As much as I personally support it, the buy local campaign does not work for two main reasons:

1) They do not have enough money for snazzy TV commercials.
2)Where IS local to a mega urban center with 20 million people?

That, in my opinion, is the problem. Anyone else?

Small food producers selling local are having a lot of success, as near as I can tell, but you'd never know it, because as atreyger says, they don't have gazillions of dollars to pat themselves on the back on television.

That doesn't mean the buy local movement isn't working, it just isn't working on a vast national scale.

"Small is beautiful"...but it's harder to see.

Surely it's not that difficult - does there need to be a precise definition of local? Isn't it enough to know where your food is from and to realize that food that was grown/produced closer to home is probably fresher, better tasting, and less environmentally destructive given the shorter distance to travel to your plate?

In Manhattan, "local" could be the Hudson Valley, or NY State, or the Tri-state region, or New England or.....  but why argue over it, when it is pretty obvious that a red pepper from Long Island is more local than one from Holland?  Russet potatoes from Oneida are closer than those from British Columbia...even Florida oranges are closer than California oranges.

The real difficulty is that most stores don't tell you where the food is from so you have to rely on the sticky labels on fruit or on brands of bagged veggies, or on asking the grocer.  I always appreciate stores & farmer's markets that label items as "local" or even better, simply tell me exactly what farm and where it came from.

Subsidies help no one, even when in the good sectors. The market should work itself out and if we want the market to sell local food, we have to market local as being better.

You are absolutely right, Tom, about how there are lots of opportunities for small local agriculture to feed us in the cities.  But I think if I understand aright, reading between the lines, David Kamp's review of Michael Pollan's book, what he is appealing for is not so much a huge, government-promoted structure, as a practical system that can be more widely encouraged and taught.

It puzzles me, how much Angst, how much Sturm und Drang, there is, here and in one or two other recent Grist threads, over personal action, local action, vs. something more macroscopic, systemic, institutionalized.  I think we have to commit ourselves to both levels, given human nature, and refrain from condemning either the one or the other.

Kaela/kmp is right (as she always is): It should not be difficult to get people to be more energy-efficient, etc.  What we need, though, is leadership.  I think many Americans really want to be environmentally constructive, really want to make their acts of eating, traveling, living, as environmentally helpful as they can.  (OK, I almost wrote "most Americans," but some cynicism is in order: I have no way of explaining the besotted love of McDonald's, McMansions and SUVs.)  But we need to be shown how.  We need all you environmental-studies majors to take the lead, and make it easy and straight-forward for us to follow a decent plan.

E.g.: Regarding eating locally: Pollan's book is useful on how to go about researching where our food comes from.  Not only is that not easy to do, but it must be emphasized that it is not easy to do.  The food industry is disgracefully opaque.  There is a serious, urgent need to have experts do this kind of research for us.  I would really love it if here in NYC there were a Food Police Force -- oh, I guess that is not a good name, a bit too Nazional-Sozialistisch -- ; how about, Food Ambassadors? -- OK, needs work, work in progress, please return to the tour; let us just get back to the concept: a system of friendly (!; muy importante!) advisers to restaurant-owners and food-store owners.  In a completely unthreatening way (!; eso tambien es muy importante), owners should be encouraged to make available right up front where their food comes from.  How nice it would be, if fruits and vegetables could be labeled clearly, "From the Tri-State Area."

(See also, in general, an interesting little piece by Paul Rauber in the May/June Sierra, on the work of Richard Pirog and the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University.  They compare fuel costs to transport fruits and vegetables from different producers to Des Moines.  The Hawaiian pineapplists will not like the results, but the Chilen~o grape-ists should be encouraged.)

True, I would have to send in the goons against restaurateurs who perversely continue to serve swordfish.

On Joel Salatin: A real freak-o-saurus, but that should be recognized as totally irrelevant.  He obviously is doing excellent work in his neighborhood in Virginia and DC.  I would love to see the little avian dinosaurs pecking in the artiodactyl poop.

That said, "Why do we have to have a New York City?  What good is it?," does little to endear Farmer Joel to me.  One wonders, who is he doing it all for?  As old Aristotle teaches -- he does not always get it right, but here I think he does -- , we are beings who are at our best when we live in cities (i.e., "zoa politika").  I strongly disbelieve any backwoods environmentalist rhetoric to the effect that cities are a blight.  Yes indeed, MODERN cities are a blight.  But the concept of the city, going back to 3000 BCE at least, in Iraq of all places -- what goes around comes around -- does not have to be like that.  "Civilization," the art of being urban, requires a division of labor.  It is good for us to know where our food comes from, but really, we do not need to follow the morally wobbly Mr. Pollan and shoot dead our own pig.

Highly recommended: Annie Proulx's "Close Range: Wyoming Stories," of which the last, the now well-known "Brokeback Mountain," is just one of this amazingly powerful writer's masterpieces.  See how impoverished, truly, these people are, in her stories.  These people, out in smallest-town rural Wyoming, have no civilization; and so they become monsters; they terrorize one another.

