Edible Media takes an occasional look at interesting or deplorable food journalism.
Whatever else it has accomplished, the local-food movement has certainly conquered the appetites of New York's influential food-media editors.
Following the lead of Gourmet, glossy mags like Food & Wine and Bon Appetit now offer regular paeans to place-based eating. The New York Times Wednesday food section sometimes seems like the house organ of the city's burgeoning eat-local scene -- and often covers the topic in locales across the country as well.
As predictably as night follows day, this rise to fashionable status has inspired doubters. That's fine. Movements need criticism, including self-criticism, or they risk congealing into mindless orthodoxy. A couple of times in Victual Reality (here and here), I've addressed some high-profile critiques of eating close to home.
Now I'll look at another kind of response to eating locally -- the avuncular embrace from high-profile writers who can barely conceal their feeling that it's all just a fad. These writers patronize local food as something fun that the kids are getting up to, but don't see it as a serious movement.
I'm thinking of Adam Gopnik, staff writer of The New Yorker. I've never been a big fan of Gopnik's. Too often, he writes a kind of smart-guy-in-the-know prose: more interested in displaying his own wit and knowledge than really digging into a topic.
Gopnik's latest piece, appearing in the magazine's venerable annual food issue (currently on the shelves, dated Sept. 3/10), takes on what he calls "extreme localism" in eating. In what now feels like a very familiar narrative device, the article recounts his picaresque journey around New York City's boroughs to gather ingredients for a meal to be cooked at home for his friends. In the process, Gopnik meets some of the city's cutting edge food producers: a Brooklyn farmer (my friend Ian Marvy of Added Value), a rooftop beekeeper, a city-park forager, and a man who raises chickens in the Bronx.
It's all very charming, except that these mini-profiles lack depth. It's as if there's a tacit joke between Gopnik and his in-the-know readers: Get a load of this guy! He's growing vegetables on an asphalt playground in Brooklyn! What a character!
The trip is so entertaining that Gopnik can't resist bringing his kids along for the ride, and squeezing a bit of comedy out of them. That aspect of the story actually worked for me, because it helps Gopnik make an important point:
To shorten the food chain is to pull it close, close enough to put a face on one's food and a familiar place on one's plate. To eat something local is to meet someone nearby. We had put the city, from Brooklyn ingenuity and Bronx Zoo manure to a slaughterhouse on 168th Street, on a plate, and eaten it up. The plates had stories, where they normally have only food.
That's good stuff. But Gopnik also indulges in some high-toned philosophizing that's really pretty facile. At the end of the article, when he's telling us what we should think of his experiment in culinary localism, we get this:
There are powerful arguments against localism: apart from the inevitable statistical tussles about exactly how much fuel is used for how much food, the one word that never occurs in the evocation of the lost world of small citie and nearby farms is "famine." Our peasant ancestors, who lived locally and ate seasonally from the fruit of their ow vines and the meat of their own lambs, were hungry all the time. The localist vision of the tiny polis and it surrounding gardens has historically led to bitter conflict, not Arcadian harmony.
Fair enough. This is an important point, one often lost amid eat-local sloganeering. In its 10,000-year history, agriculture has generally meant eating locally -- and the specter of famine has always crept along at its edges, ready to pounce. Around 50 years ago, we managed to industrialize agriculture, ramp up its productivity, and smooth out its rough edges with technology.
In the West at least, famine has become an abstract thing (although people should remember that in World War II, some half million Europeans died of hunger).
But is industrial ag's triumph the end of the story, as Gopnik suggests? Not likely. Sure, industrial agriculture has made famine seem obsolete or at least distant, relegated to "developing countries" that haven't embraced artificial fertilizers, etc.
But in historical terms, industrial ag was born yesterday. In its half-century reign, chemical-intensive farming has mined the soil so thoroughly, and so steadily eroded the genetic diversity of key crops, that it may have seriously comprised its ability to produce food in the long term. To say nothing of its reliance on fossil fuel.
In short, rather than imperiling the food security of discrete villages and cities, as Gopnik accuses the "localist vision" of doing, industrial ag may be imperiling food security over a broad swath of the globe.
Of course, there's no need for either/or thinking -- the first recourse of sloganeers and facile writers. Why can't we knit revitalized local and regional food economies into the current global one -- creating a hybrid one that maximizes the benefits of localism while minimizing the threat of famine? The thought never occurs to Gopnik.
Gopnik goes on to level what he sees as a second devastating critique of eat-local: the class issue.
