Cows on pasture: potential solution, or menace to society? What is just food? One might answer: food produced without causing undue ecological damage, food grown under production systems that allow workers and farmers to earn livable wages, food that’s healthy, accessible, and affordable to everyone who eats.
To James E. McWilliams, author of the new book Just Food: Where Locavores Get It Wrong and How We Can Truly Eat Responsibly, just food is certainly much more than food produced and purchased locally, and his book wags a contrarian finger at the “locavores” who believe purchasing food grown close to home somehow makes it more just, fair, or better for society and the planet.
“The locavore approach to reforming our broken food system has serious limits-limits that our exuberant acceptance of eating local has obscured,” McWilliams writes. In their application of a simplistic valuing methodology (judging food purely by how far away from one’s plate it originated), he claims, these 100-mile dieters could potentially do more harm than good, if they succeeded in their apparent mission to force the entire world’s eaters to choose food grown within a short drive of their kitchen table.
The problem with this argument is its irrelevance. The few truly orthodox locavores who presumably exist (do you know even one?) aren’t close to persuading the world to eat the way they do. To devote an entire book to debunking the impulse to eat closer to home doesn’t address the points raised by food and farm activists. At their most relevant, today’s alternative eaters illuminate the systemic problems created by industrialized food provisioning: negative impacts on the global climate as well as significant deterioration in water quality, soil quality, local economies, worker justice, and human health.
McWilliams reduces the message of the food movement to a simple prescription—eat local—and proceeds to debunk it. Yet it’s hard to believe any thoughtful person could imagine that eating locally would address this multitude of issues. One imagines, rather, that consumers, when faced with a system they don’t support, are voting with their dollars for the only alternatives they can find-local food at the farmers market and organic products at the store. What McWilliams seems to miss is that these purchasing choices don’t make people fundamentalist locavores or organic purists. The locavores I know don’t view shopping consciously as a solution; they view it as a protest.
The author often categorizes proponents of alternative food systems—first locavores, then organic advocates, then those who object to genetically modified crops—as wild-eyed extremists in need of some firm schooling on “a golden mean of producing food.” McWilliams’ vision of this agricultural golden mean promotes lifecycle assessments over food miles, and judicious pesticide use over organics. He preaches the potential of genetically modified cassava to feed starving Africans, dismisses grass-fed beef because it can’t be scaled up to meet current demand, and advocates a drastic increase in freshwater aquaculture to meet demands for animal protein.
Again and again, one gets the uncomfortable feeling that McWilliams creates fanatical straw men in order to make his own presentation of facts seem like a rational alternative. “The problems that I have with organic agriculture have less to do with how it is currently practiced than with the inflated claim that it’s the only alternative to today’s wasteful conventional production,” he writes. But do any serious proponents seeking more sustainable alternatives to conventional agriculture claim this?
As he continues on his mission to disabuse the ecological faithful of their trust in growing organically, McWilliams uses the fact that sometimes organic growers use toxic natural compounds to knock organic off what he perceives to be its high horse of purity, and then cites the work of Bruce Ames, a controversial Berkeley scientist, to support the view that many modern pesticides don’t hold the same risks as their older counterparts. Despite devoting pages to each of these points, they do little to move McWilliams towards his chapter’s supposed conclusion: that organic should fall within a “continuum of farming systems.” A discussion of the pros and cons of organic and conventional production, and a studied evaluation of other farming systems along such a continuum, would have been a good start.
McWilliams’ defense of modern pesticides leads him to a contradiction. If pesticides aren’t so bad, one wonders why the author’s measured support for GMO crops hinges in part with the argument that they allow for a reduction in pesticide use. Or do they? “To be sure, there are many studies that show the exact opposite-that is, that GM crops have done nothing to reduce pesticide use,” McWilliams writes.
Paying little heed to such inconvenient tangles in this chapter or others, McWilliams hurtles forward down the path of measured (the man loves his middle ground) support for GM crops. In his rush to the middle, though, the author misses some important facets of the GM debate. For example, he glosses over evidence that GM technology hasn’t managed to boost yields, much industry hype to the contrary; and he ignores the vested interest in today’s crop of herbicide-tolerant genetically modified seeds: namely, that the companies that sell seeds with herbicide resistance also peddle the herbicides that must accompany their product.
This blithe obliviousness to the profit-seeking motives of the GM seed industry allows McWillams to argue for development of GM technology for “subsistence oriented” crops so they might thrive in dry or salty soils. This argument falls short on economic and theoretical grounds. While Monsanto can make billions of dollars per year selling Roundup Ready corn and soy (and Roundup) to industrial-scale farmers, there’s little cash to be made selling, say, drought-tolerant cassava to African smallholders. So what entity is going to develop such seeds? McWilliams’ answer: the Gates Foundation. But while the aims of the foundation are admirable, there’s plenty of evidence that Gates, like McWilliams, doesn’t really understand hunger in Africa.
