Tribalism and locavorism

Now that I live in Germany, I’m finding that my cynicism about organic food – which is motivated by most of the same concerns as Desrochers & Shimizu’s cynicism about local food – is very shocking to people. In Belgium, that was very much not the case. Basically, I resent paying more for food that is neither better tasting, nor more nutritious, nor, as far as I can tell, significantly better for the environment or produced by more worker-friendly firms. Life in Germany seems, so far, to mean getting nickeled-and-dimed a lot, so it matters to me more than it used to. It really shocks people when I say that I avoid buying organic foods if I have a choice.

But… I do shop at local organic chains quite a lot simply because no one else sells some of the weird things I buy. Finding reasonable quality unsalted shelled peanuts for nasi lemak is monumentally difficult in Germany, even at organic grocers, and finding them cheap is impossible. In a sane world, peanuts shouldn’t cost more per kilo than pork.

That said, I do defend local produce on the grounds that it usually does genuinely taste better and if I have to pay an arm and leg for something, I’d rather some farmer in the village was pocketing the money than Aldi Süd. At least farmers in the village buy drinks for me. I wish there was a CSA here, but somehow that concept hasn’t quite penetrated this part of Europe yet, and I don’t eat enough potatoes to want to buy the 30 kilo bags one of the families in the village sells off the back of their truck. I find myself oddly on Jill Richardson’s side here, despite a disposition to agree with Desrochers & Shimizu, and the reason is because she doesn’t engage in any of the ecological arguments I would have expected and disliked. I think organic food is a scam, but I’m not so hard on the local food movement. A commitment to fresh food raised by accessible people on this side of the world takes a lot of the fear and mystery out of food that just magically materializes in the grocery stores under cellophane. It is probably more nutritious, not because it’s local but because “local food” almost always means fresh vegetables. That’s worth something to me and I don’t think it’s wrong for businesses to meet that need.

But as a comprehensive food ideology… No, I am not giving up tropical fruits or cheap ketchup.

Scott Martens,

If you need reasonably priced unsalted shelled peanuts in Germany, you have to shop at an Asian supermarket (one with a principally Asian customer base) not an organic foods store.

@Scott Martens – not to open a whole can of worms, but as someone who grew up next to a non-organic farm and saw the impact of the chemicals used on our back garden, I have to say that there are clear environmental benefits to at least some forms of organic farming – they just aren’t about climate change, rather about the leaching of various compounds into waterways etc.

In Germany in particular, organic means ‘safe according to Vedic theories of woo woo’. The phrase Life Force is never that far away. Now, this does usefully exclude some dangerous things that scientific opinion at one time thought not unsafe. But it also leads to counting some equally dubious stuff as safe.

As long as the people doing the work acknowledge the existence of things like E Coli and mycotoxins and manage the risks, it’s a toss up as to whether the overall result is better or not.

But beware anyone in charge of the production side who thinks organic is safe-by-definition, and so dismisses those risks as invented by the Heritage foundation…

If Mercatus won’t support free commercial speech, who will?

Um, dude, I don’t think they’re arguing that talking about food miles should be banned. They’re just saying that it’s stupid and counter-productive.

Rob, the point is that they don’t care about any other stupid marketing gimmick, just the marketing gimmick that appeals to the left. Which is quite telling.

Seems fairly clear that what is meant by “organic” and probably “local” is very nation specific.

Round these parts (the UK) if I refer to something organic, I probably mean something certified by the Soil Association. Now, I don’t know if they are any better or worse than any other accredition scheme, but there are many areas where I have to trust the labelling, when it comes down to it.

So until someone comes up with a pan-European accredition, or even an international accreditation, “organic” seems to be in the eye of the beholder. That’s leaving aside ha-ha-funny-yes-shut-up-now arguments that all food is “organic”

sanbikinoraion @2, UK supermarkets definitely seem to more about price discrimination than animal welfare with organic meat. Free range chickens are marginally more expensive than battery ones but organic ones are extortionately priced and I can’t tell any difference in quality. If you are really bothered about animal welfare an meat quality the go to your local butcher or, if you have one, local farm shop.