Tom is right on and if you check the links you'll find more excellent information about creating a sustainable food system, which is not only possible but essential. That said, one thing that hasn't been brought up yet is the concept of feedback loops. Local/regional food networks have a relatively short feedback loop. If something goes wrong, if changes need to be made, you find it out much sooner than when the feedback loop is global. You can think what you want about Mark Salatin, but when you know where your food is going (and where it came from) then you practically eliminate things like hoof and mouth disease epidemics, mad cow, maybe even avian flu, who knows?

The thing to do is to replicate the models that work in cities and towns everywhere and network them together. Eventually we'll have  wonderful web of sustainable food options all around the country. National but local at the same time.

What in the world is a "feedback loop"?

Here is a very curious sentence indeed: "Local/regional food networks have a relatively short feedback loop."

I am sure the author of that sentence knows what he/she is talking about, and I am sure that is just the sort of person that we can trust with making all sorts of important decisions about our future.

But really, you cannot expect liberal-artsy slug-a-beds like me to be able to keep up with such jargon, n'est-ce pas?

It's like when the sound sytstem screeches at the Karioke bar.  Hehehey.

Does that help?  The local food/consumer network screeches when something goes wrong.

Leaving the urbanites to wallow in their own mess of mega-corruption.  Eating mad cows, avian flu chickens, and chemically contaminated food.  All covered up by lobbyist bribery to ensure industry "self-regulation".

Get cancer?  Take the treatment.  Payed for by corpoprate/government health insurance.

"I strongly disbelieve any backwoods environmentalist rhetoric to the effect that cities are a blight."

Actually we "backwoods" reactionaries like the fact that cities keep the vast majority of humans out of our natural areas.  Let 'em enjoy their sophistication.  I myself am not above visiting the blight ocasionally.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog

"...he wants Pollan -- or Salatin, or the Justice Department -- to come up with a grand, sweeping solution to the environmental, social, and public-health disasters being wrought by our food-production system."

Well it seems as if Salatin has discovered the solution, cut out the middlemen, market directly.

The the skyrocketing prices and profits for everything at "Whole Paycheck" (Whole Foods) rocket into the small farmer's pocket (is that a rocket in your pocket or...).  And then just maybe the prices will not be quite as astronomical?

But if you want a large scale solution, one that can bring organic farming up to the efficiency of agribizz farming, with square miles of grain, ftuit, and vegetables  organically produced, without below minimum wage illegal labor practices,without chemical fertilizer, pesticides, herbicides, and genetically modified crops resistant to ever stronger herbicides (in response to ever more herbicide resistant weeds)?

I have it!  But if I simply tell you what it is, you will ignore it.  On the other hand, if I use it to actually produce food and keep it mysterious, then the media will seek it out and publicize it.

Do you see how Salatin is using mystery by acting slightly cranky?  Without mystery the culture of systematic boredome moves on past any proposed solutions.  You will reply that Salatin writing books really exposes ideas to the mass media culture?  Nope.

Hardly anyone reads books, hardly anyone even reads the New York Times book reviews.

Now to detail that grand solution....maybe some other time.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog

Here is a very curious sentence indeed: "Local/regional food networks have a relatively short feedback loop."

----------------------------

I think maybe SML was referring to the capacity for a local system to respond to consumer demand/sentiment in a way that the global system cannot (do people really want all that crap that it sold, or do we buy it because it's there and we have to eat?).  Also, the whole animal disease issue could easily be remied if things remained at a small local scale; in fact, I would argue that most of the "epidemic" scale diseases we see are only caused by large-scale monoculture of livestock.

That said, I think it's worth looking at a bit more:
My take on this is three-fold.

Economic/Money.  When an individual purchases an item from a local farmer, that farmer then spends that money in the community buying items for the farm and/or various goods to support her/his life and thius enriches the community where the original individual lives.  The problem comes when the farmer only shops at Walmart, Target, online, etc.

Ecologic/Nutrients.  When that same individual purchases some produce and eats it, their waste is  put into the local soil/water which is later used to grow crops.  Also, the individual can take back scraps to be composted.

Social.  When the farmer sells to their neighbors, s/he has more motivation to produce quality and not just quantity.  S/he also is more likely to take care of the land that is helplessly connected to the greater bioregion and is more likely to create an aesthetically pleasing (read: diverse) farmscape.  Further, meeting people over food is a good way to create community networks that aren't just limited to one issue.

These examples are obviously too simple to characterize the complex and diverse local food networks Tom is talking about (and which we need), but I think they are useful nonetheless.

The social scale of the problem is huge. Small is beautiful yes, but seems a scale of refuge for the few - admittance a function of education and  entitlement that is usually the province of the priveledged.

What is being proposed and discussed in the works and comments is nothing short of rejiggering the relations of production - can you spell commiepinkoliberalsocialist?

The US and the world are in the midst of dramatic global monetary reorganisation. The risk of currency collapse is very high right now due to a worldwide 'liquidity bubble'. Standards of living in the US are due for a "correction"(I won't say lowering although the measurement of our qulaity of life will be less dependent on material indices-a change for the best!).

