Local Lettuce=Liberty Cabbage
Katherine Mangu-Ward | June 14, 2007, 10:59am
Tucked behind the New York Times paid subscription wall is a tidy little blog post dissecting the "buy local" movement. It's on the Basic Instincts blog, by Richard Conniff, the author of The Natural History of the Rich: A Field Guide and The Ape in the Corner Office: How to Make Friends, Win Fights, and Work Smarter by Understanding Human Nature. Some highlights:
The “local” label also says little or nothing about a product’s actual environmental friendliness. A resident of Sacramento, for instance, can take comfort in buying “local” rice, but it’s still likely to be rice grown in a heavily irrigated desert, at huge environmental cost. In the overall carbon footprint of a product, the cost of transport often turns out to be relatively trivial. For instance, a New Zealand study recently made the case that better conditions make lamb grown there and shipped to Europe four times more energy-efficient than home-grown European lamb....
Beneath the surface, the urge to buy local is often just a disguised version of the urge to punish someone foreign. But as a way to fix global warming, fretting about where your salad was grown is like thinking you can win a war by calling your sauerkraut “liberty cabbage.”
One point he doesn't touch on--in addition to environmental impact, there's also human impact. Buying food grown (or products manufactured) in poorer countries is one of the most effective ways to increase quality of life for those who are less well off.The Europeans who originated the buy local movement did it, in part, to take the piss out of over-subsidized American farmers. But they wind up hurting African farmers whose goods they once imported a heck of a lot more.
FYI: Anyone with a .edu address can get free access to TimesSelect. Just go here.
For more on local eating, go here, here, and here.
GILMORE | June 14, 2007, 12:16pm | #
joe | June 14, 2007, 11:10am | #
"Beneath the surface, the urge to buy local is often just a disguised version of the urge to punish someone foreign."
No, it's not. This is just a dumb slur, marring an otherwise interesting argument.
I used to write research reports about Organic/Fair Trade/'Whole' CPG market trends (for investment bank) and there were some suprising lessons learned...
The truth is, none of these things have nearly any effect on environmental practices, or diverts money to 'local farmers', or benfits small business more than large ones.
i.e. Fair Trade in Coffee for instance doesnt necessarily provide significant benefit to the growers other than some stability in prices to some degree. They're not much better off, but since they have a steady customer with fixed prices, their business can make better predictions.
Most consumers who make purchasing decisions based on these 'ethical marketing' positions rarely care enough to learn about the real impact of these markets; the main benefit is psychological = "I'm a better person for choosing these products over those". This is the basis of any kind of branding.
In this sense, the whole Organic/Whole Foods industry is more conniving than 'corporations', in that they disinigenously present themselves are morally superior products, when in the end, the products arent significantly dfferent from mass market items in their human/environmental impact.
Just as an example = The organic produce industry consolidated rapidly over the 1990s, to where no major retail chain buys much from 'cooperatives' or individually owned farms. If you went to the organic supplier/farmer, you'd find a business no different than what yuppies think of as "industrial farming'; most of the distinctions consumers make in their minds are fantasies invented by marketing...
Anyway... the Ethical Consumerism trend is something to be very skeptical of, because it's simply playing off the idea that "all OTHER products are vaguely 'unethical'." This is a canard.
Rex Rhino | June 14, 2007, 2:19pm | #
Two words: Conspicuous Consumption.
In an economy that can produce cheap clothing for pennies in China, and where even poor people in the "ghettos" often have big screen TVs and ipods and drive SUVs, it is becoming more and more difficult to distinguish class.
Just about anything, short of fabulous jewels, or 100 metre long yachts that only the ultra-rich can afford, is mass produced and is affordable by most people. When you can buy Louis Vuitton handbags for the average days wage at your suburban St. Louis shopping mall, and when gourmet coffee is easier to find than a McDonalds, it is getting harder and harder for the upper-middle class educated urban professional to distiguish himself as in a higher class than the electrician living up the street.
The upper middle class, the people who used to be able to demonstrate their social class by purchasing a Cadillac or designer sunglasses, needed to find a new way to demonstrate their "superiority" to the lower middle classes. But what do you do when the very concept of conspicuous consumption is failing.
This is why the new "responsible eco-shiek" is becoming popular, and why it is popular with both conservatives and liberals (assuming that they are upper-middle class conservatives and liberals). Organicly grown food, fair-trade food, locally produced stuff and hand-made stuff, are decided with a built in scarcity.
There is only a small amount of working farmland that is local to large urban population centers. Only a limited number of people in large metro areas can purchase locally grown produce. The fact that it is organic, and therefore some of it is destroyed by pests, makes it even more scarce. Consuming local products has scarcity built into the buisness model.
This new fashion for inefficient production systems is the perfect form of conspicuous consumption, because it is unattainable by the masses BY DESIGN! Of course rich people who participate in this life style think it is morally superior... the rich ALWAYS think they are morally superior. I finished reading a book about victorian culture not too long ago, and they were just as convinced that the fashions of the rich of the day were a choice morally superior than those of the poor.