I do think fresh and seasonal products taste better and being local helps with this and also helps with economic sustainability. Of course it matters where you live, I worked in the South of Italy for a year and the local produce was excellent and readily available on street stalls, vans going door to door, small shops, and large supermarkets. There really was very little need to get fresh ingredients imported or even from other parts of Italy. Farmer’s markets and organic produce seem like marketing cons to me.

“Farmer’s markets and organic produce seem like marketing cons to me.”

Seriously? Is there anyone here who’s actually a farmer, or knows a farmer, or has lived or worked on a farm? I come from a farming family, and we’ve been selling produce via several farmers markets for 25+ years. For us it’s been the difference between making a living, and bankruptcy.

And as for organic produce – I recognize that poisoning farm workers is not as important as paying a slightly higher price for food. Wouldn’t want to cut into that yearly vacation.

Katherine’s point about having to trust accreditation schemes is an important one; I buy most of our meat from a local farm shop partly because it’s putting money into the local economy rather than a supermarket chain but mostly because I can see that the animals are decently treated. Buying locally offers better access to information – and the possibility that your supplier is more open to suasion than a corporation. On a larger scale, I suspect the same is true for accreditation bodies; I trust the Soil Association label more for UK-produced goods than for anything from overseas, simply because there seems to be a better chance of rigorous, regular inspections. Food miles as a proxy for trust?

I am less interested in the food mile issue than I am in the idea of spending my money locally, and having that money stay available within my community. When I pick up my CSA veggie/fruit share from a farmer I know, then I know that is happening. When I spend money at the supermarket on produce, I have no idea which giant agribusiness outfit is benefitting.

Markets are the Tastevor’s friend. The problem with supermarket veg and fruit is that it is never ripe. In the US, Asian supermarkets, that buy the stuff when it has ripened from the wholesalers who are trying to get rid of it, provide a tastier product, but it goes bad faster (obviously).

Eli has some apples in his fruit bin that have been there since January when they were bought for a sauce. About as tasty now as then.

Speaking as an office drone with some time to kill, I call tribalism (not to say snobbery) on Anarcissie.

There is a public policy component, in that a number of states are providing public subsidies to local farmers (many of whom use undocumented workers) to sell their products (in competition with unionized grocery stores). Food miles is frequently one of a number of arguments supporting this subsidy. But, that supports your point about tribalism.

It’s populists who want guns to be available. Could be right, could be left.

“Mercatus is attacking the locavores because they are (seen as) elitist liberal DFH types”

No. This paper is precisely targeted to be used in lobbying against a specific regulatory initiative: country of origin labelling, or COOL. See pp. 12-13 of the paper.

You are not naive enough to believe that the authors chose this topic because it interested them as an intellectual matter, are you? Don’t you understand that stuff like this is produced because there is either a direct or indirect funding source that pays for it to be produced?

There’s no mention of a carbon tax from Mercatus either.

The best part of this is that they basically break down the price. Obviously the information aggregating aspects of Hayek’s price mechanism are somehow obscuring key points that need to be made.

Nice call John.

Mercatus is attacking the locavores because they are (seen as) elitist liberal DFH types

I think it’s about justifying cross-border trade and destroying in-country labour strength. This sort of thing was getting a lot of attention last year in the dumber media; I don’t think the attacks on locavores stray too far from that template.

@Derek Bowman: “All of the advocates of local foods that I’ve seen advocate ‘in season’ eating, and none of them advocate an exclusive reliance on such foods. And of all the social and environmental benefits to buying from local farmers (and even growing your own food), the idea of ‘food miles’ has always been toward the bottom of the list.”

Seconded. Hopefully, these kinds of discussions lead to a better public understanding of labeling distinctions (e.g., organic v. local); and encourage consumers to commit to a more honest accounting of the community, economic, and environmental benefits realized through their support of (relatively) local producers.

The foodmile dehypothesis that posits that it is totally reasonable to import NZ lamb to Europe in january because it’s in season, A1 foodie quality, and uses almost-free water transport and almost-free freeze continuity, was an unpleasant revelation to this inveterate locavore.

There are other things to consider as posters here have pointed out. One thing to add, in favor of local food production is, that it somehow seems desirable, in our day and age, to live in a locality that knows how to produce its own food. Here in France, this is particularly ingrained in the notion of ‘terroir’. One never knows if some day soon the S might HTF.

Also of importance, perhaps, is this article from this weekend’s NYT investigating the quasi-total capture of the organic food certification process in the USA by big agribusiness. Quelle surprise!