Gates and McWilliams, in promoting biotechnology as the solution to Africa’s food troubles, take a shortsighted view of hunger, seeing it only through the lens of yield shortages and disregarding the ample historical evidence that hunger in developing countries has at least as much to do with world trade, democratic failures, poverty, and conflict as they do with the lack of a salt-tolerant sorghum seed.
McWilliams: courageously manning the middle of the road. The most sensible recommendation McWilliams makes is that if we want to lesson agriculture’s impact on natural systems, we need to eat less meat. In forming this argument, he relies heavily on a 2006 report from the Food and Agriculture Organization, almost to the point where one felt reading the report and getting data firsthand might have been a better use of time. McWilliams’ also hypes the importance of life-cycle analyses (LCAs) in pointing out inefficiencies in the food system. LCAs are good tools, but they hardly represent the sort of radical approach that’s “off the public radar screen,” as the author claims, ignored by locavores the world over as they persist in stubbornly clinging to food miles as their shortcut solution for determining a food’s ecological footprint.
McWilliams’ stated goal in writing Just Food was to lay a blueprint for “how we can truly eat responsibly.” He’s right in pointing out that eating locally and organically alone won’t result in the creation of a just food system, and that there’s much work left to do if the aim is sustainability in food provisioning. Yet his book fails to outline any sort of considered analysis of what a “truly” responsible food system might look like. Instead, the author wastes time promoting himself as the arbiter of rational thinking about the food system, an antidote to those rabid locavores and organic purists crowding the aisles of Whole Foods and farmers markets who vainly believe they’ve found the solution to our food systems’ problems.
One imagines McWilliams, a historian at Texas State University, might have written a book more in tune with his academic training, perhaps an examination of the rise of the varied movements of local eating, organic growing, fair trade, and healthy food access. He could have combined this historical survey with an analysis of what these movements mean in the greater context of our increasingly globalizing food system, and concluded with how they might be woven together into a forward-thinking approach that moves us toward the “just food” he claims to care so much about. Instead, we’re left with a treatise that focuses more on taking Alice Waters and Slow Food advocates down a peg than on putting forth innovative solutions to the problems within our food system. While this might be the author’s idea of fun, it’s ultimately a childish way to make a point, and a disappointing strategy on which to hinge a book.
Comments
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Matt D Posted 3:58 pm
08 Sep 2009
As a public sector agricultural scientist: If you don't want Monsanto to be the only entity in town that's developing new crop varieties/chemicals, then stop slashing our budgets!
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Matt Petryni Posted 1:05 am
09 Sep 2009
The other, and perhaps more ridiculous claim, is the straw-man assertion that all locavores think they've "solved" the problem. I know almost no environmentalist who thinks any of the measures environmentalists are currently pursuing are a complete and perfect solution to anything. People make the mistake of assuming otherwise quite often, and think that all environmentalists actually believe the world would be utopian if everyone just did things their way. In reality, most environmentalists are reasonable people who realize the limitations of practical existence in their respective societies, and choose from within them what they see as the most viable path toward, but not necessarily to, a better world. That's an important distinction.
One other issue I take with McWilliams and others focusing on the "yield-side" end of this agricultural debate is the notion that environmentalist principles "fail to meet demand" in a presumably hungry world. This realization ignores two things: one, that we currently produce more than enough food to feed the world's people, we just distribute it poorly; and two, that demand is almost always created when supply is provided, creating a feedback cycle of ever-increasing demand. The idea that the problem with organic farming is that it simply won't be adequate to feed the world's people should, at this point, be pretty obviously absurd; especially considering we cannot continue to increase yield at the expense of food supply sustainability.
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cyberfarer Posted 12:47 pm
09 Sep 2009
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Matt D Posted 3:44 pm
09 Sep 2009
I work at a Land Grant University - a system that was set up in the 1800s to assure that farmers in each state (then a much bigger chunk of the population) would always have local access to agricultural scientists who spent their time working to breed better crop and animal varieties, solve pest and disease problems and generally apply science to every agronomic practice so that families could rise above sustenance farming. As the public left the land and lost their interest in food and agriculture, there were fewer and fewer voices calling to fund research in agriculture versus competing interests like medicine.
My public sector colleagues are THE ONLY SCIENTISTS WHO STILL WORK TO TEST AND IMPROVE ORGANIC AND LOCAL FARMING TECHNIQUES. In my university, one of the few remaining applied plant breeders continuously produces new and better forage varieties for the local (small farm) dairy industry.As funding disapears, formerly vibrant departments across the country (e.g. plant pathology, integrated pest management and plant breeding) are rapidly being combined and cancelled. I'll happily take my skill set to Monsanto if there are no public sector jobs left - but if you care about sustainability and farming (and not just silly romantic notions of what farming is), you won't paint agricultural scientists as the enemy. It's a profound sign of your ignorance that you think applied agricultural scientists (e.g. plant breeders) work in "laboratories."