It is even perilously easy to construct a Veblenian explanation for the vogue for localism. Where a century ago all upwardly mobile people knew enough, and had enough resources, to get their hands on the most unseasonable foods from the most distant places, in order to distinguish themselves from the peasant past and the laboring masses, their descendants now distinguish themselves by hustling after a peasant diet.
It's so "perilously easy" to make such a critique that I did so myself two years ago. Again, Gopnik chooses to score rhetorical points rather than dig in deep. Lots of people are working hard to overcome the brutal paradoxes of local food and class. One of them in fact is Ian Marvy, Gopnik's Brooklyn farmer, whose program Added Value explicitly uses food production as a way to build wealth and skills in an economically devastated neighborhood -- and make high-quality food accessible in the process. (Here's a profile I did of Added Value a while back.)
Gopnik doesn't get into any of this. Rather, he summarizes Added Value as "socially ambitious" and leaves it at that -- and lets his own "Veblenian explanation" of local food hang there, as if no one were answering it.
In all, a disappointing performance -- an exercise in glibness over depth -- by a prominent writer in what's probably our most influential magazine.
Mark Bittman in Naples
One food writer whose work I almost always admire is Mark Bittman, author of the indispensable Minimalist column in the Wednesday New York Times.
Last week, he did a did a wonderful piece on a restaurant in Naples, Italy, a place where people eat a lot of local food without fussing much about it.
Here's how he describes La Tavernetta, a restaurant he says separates "food lovers from dining aficionados":
Professionals, laborers, families and the Old World version of ladies who lunch all sit elbow to elbow, munching on their crunchy, moist meatballs, their calamari with peas, their sausage with greens.
Sounds like paradise. I love how, in places where people really love to eat, great, moderately priced food attracts a diverse array of people. At a spectacular sausage stand in Vienna, I once saw businessmen in $2,000 suits standing elbow to elbow with construction workers. I've seen the same thing at great taquerias in Mexico City as well.
It's something I wish I saw more of here in the United States.
Peterson’s Waxman-Markey amendment: the nitty gritty and what it means
Comments
View as Flat
Biodiversivist Posted 2:32 am
03 Sep 2007
Yes, well
The difference between a fad and an institution is longevity. Is Starbucks a fad or an institution? I'm betting that the local food idea will be long-lived, passing from fad status into something more. There is something about Starbucks that appeals at the gut level, as does local cuisine.
In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Poison Darts--Protecting the biodiversity of our world
Permalink
JMG Posted 3:20 am
03 Sep 2007
Didn't Napoleon fix this?
Blaming famine on localism seems pretty dumb -- I'd guess that the people really vulnerable to famine are those who depend entirely on a long fossil-fueled supply chain to bring them their victuals.
People who grow food typically seem to know a lot about how to put food by; in the 19th C., Napoleon awarded a big prize to the guy who figured out how to can food for his armies.
It's true that a complete, air-tight localism is vulnerable to famine, because anything that disrupts the local crops would lead to a loss of food supply. But that's an argument for living beneath your means and putting some of the surplus away, not for saying that it's riskier to grow food and eat locally. It will always be riskier to live in cities and depend on distant supply chains than to live near your food sources.
(Note that, like the Irish famine in the 1840s, rural famine since industrialization is usually the result of expropriation of food more than its complete and total collapse -- since industrialization, rural folks have lost power and status and wind up starving while food is taken from rural areas to feed the cities. In Ireland, the shipments of food to England never stopped.)
Save the world: Reduce greenhouse gas emissions 5% annually.
Permalink
Tom Philpott Posted 4:06 am
03 Sep 2007
Excellent points, JMG
Another interesting facet of the Irish potato famine is its relation to crop biodiversity. In Peru, center of origin for the potato, dozens of varieties flourish to this day. It would be nearly impossible for a single disease to wipe out a significant portion of those varieties. Potatoes supported civilization there for centuries. In Ireland, the British overlords introduced only a few varieties of potatoes. Before long, a blight rose up to wipe them all out. Why didn't the Irish peasants simply eat something else grown in that famously rich soil? Because as JMG points out, the country's plentiful grain production continued getting shipped to Mother England during the famine.
A little later in the 19th century, a similar situation held forth in the Indian Raj, as Mike Davis documents in his brilliant Late Victorian Holocausts. Again, as crops failed and people starved to death by the millions, grain crops continued to make their way to England.
A century and a half later, many in the West, including people in positions of great power, are still urging people in the "developing world" to focus more on producing food for the global market than for domestic consumption.