When joe, and all the other white people (as he mentioned in his post), go to the local produce market to buy squash... and when joe makes sure to tell us all that he buys his produce local and organic... joe is saying more than "I like organic locally grown produce". Hidden behind the lines is joe saying:
"I am an education, intelligent, upper-middle class white man. I am not one of these Budwiser swilling, SUV driving, fast-food eating, Fox News watching tastless crietens! I have taste, I have knowledge, and I have the resources to act on it! I am superior to the average American!".
As joe said, of course all the people going to the local organic food market are white (even though the growers are asian)... Because upper-middle class people are disproportionatly white. It is a way for the upper classes to hang out with the upper classes, and congradulate themselves for having a lifestyle, that is by definition unattainable by the masses, more morally superior than all those irresponsible trash who shop at Walmart!
celebrim | June 14, 2007, 3:18pm | #
"GILMORE | June 14, 2007, 12:16pm |..."
Nail on the head. I'm reminded of the Fosterites in 'Stranger in a Strange Land' who judge each others morality primarily by whether they by products approved of by other Fosterites.
Most of the feel good labeling of the past few years - most visibly 'organic' - is an absolute crock. On the whole 'Organic' foods tend to be worse for the environment than the ones not so labeled. 'Organic' foods generally require more irrigation and have higher culls (the percentage of crop thrown away as unsalable) than non-organic foods. Organic farming is inefficient in terms of land and water use, and would if practiced extensively result in greater degredation to the environment than standard modern practice. And organic foods are neither safer nor more nutritious. The plain truth is that many organic foods are produced with 'organic' plant pesticides which were abandoned years ago because they had higher toxicity levels than newer products.
As for 'tasting better', for the most part neither locally grown nor organic is any assurance of higher quality. This is especially true of organic, but even with 'locally grown' its going to be only a few highly perishable crops where the difference is going to be noticable. I buy locally grown seasonal peaches, pears, nectarines, and tomatoes because you can't transport these foods ripe. You've never bought a ripe peach or pear at a grocery store and most people have never had one. But for most foods, the argument that locally grown means 'better' is ridiculous. For one thing, often as not if you go to the farmer's market you are buying the exact same thing that farmer shipped out on a truck and which is in your local grocery store. For example, local strawberries are available seasonally in my local grocery. They are the exact same ones available at vegetable stands and farmers markets. When in season, they are the best strawberries available. Most of the rest of the year, they just aren't available so if you want them out of season your best bet is a berry grown where it is seasonal. Similarly, I buy locally grown watermelons, but the climate north of here is better (drier) for watermelons and results in a superior melon when it comes to ripeness. I get my early watermelons locally, but the best watermelons I get are shipped in from elsewhere. Ditto blueberries, cherries, broccolli, onions and a host of other crops that do better in someone elses climate. I expect they feel the same about our strawberries and mandarin oranges (even if they've never thought about where they come from).
Most of all, this is an example of marketing. It tastes better to you because you expect it to taste better, but in a blind taste test I'd put money on the fact that people that swear by this and that couldn't tell the difference.
And for the record, Wal-Mart's produce is generally superior (riper, fresher, etc.) to Whole-Foods. The reason? Volume. Not only that, but its generally half the cost, which means its probably produced or distributed in an environmentally friendlier way. For example, I bet that a good bit of the price difference is that Whole-Foods wastes more food.
joe | June 14, 2007, 5:42pm | #
swillfredo,
"If the farmers selling to corporations are being paid a relative pittance why haven't they started selling at the Lowell, Massachusetts farmer's market? How much locally grown citrus do these guys offer?"
1. Individuals farmers in New Jersey, Alabama, and Chile might have trouble coming to the Lowell Farmers Market each Friday.
2. Squash is not a citrus.
GILMORE,
That's very interesting. It's also a pretty good rebuttal to the slur that people who are interested in such things are motivated by a hostility to furrners.
gorgo's foil,
Good point! Those are people who are actually making decisions with their own dollars in an attempt to bring about a change in the market throgh completely non-coercive, market-based mechanisms. The chance that Reason will ever publish or link to a piece noting and applauding this idea is approximately 0, for no othe reason than "they're not our sort of people, dear."
Rex,
"As joe said, of course all the people going to the local organic food market are white (even though the growers are asian)... Because upper-middle class people are disproportionatly white. It is a way for the upper classes to hang out with the upper classes, and congradulate themselves for having a lifestyle, that is by definition unattainable by the masses, more morally superior than all those irresponsible trash who shop at Walmart!"
Oh, I must not have mentioned that the Farmer's Market taked Food Stamps, and that poor people from nearby neighborhoods shop there, too. Or that the produce is cheaper than at the store.
Aw, look, I killed Rex's puppy. And he was feeling so good about gettin' dem libruls, too!
jh, you fucking twit, you posted your email address when you commented as "the Fake joe." Is it physically painful to be that stupid, or is it sort of a numb sensation?