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Chuck Deuce Posted 3:48 pm
09 Sep 2009
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cyberfarer Posted 4:11 pm
09 Sep 2009
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Chuck Deuce Posted 5:42 pm
09 Sep 2009
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cyberfarer Posted 7:39 pm
09 Sep 2009
trade, democratic failures, poverty, and conflict as they do with the
lack of a salt-tolerant sorghum seed." But our reviewer also misses what Raj Patel does not and that is the biggest obstacle to food, or the elephant in the room, and it is the inability to pay. It is why people starve in developing nations while food they grew is exported to sit on the shelves of Western supermarkets.An example from today's news: "Guatemalan President Alvaro Colom has declared a 'state of public
calamity' to try to mobilise funding to tackle severe food shortages in
the country ... 'There is food, what is lacking is the money for the affected people to
buy food,' Mr. Colom said. 'We are not going to wait until we've reached
starvation levels to act.'" [emphasis added]Western industrial agriculture is only concerned with deliverng excess food to those who already have too much but have the dollars to buy more. It is unconcerned with those who are hungry. That is the disconnect between the author, the Gates Foundation, scientists and others who believe feeding the hungry requires a technological solution when in reality it requires a social solution.
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Matt D Posted 7:45 pm
09 Sep 2009
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Matt Petryni Posted 9:36 pm
09 Sep 2009
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Matt D Posted 4:36 pm
10 Sep 2009
Haha, yeah well I can only hope that the average reader here is more interested in actually fixing our environmental problems than just enjoying a dogmatic echo chamber.
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Matt Petryni Posted 10:06 pm
10 Sep 2009
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cyberfarer Posted 8:44 pm
09 Sep 2009
They'd be just as happy to sell organic heriloom beets if that's what
the public wanted. It's just business."Let them prove the market wants them. Label them and the products which contain them. Then the market can decide. Why has Monsanto lobbied against labelling if the market supports their demon seeds?"Monsanto released use of all of its patents for any non-profit work in Africa."Non-profit work. How nice. Christian missionaries to help spread the seeds onto fields that didn't want them, no doubt.
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Matt D Posted 3:55 pm
10 Sep 2009
So in answer to your question:GM food isn't labelled for two reasons. First of all, it's currently impossible to track and separate different kinds of, say, corn. Farmers drive their load up to an industrial processor, where they sell it into a giant silo, where it's mixed in with all the other corn currently being sold. It would be incredibly difficult and expensive to change this. Chances are if labeling was required, everything would just end up being labelled "contains GM" because it would be cheaper to take that loss than build the physical and electronic infrastructure that would be required to track it. Straight to market farmers wouldn't be affected by this, but you already know who they are (so what's the point?). The reason why this isn't a problem is that millions and millions of dollars have been spent trying to find some real health risk associated with genetic engineering with no luck so far (I'm working on this myself). When you get down to it you can't "prove" that any food is safe. In fact, there's always a chance that your food will make you sick (e.g. green potatoes contain a poison, any mold can be poisonous, etc.). Labeling would just upset consumers unecessariy. It's no fun being on the side of "government knows best" but that's kinda part of the point of having one. People freaked out when vaccines were first proposed (picture being a mother being told to infect her child with smallpox in order to prevent him from dying!), but academic and government institutions found them to be safe and effective and encouraged the public to participate. No technology can be proven to be 100% safe, and people are still rarely harmed by vaccines today, but overall, vaccines and GM technology are good for the American public, and the government is simply doing it's job by doing it's best to advance our interests.
I think your comment about Monsanto's charity is pretty cynical. African farmers won't be able to afford any of Monsanto's product anytime soon (this isn't one of those 'first one's free' things). Monsanto gives to charity for the same reason that ALL companies do - public relations. I could care less what their motivation is. Charity is charity and millions of Africans are really hurting right now while most of the world does nothing.
Finally, saying "no doubt" just means you don't have any real idea what those farmers want. I certainly don't know what "developing world farmers" want either, but I at least have talked about it with ag scientist friends of mine who grew up in the same communities as those farmers.
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Ms. King Posted 9:57 pm
18 Sep 2009
Would you mind sharing any sources of information you have regarding Monsanto's release of patents for nonprofit purposes? This point is particularly interesting to me, as I recently composed an article on nonprofit agricultural projects in Africa. One of my primary concerns is that African farmers who plant GM seeds do not own the means to their own livelihoods. If the seeds are patent protected, spreading them in Africa does not empower local farmers, but instead increases their dependency on the West. I was not aware that Monsanto had released any patents. Any information on this topic would be greatly appreciated!
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