New York Times food reporter Kim Severson has declared a new trend: "lazy locavores," people who want to "eat close to home" but are too time-strapped (or lazy) to put much effort into it.
According to Severson, "a new breed of business owner" has arisen to cater to their whims. She opens her piece with a San Francisco entrepreneur who "will build an organic garden in your backyard, weed it weekly and even harvest the bounty, gently placing a box of vegetables on the back porch when he leaves."
Wow, outsourced home gardens -- that is pretty lazy. The question, though, is whether Severson has actually discovered a trend, or merely manufactured one on deadline -- the notorious vice of NYT style writers. The answer, I think, is a little bit of both.
At its best, the sustainable/local food movement challenges the industrial-food paradigm that draws a bright line between food consumers and producers. In the industrial model, a very few people produce food (i.e., farmers, processors, cooks, etc.) and everyone else consumes it, more or less passively.
Through most of human history, production and consumption were pretty closely intertwined. Most people farmed, and even city and village dwellers kept a garden patch (and even livestock) that supplied significant calories. Nearly every household cooked its own meals -- the modern restaurant arose in the 19th century, frequented by a very narrow group of wealthy folks.
To industrialize food production, we've basically relied on fossil energy to release the great majority of people in industrialized societies from food production. In the process, we've allowed the food industry to externalize massive environmental and social messes.
Now, with fossil energy looking scarce and climate change evidently in full swing, it's surely time to reconsider the industrial model.
As far back as 1977, Wendell Berry in his seminal Unsettling of America was denouncing the consumer/producer divide. "The responsible consumer must also be in some way a producer," he declared -- that is, take more responsibility in the kitchen and the garden for food production, get to know and support the farmers in one's region, etc.
In his 2007 book Slow Food Nation, Slow Food International director Carlo Petrini took up that theme, and even coined a new word: "co-producer." According to Petrini, co-producers take an active role in producing the food they consume -- again by cooking, gardening, learning about the food system, and actively supporting the farmers in their "foodshed."
All of this leads us back to Severson and her rent-a-gardener -- the guy who moves around the Bay Area tending and harvesting the vegetable patches of the rich (presumably handing the produce over to personal chefs to whip into culinary delights).
Nothing against the gardener himself. I give props to anyone, in this day and age, who's figured out how to scratch a living out of the land.
But surely the roving gardener's clients aren't challenging the production/consumption divide, or rethinking their place within it. Rather, they seem to be viewing "local food" as an opportunity for ever-more rarefied and status-laden consumption.
This is the same idea I was trying to get at in my recent speech at the Organic Summit -- that the sustainable food-movement may be losing its ability to inspire people to think about their consumption, and instead merely giving them license to consume mindlessly, so long as they buy products with certain marketing labels attached ("organic," "local," etc.)
Outsourcing one's veggie garden seems like a prime example of this hyper-consumerist take on local food.
But most of Severson's other "lazy locavore" examples seem forced. For example:
A share in a cow raised in a nearby field can be brought to you, ready for the freezer -- a phenomenon dubbed cow pooling. There is pork pooling as well. At Sugar Mountain Farm in Vermont, the demand for a half or whole rare-breed pig is so great that people will not be seeing pork until the late fall.
Wait a minute. The practice of buying share in a cow or pig actually represents a major commitment on the part of the consumer.
Small-scale livestock farmers often struggle to find markets for the so-called "off cuts" -- essentially, everything that's not a quick-cooking steak or pork chop. By selling whole animals to groups of consumers, farmers solve that problem.
And the consumer, in turn, is confronted with a freezer full of not just steaks and chops but also stuff like pork belly, beef shank, shoulder roasts -- cuts that take skill and knowledge to turn into delicious food.
Near the end of the article, the famed novelist and homesteader Barbara Kingsolver tells Severson:
As a person of rural origin who has lived much of my life in rural places ... I can't tell you how joyful it makes me to hear that it's trendy for people in Manhattan to own a part of a cow.
I couldn't agree more. There's nothing lazy about that kind of locavorism. Severson is onto something, but she didn't quite nail it in this piece.
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Comments
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PermieWriter Posted 3:01 am
24 Jul 2008
Eat what you grow, grow what you eat
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Delay And Deny Posted 3:50 am
24 Jul 2008
We need to re-agrarianize the American family -- falling real estate will help.
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Bart Anderson Posted 4:55 am
24 Jul 2008
Careful not to be sucked into this bogus framing of the issue from Kim Severson. Think about it, should one really listen to NY Times, that bastion of ostentatious consumerism, when they begin to lecture about self-sufficiency?
This is a non-issue, framed with faux-populism.
