Living in Dryden has thankfully been a place where cranky comments - apart from my own - are rare. I didn't expect that my local eating project would generate complaints, especially relative to some of the political positions I've taken, but somehow it seems to have struck a nerve with two local commenters.
The first, on my Starting Eating Local entry, came from "anonyman," but at least included some helpful information after a blast:
Although the orthodoxy of this 'eat local' venture seems needlessly symbolic, arbitrary, and bordering on backwards and parochial, you may as well know where to get the good stuff. For corn, that would be the Fall Creek Market on Fall Creed Rd just past Red Mill. Most fresh sweet corn is wonderful, but their varieties are particularly outstanding.
The second came in this morning, to my original post about plans to eat locally. Andrew writes:
My comment is that in my experience local produce is always always more expensive than produce from eleswhere, even in season. Your project is laudable, but my opinion is that people who get on the buy-local bandwagon are mostly a class of people who regard cost as irrelevant and unimportant. The cost difference is huge. One local peach at the farm market in my neighborhood in New York is a delicacy costing more than $1.00. This makes me mad, because I like the concept as much as anyone else, but I wish people would wake up and face reality and stop joyfully paying so much just to support an ideal. It goes against the whole concept of "market". Pardon my rant.
I'm guessing that the first comment is from someone local, and the second is from someone in New York City, but the assumptions behind them reflect paths I've rejected as I embarked on this local eating project.
To highlight a key phrase in the first comment, "bordering on backwards and parochial" is frankly more of a compliment in this context than an insult. I grew up with the broad idea that it was better to be a citizen of the world than of a particular place, understanding that progress came only from setting the ideas of the certain time or place one inhabited aside in favor of more universal understandings. Now, I'm not so sure. I no longer believe in the mythology of continuous progress - things can and often do get worse over time. "Backwards" may be the right direction to go sometimes. And "parochial" is kind of a mean word for "local". Given that I've been writing this explicitly local blog for four years, it seems unlikely that I'm going to see that as a problem. I've definitely decided that local perspectives and happenings - "parochial" or not - are worth my attention.
The second comment seems to mix up a number of concerns. First, I can see where buying local might seem hard in New York City. Community gardens aren't exactly common, suburbanization has forced agriculture further and further away, and farmers markets are kind of a late addition to New York's huge existing infrastructure for distributing food to the people who eat it. They do cost more, because farmers have to do a lot more of their own work to bring that food to market, in the absence of any other infrastructure meant to distribute local food. Some of the same concerns exist out here too.
Then there's the sort of snide part:
people who get on the buy-local bandwagon are mostly a class of people who regard cost as irrelevant and unimportant
Interpreting this less charitably, I'd say the writer hopes to suggest that "eating locally costs more money at the moment, so the people who find it interesting must be a bunch of rich snobs." Die, progressive yuppie scum! Or something like that.
The cost issue is a real problem, not to be ignored, but reducing food to the price it costs ignores a huge range of other issues. When people buy a new car, does everyone buy the cheapest car available that could possibly address their needs? Looking around, I'd have to say probably not. Do homebuyers look at their purchases as the cheapest thing they can find wherever it might be, with the maximum resale value? Occasionally, though probably not when they plan to live in the house themselves.
The cost of eating seasonally available local food appropriate to the location where it is found should be lower than the cost of importing food. That used to be true all over the country. The rules changed in the 19th and 20th century because transportation became so cheap and because economies of scale made centralized processing of standardized foodstuffs more desirable. Agriculture turned industrial, and part of that process meant chopping away the connections between growers and eaters. Local infrastructure disappeared, and local relationships vanished. Eventually it reached the point where it became difficult to buy locally, even when you wanted to do so.
I'm interested in rebuilding those relationships, and see their disappearance as an unfortunate cost of the choices we've made over the last century or so. All that information about where food came from has disappeared - though now, thanks to the strange global creation called the Internet, it's at least possible to find things again. Still not easy, but possible.
(It's also worth noting that the nature of the food itself changed to meet those transportation needs, and that local tomatoes and corn often taste a lot better because they weren't bred with long-distance transportation in mind. Local doesn't automatically mean better quality, but it certainly opens new opportunities for quality.)
The last part deserves special attention, I think:
I wish people would wake up and face reality and stop joyfully paying so much just to support an ideal. It goes against the whole concept of "market".
The concept of "market" began in a very concrete way, with people coming together to exchange goods. I have strawberries, you have eggs - let's make a deal. Cash makes it easier to make all of these deals, and these deals built on our choices eventually bring us to the point where markets can do what they do best: set prices.
I'll confess that I don't understand people who think that we should all step back and let "the market" make our choices for us. Our choices are supposed to be a key part of how markets operate. Comparative advantage explains how some places can make things more cheaply than others, but it doesn't come with a moral claim that cheap is necessarily better.
I'd much rather be an active consumer, driving the market to address the kinds of choices that I want to be able to make, than a passive consumer, just taking whatever rolls off the assembly line into my kitchen.