Victual Reality
Permalink
marketfarm Posted 4:08 am
03 Sep 2007
Chafing Under the Local Yoke
For folks like me in rural America, prescriptions for a strictly local diet are an invitation to poverty and privation. Outside our all-too-brief growing season, the local diet in this area would be largely limited to beef, stored root crops, honey, and eggs... if we can find producers selling locally. We'd have to do without coffee, chocolate, seafood and citrus altogether.
And if all the farmers and ranchers in this area had to survive on sales to just the 10,000 or so folks nearby, most would go out of business or pursue some other line of work.
If we want to continue living out here, it seems we either have to grow our own crops and grind our own flours and butcher our own hogs, or endure the scorn of our privileged city cousins who think we're abusing our bodies and wasting fossil fuels and failing our local farmers.
The neighborhood farmers' market where producers sell their goods direct to the consumer is the ideal model for the local foods movement, and for good reason. When I lived in Seattle years ago, a daily visit to Pike Place Market supplied the fixings for almost every meal. The food was fresh, the producers made good money, and our fossil fuel consumption was minimal.
But not everyone can live in Seattle or central California or Florida. And not every farm can be located within an hour's drive of a busy market like Pike Place. Consumers need a wide selection of products available for purchase more than just once a week for a couple hours, and producers need a steady flow of buyers.
The imperative to "eat local" should be replaced, in my opinion, with the advice to "buy direct" whenever possible. Buying direct from the producer achieves the same benefits as buying local, but without the unrealistic geographic restrictions.
Only the farmer who grew the tomato, or who planted the corn or harvested the asparagus or raised the chicken, can tell you exactly how the food was grown. Only the farmer who sells direct to the consumer can explain how the final product was processed and brought to market.
Buying direct from the producer, whether from a subscription farm or open-air market or by mail-order, is the best way for food shoppers to ensure freshness, quality and safety in the products they buy.
Michael Hofferber Market Manager www.FarmersMarketOnline.com Buy Direct. Sell Global.
Permalink
WWAGD?! Posted 4:53 am
03 Sep 2007
Vasco Da Gamma...anyone?
What?
You're omitting the entire history of trade on land and on sea in World History?!!
What about salt...it's use in preservation so edibles could be traded!
What about the Dutch East India Company -- coffee, spices, teas!
Figs, dates, potatoes, the list goes on and on of foodstuffs that have been stored, preserved, sailed, wagon wheeled around the world!
John Bailo
Sutext:
Permalink
Maywa Montenegro Posted 5:32 am
03 Sep 2007
Feast or Famine?
More threatening than famine, it seems to me, is the epidemic of obesity. According to a report released last week, the rate of obesity rose in 31 states last year. Although a number of variables are undoubtedly to blame---including lack of exercise and overeating--my gut tells me that the industrialized chain has something to do with this. A market flooded with highly refined corn-based products, such as the 800-calorie Double Big Gulp is a greater risk to public health a this point than the specter of hunger.
Permalink
Biodiversivist Posted 5:36 am
03 Sep 2007
I think the key is to see the local
food thing as another market, not "the" market. Like Starbucks is one place to get coffee, but not "the" place to get it. The arguments for and against local are mostly philosophical, like counting angels, until someone successfully lobbies government for mandates and or subsidies. The local market, like Starbucks, relies mostly on images and feelings. Rational argument backed by science does not usually work that well with the general public in any case. And other than using government as a tool to short circuit free markets, the economic arguments are also not under our conscious control. Consensus does not exist because we don't all have the same needs and desires (fantasies).
In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Poison Darts--Protecting the biodiversity of our world
Permalink
WWAGD?! Posted 7:51 am
03 Sep 2007
Oxidation
I avoid these like the plague. I always buy 100% juice...which limits my national brand choice to Ocean Spray Grapefruit and some orange juices.
I found a good lemonade, Santa Cruz, which uses cane sugar and is yummy.
My pet theory is the the high levels of CO2 in many areas prevents ideal oxidation for the human body, which is contributing to the fat problem.
John Bailo
Sutext:
Permalink
Bart Anderson Posted 8:42 am
03 Sep 2007
The worm turns
John Bailo writes:
Look at the foods you've cited, John. They are all high-value, low-weight foods that were luxuries in their time. As food gets more expensive to ship, I think we will see a return to that pattern of a few expensive luxuries, but with the bulk of food produced and consumed locally. Grains and pulses may be an exception, since they are suited for storage and long distance transportation.Michael Hofferber wrote:
I think you under-estimate the ingenuity and resilience of rural people, Michael. If you look at the popular culture of the 19th century, people were bowled over by the abundance and variety of food available to farmers in America.I was moved by an essay by Angelo Pellegrini, an Italian immigrant to Washington state at the turn of the century. Coming from peasant poverty, his eyes popped at the quantity and richness of the food. He was shocked at what people threw away.
