7 ms·

While "food miles" may not be the overriding concern of most locovores, it certainly seems to be the favored argument they use most often to justify various act

by evgen 16y ago

While "food miles" may not be the overriding concern of most locovores, it certainly seems to be the favored argument they use most often to justify various actions and decisions; of the various concerns you listed energy conservation is the one that is easiest to try to quantify. Since this particular point is one that will, by definition, almost always be won by the locovore side they tend to drag it out more often than they should (especially because it is a point they subsequently lose on when the bigger picture is examined.) Personally, I think locovorism is way past the point of no return in terms being nothing more than a means for yuppies to distinguish themselves from the hoi polloi. Once you could get organic veggies at Wal-Mart they needed St. Pollan to give them a new rallying point. I live in the bay area and from the vantage-point of this mild climate it is very easy to enjoy local seasonal food with almost no inconvenience to my lifestyle. I grew up on the midwest on one of those small farms you praise (back before shipping arugala around the world for my local salad bar was common or even possible) and I can tell you with certainty that seasonal cuisine in that climate really sucks.

patio11 16y ago
Once you could get organic veggies at Wal-Mart they needed St. Pollan to give them a new rallying point. Highlighted for emphasis. Virtually every trend in marketing food to the middle class is "Don't eat that. Poor people eat that. You don't want to eat like a poor person, do you?" The big picture reasoning for that is here: http://www.ers.usda.gov/AmberWaves/September08/Findings/Charts/Findings2_fig02.gif http://www.ers.usda.gov/AmberWaves/September08/Findings/Char... The dollar cost of the inputs to what might be called "traditional food" is cratering, due almost entirely to technological improvements. A 2010 tomato resembles a 1970 tomato, but costs much less. If you ate like someone in the 1970s ate, you would spend much less of your total income on food than they did. That would be a very negative outcome for some players in the food industry. Hence, trying to tell you that your 2010 tomato is not really the same tomato as that 1970 tomato your mother used to make pasta sauce with. It is a magic poisoned GMO tomato. Your mother, if she was still making you pasta sauces, would certainly be using good natural organic local tomatoes. Since your mother doesn't still make you pasta sauces, you can pick up a morally appropriate pasta sauce at Trader Joes for a mere five times the price of the same ingredients with a different label at WalMart. (The change in who cooks and how much is the story behind the story of American food consumption in the last two generations.)
- tptacek 16y ago
  "GMO" is a red herring. When it comes to produce, the problem isn't that it's mass-produced and it isn't that it's mutated with secret Monsanto DNA. The problem is that huge companies have conditioned the market to believe that tomatoes are something you get in the bin 15 steps forward and 5 steps sideways from the entrance to the supermarket, in the big bin labeled "vine-ripened tomatoes", when in fact tomatoes don't work that way, and anything you put in a bin labeled like that must, by necessity because of the way supply chains work, be a fake wax replica of a tomato even when good tomatoes are available. The problem is not that poor people eat tomatoes. The Fresh Markets supermarket 3 blocks north of me serves a solidly lower-lower class market (I live next to Austin, one of the poorest neighborhoods in Chicago, a "food desert") has better produce than Whole Foods does. Poor people, particularly Hispanic poor people, do veg really well. The problem is that the Del Monte's of the world are replacing real tomatoes with fake tomatoes. That is bad. It's not a class warfare issue.
  - kragen 16y ago
    You're living in a fantasy world. No city in the US is so corrupt as to allow a large supermarket to sell globs of paraffin and beeswax as "tomatoes." Those are actual tomatoes. If you have a real criticism of them, your hyperbole or delusion seriously undermines it, and you neglected to state it.
    - tptacek 16y ago
      They're not made of wax. They don't even contain wax. They just taste that way. Sorry I didn't make that clearer to you.
      - kragen 16y ago
        Is your complaint that they taste bad because they're out of season? Maybe you could be a little clearer still; the connection you're claiming between the labeling of the bin and the flavor of the tomatoes remains obscure.
tptacek 16y ago
If the point of this discussion is to stigmatize and ridicule the orthodoxy of "locavorism", I'm on board. If the point is to ridicule Michael Pollan and Alice Waters, to highlight the fact that the model of production they talk about is a luxury item for the rich and utterly untenable for most of society, I'm even on board with that. But if the point is to make the argument that there is little benefit to seasonal cooking or small-farm animal husbandry, you lose me completely. There clearly is a benefit: * Out-of-season vegetables are very often of lower quality than canned; the obvious example is tomatoes, but you're also not going to eat a ramp in December, or a high-quality parsnip in May, or a Vidalia in the fall. * The consumer embrace of faux-fresh off-season veg actually is a bad thing; it pushes out producers who make real veg in favor of people who are selling wax veg year-round; people are still buying wax tomatoes in July. * Alienation from seasonal cooking results in home cooks who, like me, had never tasted a ramp or a morel or a vidalia or even a real tomato; seasonal cooking is vector towards good cooking, and one thing that I think is hard to argue is that America needs more and better home cooks. * Supermarket meat is a bona fide debacle. There's universal agreement that we've managed to breed flavor and health out of pigs almost entirely. Industrial chicken is epsilon away from being grown in vats instead of farms. Beef is being treated with ammonia before grinding (the trend towards buying meat not only pre-ground but pre-shaped is another pathology). * "Local meat" is in some cases actually cheaper than the supermarket crap; you have to make a lifestyle concession to get access to those prices (ie, you have to have a $150 chest freezer, and you have to be willing to actually cook), but high-quality pig and beef is not out of the reach of a lower-middle-class homeowner. * I live in the midwest. I'm not a fan of St. Pollan[1], but there are some restaurant owners here that I do admire and who make a point of sticking to midwest-seasonal. I take exception to the idea that it "really sucks". We should meet in the middle. In the colder climes, we should be shipping in "accent" products from the west coast to liven things up, but there's plenty of regional produce that can and should form the staple. Right now, we're at the other extreme: most people in Chicago are happy to eat a caprese with gassed-red wax tomatoes and mutant basil and kraft mozzeralla in the middle of January. * And don't get me started on our access to cheese here. [1] Although I like his writing about plants. He's a great garden writer.
- patio11 16y ago
  Industrial chicken is epsilon away from being grown in vats instead of farms. Great line. (Apropos of nothing: when vat-grown meat arrives, I will be there on day one, eating it off the freaking petri dish if they'll let me.)
sethg 16y ago
So “food-miles” is like “lines of code”—a way to substitute a half-assed metric for actual thought?
- tptacek 16y ago
  Both bear approximately the same relationship to reality. Klocs don't mean nothing; they're just a very inaccurate measurement.
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
- lotharbot 16y ago
  Something like that. From what I understand, food-miles is being used as a proxy for carbon output (and associated pollution), under the assumption that it takes fuel to move things, so food that travels a long way must use a lot of fuel. A much more direct measurement of carbon output is "food cost", since the fuel used to move the food -- as well as the energy used to grow the food -- has to be paid for, and the people bringing the food to you price it high enough to cover those costs. It turns out, shipping food thousands of miles by train or barge doesn't use much energy relative to the amount of food shipped; as the article mentioned, most of the energy usage comes from the consumer, not the grower or shipper.