Posted by simon at August 15, 2007 9:10 AM in eating locally , why
Well said, Simon. We've looked at what's necessary to eat local as well, and while I don't think we could do it exclusively for long outside of the summer months, it would be a fun experiment. Long-term, I think I'd prefer a largely local approach, leaving wiggle room for foodstuffs that simply can't be grown locally - the classics of chocolate and, for Tonya, coffee, for instance.
Regarding the costs, I'm always struck by how they vary. Some places, like the Farmer's Market, are often a bit more expensive than it seems they should be (but clearly, from a free market perspective, they have more than enough customers, so price isn't an issue there). Other places, such as small farm stands or local farmers selling direct, can be astonishingly cheap - well below the supermarket prices for far better food.
Plus, of course, it's always difficult to factor in the cost of maintaining health. Eating locally is likely to result in a better diet, which can provide physical and psychological health benefits, but how can you quantify that? And how do you even necessarily know it's happening, when the benefits may not be obvious until taken in aggregate over many years.
For me, though, a lot of eating locally comes down to taste. The food simply tastes better, thanks to better growing techniques, less processing, and shorter time-to-market.
cheers... -Adam
As a family of five living on one income, we never have extra money at the end of the month. However, my mother (a great cook) always told me to buy the best ingredients I could. I would gladly pay a bit extra for food that I know where it's coming from and for food I know will taste better. We pay more for our food at the expense of other goods. Perhaps that makes me a food snob, but we are hardly the type to regard cost as unimportant. HA!
This local commenter took issue not with eat locally as a preference, but exclusively. The difference is not just quantitative or a matter of degree, but qualitative.
There is no debating that locally grown produce will often taste superior for myriad reasons -- freshness, ripeness, varietals not bred for transport. Of course.
But locally grown produce, and other locally sourced foods, represent a small subset of 'colors' in the global 'food palette'. To deny oneself the remaining 'colors of the rainbow' is self-martyrdom at its least effectual. It is the virtue-in-self-denial that seems to be fashionable with the new left. You want chocolate? Then buy it for heck's sake. You think your not buying chocolate will have any positive impact on the world? Denying yourself the pleasure for the sake of this illusory gain is intellectually venal.
As for the virtue of 'backwards', at a micro-level there are trends that may lead to places that are 'worse' than where they began. But at a macro level, the world has never been in better shape. I know this challenges the ideology that our planet is a mess, but the facts suggest otherwise. Is the glass half empty or half full (of locally-sourced water)?
The history of human civilization is horrible. It is a history of short, brutal lives, cut down by disease, malnutrition, poverty, violence, and injustice. Today's world suffers from all of these things but, proportionally, less so than ever before. More people, proportionally, live longer, healthier, and wealthier lives today than at any other time. We still have serious problems, but they are, on balance, getting better, not worse.
They are getting better for myriad reasons, including science, democracy, and global markets. For the purposes of this discussion, global markets are worth emphasizing. Local economies are well and good, but the world has benefited greatly from globalized markets. There are costs -- environmental impacts, of course -- and we are responsible for taking actions to help reduce these costs. But that doesn't require throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Participating in a local economy is great, but shunning the global one in its stead is a false choice and, on balance, a counterproductive one.
Finally, isn't there something arbitrary about all this? Why only eat local food? Why not only buy furniture made of local wood? Or computers assembled by local PC shops? Where are the boundaries? Of course, it is obvious that one's life will quickly become very small and limited following this philosophy to its logical conclusion. In large part, this is because all that we enjoy in life, all that enables us to live modern lives, and in some cases earn our livings from home over a global electronic network, are enabled by global markets. Why single out food?
Again, it makes great sense to prefer local foods. It makes little sense to exclusively rule out all other food.
Simon, thank you for bringing this discussion to the front page. There are some interesting, complex issues here.
The free market is about choices - not just cheapest but best on a long list of criteria. There may always be enough consumers to keep the producers of the cheapest in business. But it's a delight to watch the trend to other priorities expanding demand for more and better choices.
I'll take the rest of my response over to Five Wells
Quoting and replying is usually a better idea on an email list than in comments, but this is a great comment worth a detailed reply, so...
It's different on a number of levels, actually. Thinking back to when I started Living in Dryden, I resolved to write an entry every day, even if there wasn't necessarily news. The November 2003 archives don't make for the most exciting reading, but making these kinds of things work does seem to require discipline that I don't think I'd have if I just made it a preference.
Intellectually venal? Interesting choice of phrase, though I'm not really sure what it means in this context. I haven't completely run out of chocolate at home, so there isn't much martyrdom, and while I do love chocolate, I'm hardly addicted to the stuff.
If you look at the original post, you'll see that while we won't buy chocolate, it's not like we won't eat it:
Removing chocolate from its role as a staple - you used to find lots of candy wrappers in my car - and bringing it back to its role as a special treat seems like a decision that comes with lots of benefits, and little need for martyrdom. I suspect my dentist and my wallet will be happy, and my appreciation for chocolate will be renewed, if anything.
