modern chain capitalism rejects local differentiation as an oppressive relic of global inequality. But mass conversion of all world cities into a facsimile of Houston is not exactly what everyone would label “equality” or “prosperity” — if it were people wouldn’t protest against McDonald’s and Wal-Mart (economists, of course, just assume these people have made some error in their cost-benefit analysis). Maybe we should try to help those Kenyans generate local prosperity rather than encouraging carbon-based dependence that relies on sending their food production to one of the richest countries on Earth whilst half of their population starves.
To choose a locally grown apple over an apple trucked in from across the country might seem easy. But this decision ignores economies of scale. To take an extreme example, a shipper sending a truck with 2,000 apples over 2,000 miles would consume the same amount of fuel per apple as a local farmer who takes a pickup 50 miles to sell 50 apples at his stall at the green market.
Again, simplifying assumptions take no account of other inputs. The biggest reason transport costs are not given proper weight when calculating ethical food consumption is that fuel is so massively cheap or subsidized, especially in the US. If gas were more equitably taxed, people would go to nearer markets and farmers would sell larger amounts of produce at fewer markets, or start transporting bulk goods by alternative-fueled or more fuel efficient methods. The key assumption in this argument is that fuel is a constant that does not affect the product and cannot be affected itself.
The average American eats 273 pounds of meat a year. Give up red meat once a week and you’ll save as much energy as if the only food miles in your diet were the distance to the nearest truck farmer.
An extension of this argument is what set me off today. The basis of the above paragraph assumes that all places are the same environmentally, culturally, geographically, etc. Before fossil fuels enabled long-distance transportation to blur geographic differentiation, bioregions tended to have specialized cuisine primarily because of local environmental factors. People who live in the semiarid intermontane West don’t necessarily need to give up meat to reduce their carbon footprint — they just need to ensure their meat is locally raised and range-fed. There is tons of land in the American West that is horrible for growing grain, fruit or vegetable crops on — either due to topography or hydrogeography — but is grand for pasture stock. The Central California foothills and high Plains come to mind. These places are using massive amounts of energy to irrigate corn and vines when a sparse ruminant population could provide a much higher net food energy (EROEI) ratio from the same land, all whilst freeing up the local water resources whose diversion has decimated wetland and river ecosystems over the last century.
Guys like this bug me: their audience is primarily debt-rich suburbanites who are searching for moral justifications for their existing behavior. The local food movement is focused on revitalizing local economies and re-differentiating a society steamrolled into perpetual blandness by corporate mass-marketing of food. It’s also a movement peopled by those who are acutely aware of how unsustainable current industrial agriculture is — people who want to take the first steps in ensuring that their family and community can survive disruptions in the global economy that might result from that corporate steamroller: whether it be massive shifts in climate causing distant crop failures, fuel shortages, new pests and diseases caused by unanticipated effects of transgenomic crops, or other facets of our intricate web of interdependent complexities in modern agriculture.
Simplifying — or at least identifying, understanding and taking a greater degree of control and involvement in — ones personal food chain is an empowering step for anyone. Intelligent people should be encouraging it, not snarkily rooting for the status quo.
this weekend. Brilliant lady, and I wanted to remind all of 
was ahead of its time.