Anyone who has gardened knows how labor-intensive it is. Some people like to do it as a hobby, others don't. Still others do not have the time. Nowhere is it written that you must garden yourself. This is why we invented the division of labor, so that we can specialize in what we do best.
Is it not a good thing to support local organic gardeners? Is it not a good thing to encourage vegetable gardens?
In the past it was very common for people who could afford it to pay gardeners to raise fruit and vegetables for the household. Yes, this can be a status thing, but isn't raising vegetables a great way to harness the propensity for status seeking?
Severson seems to be on an anti-local kick this week. See her article yesterday criticizing the Slow Food movement: Slow Food Savors Its Big Moment
Bart
Energy Bulletin
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sindark Posted 6:41 am
24 Jul 2008
Middlemen who make local food available to those dependent on bikes and public transport thus play a valuable role.
a sibilant intake of breath
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Rainbow Posted 7:56 am
24 Jul 2008
Rainbow
"Setting an example is not the main means of influencing another, it is the only means." Albert Einstein
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Rainbow Posted 7:59 am
24 Jul 2008
Rainbow
"Setting an example is not the main means of influencing another, it is the only means." Albert Einstein
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katakanadian Posted 1:50 pm
24 Jul 2008
I am skeptical that that these services are anything more than greenwashing unless they have a strict policy of only taking clients within biking distance of their base.
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TheJewAndTheCarrot Posted 12:50 am
25 Jul 2008
http://jcarrot.org/has-locavore-jumped-the-sustainably-ra ...
Leah
The Jew & The Carrot
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Tauger Posted 2:37 am
25 Jul 2008
As far as buying half a cow or pig, it's nothing new. My parents did that all the time when we were growing up. It's also very common in Germany. The author's astonishment at such a practice only underlines their ignorance of food production.
Tom, saying that "But surely the roving gardener's clients aren't challenging the production/consumption divide.........." ignores the reality of many people's lives. In the end, local food is local food, even if the growing of it is "outsourced".
Why the need to attack such people?
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Bart Anderson Posted 4:28 am
25 Jul 2008
I think we are in the midst of culture wars, and NYT journalist Kim Severson seems to have a chip on her shoulder about the eat-local movement. Rather than attack it directly, she is concentrating on irrelevant issues.
The Wall Street Journal just published a less tendentious article on the same subject:
The Vegetable Patch Goes Luxe by Ellen Gamerman.
One thing to keep in mind is that food trends seem to start at the top. The US/European elite until recently went in for white bread, meat and fatty foods. So, when industrial agriculture made it possible, all the other classes followed them.
The move to organics and local food came first from the idealistic-hippie movements. The elite have picked it up, and gradually the ideas are spreading throughout society.
Fortunately, healthy organic food is within the reach of most people. You just have to be willing to shop around for inexpensive healthy food, or have a garden (or know someone who does). And you've got to be willing to put the effort into preparing the food (get some good knives).
Example. Instead of buying processed breakfast cereal, buy bulk organic rolled oats. Cook or eat raw. I prefer rolled oats soaked in water/milk with yogurt on top. Add raisins, fruit or nuts. Heavenly.
Bart
Energy Bulletin
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sculpin Posted 5:55 am
25 Jul 2008
I don't think I'm particularly interested in rarefied consumption. (If I were, I'd probably have a better haircut.) I just wanted some vegetables from my front yard, and I wanted them relatively painlessly.
I have no complaints, by the way. SUFCo built two extraordinarily good-looking raised beds, installed some drip lines, and planted fall crops, including some that I'd never thought of growing but which worked out beautifully. They did a little bit of maintenance before I took that on entirely. They also built a chicken coop with my husband and me, which now houses three charming pullets.
The SUFCo folks were almost as much gardening tutors/consultants for us as they were gardeners; they were generous with their knowledge, and we took as much advantage of that as we could. Several months later, when my hip had mostly healed, I was able to take a lot of what I'd learned and put in five more raised beds along the same lines. Now some of our neighbors are copying that bed design, too.
Colin of SUFCo once mentioned to me a dream of having maintenance gardeners on bicycles with trailers full of tools, pedaling from garden to garden. Sounds pretty neat to me.
From what I heard, I was a pretty normal customer of those guys. It would be interesting to see how many customers of such gardeners are full-blown yuppies who aren't at all "rethinking their place in the production/consumption divide", and how many just needed some help getting off the ground. I could rethink things just fine, thanks. It was the actual shovelwork that was giving me a hard time.
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MAD MAC Posted 11:01 pm
25 Jul 2008
when I was in the Army I worked long hours, and had neither the time nor energy to do meaningful food preparation at home. When I was in the field, obviously I didn't even get to decide what to eat.
Sometimes the whole organic movement just isn't realistic about feasible options.
Victory in Pattani
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