I doubt that I'm a very good representative of the "new left" in any case, and don't think I've ever succeeded in being fashionable.
You forgot the importance of cheap energy in there, but...
I don't think we've thrown much out at all, actually. We've simply chosen to prioritize one dimension of a particular category of good that we purchase, in the interest of seeing how well it can work and where it might lead.
I think I can safely call myself a child of globalization. I lived in Korea for three years (1974-77), attending kindergarten while my father worked on a joint venture between Corning and Samsung that grew into an enormous company of its own. Much of my first year of college was paid for thanks to the sale of Boeing stock my parents had purchased when it wasn't clear if the 747 would make or break the company. I'm still involved in global commerce, finishing up work on editing a translation of a book from French into English.
I don't, however, share the faith that more globalization is always a better thing, or that larger markets always produce better results than smaller ones. Capitalism as religion seems to me impoverished, and worse, impoverishing, in ways that go beyond the financial. Just looking around Dryden I marvel at the community bonds this community has lost in the past hundred years, as churches and organizations have hollowed out. I'm glad to see people fighting to maintain them, but we've traded our local connections for cheaper goods, television sets, and a sense that bigger is better.
I'm willing to sacrifice some of the benefits of "global markets" to see if there are ways to connect better with my neighbors and my area. To me, rebuilding local infrastructure is a lot more important than getting food cheaply or easily, and I hope this small experiment may bear some larger fruit.
I think all I can say about this is that I disagree. I'm not attempting to set up an autarchy - I'm trying to exercise my choices in ways that lead to results I prefer.
Well, the funny part about this is that we're communicating through a server that I personally assembled in my livingroom, which (expensively, for its usage level) sits down in Ithaca. The parts, of course, came from all over the planet, and I'm not sure it's even possible any more to source a computer with exclusively US-made parts. (I remember seeing computer chips marked El Salvador in the 1980s, and they're probably still in my attic.)
(I'm hoping to lead a panel next March on "Creating Local Life on the Global Web" at a web conference in Texas; we'll see what the global swarms have to say about that when the panel picker finally runs.)
Locally-made furniture of local wood is an excellent idea, of course - if you can afford Stickley. (The wood isn't always local, and they now make one line of furniture in Vietnam.) There's also plenty of Amish furniture available. I'm writing this on a dining table made in Denmark, though, so I can't say that I've elected to carry local to every aspect of my life.
Local food does seem, however, like an obvious target. Every time I go anywhere around here, I'm surrounded by fields, often fields in production. The hard part isn't that local food doesn't exist. The hard part is figuring out how to connect to the people producing it and adjusting my lifestyle to accept a lot less prior processing, as well as the need to prepare for winter. I have a lot to learn, and it's not the kind of thing I learn quickly - but it's fascinating nonetheless, and feels worthwhile.
I suspect it's obvious at this point that I disagree with any of that being obvious.
The comment about the market seems to be ignoring the fundamentals of economics: the market is what people are willing to pay for, not a monolith, but a sliding scale based on quality, quantity, price, and alternatives. If you choose to pay more for locally grown peaches, we would just say that you have an inelastic price demand for local peaches. Someone else may have a very elastic price demand for local peaches and so would substitute wooden, tasteless peaches (sorry, editorializing) that cost less. That's how the market works: you're not screwing it up any more than he is. You can't, because you're part of it.
Hi Simon,
Great post. I agree with your assessment that the "obvious" idea you must be small and closed minded if you attempt to go local with your consumption is anything but. Since when has consumerism been the driver for open-mindedness? This implies that the only way people learn anything is through their purchases. Sure buying things is a necessary part of life, but I personally find the thought pretty depressing that any part of the world becomes parochial in its thinking simply because it doesn't have enough imports. Wow, talk about globalization-think: saving the world from xenophobia through buying cheap plastic stuff from China. YAY!
On another note, I really think the concept of food-miles is overdone. If it was only about carbon footprint, the resolution would be self-resolving as energy prices rise. Things out of the local zone are cheaper because energy has been traditionally very very cheap. That condition is clearly changing.
But there is more to it than that. I firmy believe that "globalization" is really the process of extracting capital (wealth) from the local economy and moving it somewhere else. We should all be in the business of keeping substantial wealth local, and the only way to do that is to stop falling into the trap of buying things that are priced based on energy subsidies to the transport economy. In others words, food, energy, services, everything should be purchased locally to a reasonable extent. Without this type of attitude, trade imbalances mask the real costs of goods/services, and people think they are getting things cheaper. In fact, they are just eroding their long-term quality of life (and that of their neighbors).
I think your comment about "Capitalism as religion" brings it all home. I equate globalization with that phrase, the march to more $$ at any cost. Moving back to local things, restoring community, that to me is answer to many of our social ills. Capitalism as a concept is not a bad thing, capitalism as religion is killing the planet.