(If you don't know who Angelo is, you cannot call yourself a real foodie! Read this this profile of Angelo from the NY Times archives.)
My wife's father grew up on a farm in rural Kansas, without electricity or running water. Even as a successful businessman, with access to all that the market had to offer, he still dreamed of his mother's strawberry preserves and angel food cake, cooked on a wood-burning stove.
The real reason that rural people turned away from their own local food was cost and convenience. Food became dirt cheap after the War, so why spend the time on it when you could buy Wonderbread and canned goods at the store? Also, there was the horrible snobbery against homegrown food and rural life in general -- aided and abetted by advertising.
The tide is turning -- food costs are going up, and those once-despised traditions of local food are now chic. About time!
Bart
Energy Bulletin
Permalink
JMG Posted 11:57 am
03 Sep 2007
Maybe you live in a place you shouldn't
There was a comic who got a lot of mileage a while back by talking about the famines in desolate places in Africa and then saying "MOVE! You live in a desert where nothing grows!"
If you truly can't live in your bioregion without bringing in the bulk of your foods from other bioregions, maybe you shouldn't live there. (I know, sacrilege to suggest that maybe, just maybe, Americans might have to work with nature's limits rather than just using energy to obliterate them.)
We're seeing Katrinas in slow motions with draughts and fires here in the US; eventually we may even get a clue and realize that the idea of making the middle of the country a depopulated, mechanized petrofarming plantation is not going to work--we need a lot more people growing food on the coasts and a lot less sprawl and marketing executives.
Save the world: Reduce greenhouse gas emissions 5% annually.
Permalink
gmunger Posted 2:30 am
04 Sep 2007
The Idea of a Local Econoomy
While JMG is correct to point out that, in many locales, we must learn or at least relearn how to live properly within the parameters of what the land can sustainably offer, I think we should also consider the idea that healthy rural communities have value which has been underappreciated. Perhaps our farmer friend would not have to rely so heavily on selling his product outside his rural community, and purchasing so much of his needs from "outside", if his rural community was more self-sustaining. The deterioration of our rural communities, such as they are, was not an inevitable process, as the lords of Chicago School economics would have us believe. Instead the withering of small-town America was the result of economic "policies" handed down from the seats of power, sold as a bill of goods by Madison Avenue, and swallowed as bitter medicine, even by the victims themselves.
I'll share an essay by Wendell Berry, which speaks to the ideas in this thread very well, I believe.
Permalink
SnoDragon Posted 12:39 pm
04 Sep 2007
Local based on locality
I don't think anyone is suggesting that people live solely off of locally-produced food. As a resident of the Upper Midwest, where 6 month winters often prevail, I understand that in January, a local-only diet would be relegated solely to frozen, dried, and canned goods. Which would suck somewhat.
At the same time, there is much to be said for eating locally. Different regions of the U.S. have different growing seasons and different climates (duh), so this means that different varieties of crops must be grown to accomodate the climate distinctions. So instead of only Red Delicious apples (P.S. Ewww), we could have hundreds of varieties of apples, each hardy and disease-resistant to their own area. Like the example of the Irish potato famine, genetically similar mono-crops are susceptible to disease. Whereas eating locally encourages biodiversity and food security.
Another important point about eating local is quality of food. When you buy a tomato from the farmer's market in July from a farmer who lives 10 miles away and who picked it that morning, that tomato is pretty damn ripe. That means it probably has a higher nutritional content. And it tastes better too. Supermarket produce is picked before it's ripe because of how long it has to travel/wait before it reaches the shelves. And it's bred to travel well, which ususally does nothing for the taste quotient. Nor for the nutritional content.
I hope I live to see the day where people subsist primarily on local and regional foods, visiting the grocery store only to buy foods that are impossible to grow locally. For us it would be primarily tropical and mediterranean fruits like oranges, banannas, or figs, and maybe seafood or exotic cheeses and spices. In other words, non-essential, but yummy foods.
And don't give me that class-gap, luxury food crap. Fruits and vegetables are currently "luxury" foods to thousands of Americans who can't afford them. Locally produced food could help change that.
Eating local has a rich history (heirloom produce, anyone?) and is rooted in our cultural traditions. I don't think it's just a passing fad. Fads are usually flawed on a basic level (the Atkin's diet, anyone?) and therefore can't last. Locally produced food is anything but.
Permalink