Enviromentalists should heed the economic signals and fashion a mainstream view that can put the coming changes into a positive context
 - part time work for everyone who wants a job.
 - Full time work for everyone who needs the workout.
 - access to fresh air, water and open space
 - time to spend with freinds and loved ones

We are humans from earth. We live for adventure, art, music, rythmic dancing, philosophy, passion, fishing hunting and gathering. That hummer looks stupid!! Get a life!!!

SJR

Sorry, SJR, I don't like rhythmic dancing; I guess we'll need to tweak that plan a bit.

Thanks, Cow, I actually slapped myself awake and made some sense out of points 1 and 2.  Bravo.  Point 3 I certainly sympathize with, but it strikes me as a bit of a reach on your end.

To SJR (Sisters of Jesus in Religion?): I can indeed spell "commiepinkoliberalsocialist," but why would I want to?  Why would I want to mess up further an already quite complicated language?  And anyway, the four groups so unhappily smooshed together were/are all after basically admirable ends.

And thanks, Amazing, you are amazing.  This '67 pick-up on blocks that I got on my lawn I've been meaning to ask you to come by and look at.  I mean it's good, it's really good.  It's a Chevy.  And it's galaxy-blue; hard to match that color nowadays.  : )  : )  : )

OK OK OK.  Je t'adore, cheri.  And it was not I who used the word "reactionary."  Clearly you are the "leader of the pack."  Vroom vroom.

On Karaoke:  I rehearsed at home, foolhardily, to do Patsy Kline's "Crazy."  The register was OK at home, plus I OK'd with the Disc-Jockette to turn the register lower a bit anyway.  But: Madame la D-J always loved all that love pouring over her when she did her pseudo-Celine "That's the Way It Is," as she always did every Karaoke Night, and was notoriously jealous.  I had had a great success on an earlier occasion with Patsy's "I go out walking / after midnight / out in the moonlight / ju-ust hoping you might be," etc.  (Never mind just what kind of success.)  But this time Madame la D-J torpedoed me royally, she reduced me to trash, however well-meaning, so that my Karaoke career is quite over.  Sophisticated and elegant young men used to make sure my glass was full all evening, with Champagne, with Diet Coke, with whatever; but that is all over now, thanks to HER.

Even now, I cannot hear Celine Dion, without my blood pressure rising dangerously high.

I had a '67.  Those darn trailing arm bolts kept a lossinen on me.  So I took the rubber from a couple of busted motor mounts and bolted it between the arm and the axle.  Fixed 'er right up.

On second thought, you know urbanites could grow their own food too.  No need for us bumpkins to be acting all high and mighty.

You're more amazing than me.  Galaxy blue.  

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog

caniscandida, your commentary was interesting, but I have some issues with your final paragraph, wherein you say of the inhabitants of small towns in Wyoming that they "...have no civilization; and so they become monsters; they terrorize each other."
      I would argue that you will find at least as many uncivilized monsters who terrorize each other in our decaying big cities as you would in the mountains of Wyoming. As a person who lives in a rural area, I can testify that we are not all narrow-minded troglodytes.  I won't deny that some rsmall rural communities can be intolerant and xenophobic,  but by the same token, not every city-dweller is well-educated, broad-minded, and, well, civilized.  Let's not get into unnecesary stereotypes, please.

Hello, Storm, you are referring to the last paragraph of the long post titled "leadership."  Thanks for asking; I was rather wondering if anyone might mistake those words for an anti-rural slur, as you have.

So I am glad to be given the chance to explain: I was not describing reality, necessarily; I was describing the impression given of at least some people who live in Wyoming, by the fiction writer Annie Proulx.  She herself lives there, so presumably knows the place well, and does not write out of prejudice or contempt.

Read a couple of those stories, and you will see what I mean.  The most famous of them, "Brokeback Mountain," is perhaps not the clearest example in fact, because that at least is the story of an obviously true love, in itself the high point in the lives of the lovers.  But even there, the character Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger in the movie) is a person warped into a basic unfriendliness, a mistrustfulness, on account of how he was raised in that unfriendly, mistrustful, ill-educated, socially impoverished environment.  The other stories are probably clearer, because the sexuality is straight: these characters are so many of them yearning for love, yearning to connect, and yet cannot help but be brutal and horrifying when they go groping for what they desire.

But that is the fiction of Annie Proulx.  I lived briefly in small towns in Montana, in places which rather resembled the Wyoming places in "Brokeback Mountain," and I well know that most of the people are friendly and courteous and no less civilized than are people in a city.  Sorry if I seemed to be showing disrespect to such lovely people as they.

And for that matter, I entirely agree that cities have produced their share of monsters.  The kind of moral impoverishment that Proulx discovers in small-town Wyoming is certainly not found only there.  But in the context of that earlier post of mine, I was responding, in a rather philosophical, urbane Aristotelian mood, to the anti-urban sentiment that apparently the celebrated Virginia farmer Joel Salatin feels.