by evgen 16y ago

patio11 16y ago

Once you could get organic veggies at Wal-Mart they needed St. Pollan to give them a new rallying point. Highlighted for emphasis. Virtually every trend in marketing food to the middle class is "Don't eat that. Poor people eat that. You don't want to eat like a poor person, do you?" The big picture reasoning for that is here: http://www.ers.usda.gov/AmberWaves/September08/Findings/Charts/Findings2_fig02.gif http://www.ers.usda.gov/AmberWaves/September08/Findings/Char... The dollar cost of the inputs to what might be called "traditional food" is cratering, due almost entirely to technological improvements. A 2010 tomato resembles a 1970 tomato, but costs much less. If you ate like someone in the 1970s ate, you would spend much less of your total income on food than they did. That would be a very negative outcome for some players in the food industry. Hence, trying to tell you that your 2010 tomato is not really the same tomato as that 1970 tomato your mother used to make pasta sauce with. It is a magic poisoned GMO tomato. Your mother, if she was still making you pasta sauces, would certainly be using good natural organic local tomatoes. Since your mother doesn't still make you pasta sauces, you can pick up a morally appropriate pasta sauce at Trader Joes for a mere five times the price of the same ingredients with a different label at WalMart. (The change in who cooks and how much is the story behind the story of American food consumption in the last two generations.)

tptacek 16y ago
"GMO" is a red herring. When it comes to produce, the problem isn't that it's mass-produced and it isn't that it's mutated with secret Monsanto DNA. The problem is that huge companies have conditioned the market to believe that tomatoes are something you get in the bin 15 steps forward and 5 steps sideways from the entrance to the supermarket, in the big bin labeled "vine-ripened tomatoes", when in fact tomatoes don't work that way, and anything you put in a bin labeled like that must, by necessity because of the way supply chains work, be a fake wax replica of a tomato even when good tomatoes are available. The problem is not that poor people eat tomatoes. The Fresh Markets supermarket 3 blocks north of me serves a solidly lower-lower class market (I live next to Austin, one of the poorest neighborhoods in Chicago, a "food desert") has better produce than Whole Foods does. Poor people, particularly Hispanic poor people, do veg really well. The problem is that the Del Monte's of the world are replacing real tomatoes with fake tomatoes. That is bad. It's not a class warfare issue.
- kragen 16y ago
  You're living in a fantasy world. No city in the US is so corrupt as to allow a large supermarket to sell globs of paraffin and beeswax as "tomatoes." Those are actual tomatoes. If you have a real criticism of them, your hyperbole or delusion seriously undermines it, and you neglected to state it.
  - tptacek 16y ago
    They're not made of wax. They don't even contain wax. They just taste that way. Sorry I didn't make that clearer to you.
    - kragen 16y ago
      Is your complaint that they taste bad because they're out of season? Maybe you could be a little clearer still; the connection you're claiming between the labeling of the bin and the flavor of the tomatoes remains obscure.

tptacek 16y ago

If the point of this discussion is to stigmatize and ridicule the orthodoxy of "locavorism", I'm on board. If the point is to ridicule Michael Pollan and Alice Waters, to highlight the fact that the model of production they talk about is a luxury item for the rich and utterly untenable for most of society, I'm even on board with that. But if the point is to make the argument that there is little benefit to seasonal cooking or small-farm animal husbandry, you lose me completely. There clearly is a benefit: * Out-of-season vegetables are very often of lower quality than canned; the obvious example is tomatoes, but you're also not going to eat a ramp in December, or a high-quality parsnip in May, or a Vidalia in the fall. * The consumer embrace of faux-fresh off-season veg actually is a bad thing; it pushes out producers who make real veg in favor of people who are selling wax veg year-round; people are still buying wax tomatoes in July. * Alienation from seasonal cooking results in home cooks who, like me, had never tasted a ramp or a morel or a vidalia or even a real tomato; seasonal cooking is vector towards good cooking, and one thing that I think is hard to argue is that America needs more and better home cooks. * Supermarket meat is a bona fide debacle. There's universal agreement that we've managed to breed flavor and health out of pigs almost entirely. Industrial chicken is epsilon away from being grown in vats instead of farms. Beef is being treated with ammonia before grinding (the trend towards buying meat not only pre-ground but pre-shaped is another pathology). * "Local meat" is in some cases actually cheaper than the supermarket crap; you have to make a lifestyle concession to get access to those prices (ie, you have to have a $150 chest freezer, and you have to be willing to actually cook), but high-quality pig and beef is not out of the reach of a lower-middle-class homeowner. * I live in the midwest. I'm not a fan of St. Pollan[1], but there are some restaurant owners here that I do admire and who make a point of sticking to midwest-seasonal. I take exception to the idea that it "really sucks". We should meet in the middle. In the colder climes, we should be shipping in "accent" products from the west coast to liven things up, but there's plenty of regional produce that can and should form the staple. Right now, we're at the other extreme: most people in Chicago are happy to eat a caprese with gassed-red wax tomatoes and mutant basil and kraft mozzeralla in the middle of January. * And don't get me started on our access to cheese here. [1] Although I like his writing about plants. He's a great garden writer.

patio11 16y ago
Industrial chicken is epsilon away from being grown in vats instead of farms. Great line. (Apropos of nothing: when vat-grown meat arrives, I will be there on day one, eating it off the freaking petri dish if they'll let me.)

sethg 16y ago

So “food-miles” is like “lines of code”—a way to substitute a half-assed metric for actual thought?

tptacek 16y ago
Both bear approximately the same relationship to reality. Klocs don't mean nothing; they're just a very inaccurate measurement.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
lotharbot 16y ago
Something like that. From what I understand, food-miles is being used as a proxy for carbon output (and associated pollution), under the assumption that it takes fuel to move things, so food that travels a long way must use a lot of fuel. A much more direct measurement of carbon output is "food cost", since the fuel used to move the food -- as well as the energy used to grow the food -- has to be paid for, and the people bringing the food to you price it high enough to cover those costs. It turns out, shipping food thousands of miles by train or barge doesn't use much energy relative to the amount of food shipped; as the article mentioned, most of the energy usage comes from the consumer, not the grower or shipper.