I don’t get the current conservative/ libertarian meme that roughly says “people who eat local food are elitist liberals”.

I grew up in a lower income rural area and we ate local, organic vegetables all the time. Granted, we never called them “organic” or “local” but just about everyone we knew had a garden of some type, some of which were quite large.

Near my current home is a farmer’s market frequented mostly by Latinos (and me). Again, I imagine that the clientele is mostly lower income. The food is all local and organic and if you buy in season it is cheaper than the supermarket.

These are just two examples but I imagine they are not isolated. I think it’s somewhat inaccurate to claim that local food== high income white liberals. Immigrant groups, lower income rural whites and all other manner of folks are raising their own food.

I’ve not quite figured out why some libertarians deride local foods (e.g Tyler Cowen et. al.). Local food systems can require little to no sponsorship, subsidy or assistance from the state and can provide high-quality and affordable food. To me, this is exactly the type of system that any good anarcho-capitalist should be clamoring. I suppose it depends on which flavor of libertarianism is your favorite.

With regards to self-described conservatives I understand their ridicule a little better. Agri-business has traditionally leaned Republican. Maybe some of that Agri-business money spills over into more traditional parts of the libertarian ideoscape.

Environmental impact is a function of an array of variables and there is a large empirical literature on the environmental impact( hereafter “I”) of food. While I am not an expert in this area I think a reasonable conclusion is that the sources of I vary considerable from food item to food item. Growing tomatoes in a Minnesota winter probably has a higher I than simply importing them from Mexico. With that being said, in-season veggies purchased locally will almost always outperform comparable veggies brought in from thousands of miles away given current agricultural practices. In other words, holding constant other variables environmental impact for in-season foods will increase as distance traveled increases. “Food miles” or “place of origin” should be only one consideration.

The Mercatus folks are not doing anything terribly innovative by critiquing “food miles”. Again, the empirical literature and folks working in this area have long recognized that “food miles” are not the penultimate measure of a particular food items environmental impact. Indeed, I imagine that you could find a number of left-leaning scholars who would agree that “food miles” is not a good proxy for “total environmental impact”. It’s not a terribly damning critique of local food either; its really got to do with measurement issues.

Indeed, the Mercatus article seems to focus solely on carbon emissions which is, of course, only one part of I. There are better and more sophisticated ways to measure I. The ecological footprint would be more appropriate but there are others. Sadly, these other instruments go unmentioned by the authors as if they do not exist at all. Its a glaring omission.

Cherry picking the food miles is like ignoring massive corporate pollution and focusing instead on the polluting effects of cow farts.

You say that as though a) they were mutually exclusive – industrial farming is a thing! and b) cow farts were a trivial, minimal source of pollution. Livestock emissions (belching, in fact, for biological reasons, in the case of cows) represent 28% of total methane emissions – 80 million tons a year, which is equivalent to 2000 million tons of CO2. That’s significantly more than the total CO2 emissions of the entire nation of Russia.

I’m confused, is there some sort of part of libertarianism that says you aren’t allowed to expose idiocy?

I would tend to suspect that there aren’t papers showing that Miller Light actually fails to make you sexy enough that ridiculously buxom women throw themselves at you while you’re drinking [responsibly of course] because everyone knows that already. While the food miles thing sounds semi-plausible.

Walt, the way worries about genetically modified food get expressed is almost as bullshit as the food miles thing. I realize that TV interviews with protester’s end up showing loud people, not necessarily smart people (something those on the right should remember about Occupy Wall Street and those on the left should remember about the tea party). But it makes me crazy crazy crazy to hear anti-GM food people talk about it as if they are worried that scary science is making food that is going to modify their own personal DNA. Your stomach doesn’t let you process food in ways that let the food alter your DNA unless you’re eating highly dangerous viruses. And then they invariably talk about genetically modified corn vs. ‘real’ corn. Umm hello, corn was genetically modified by natives in America a couple thousand years ago. You can’t get corn that isn’t genetically modified by humans. Argh.

ffrancis — I lived in rural areas in the Adirondack mountains and in Canada for many years. I might concede that it is possible that the people in these areas may not have really, really needed guns. However, almost all of them thought they needed guns. One of them shot a bear in his living room. (Long story involving laying mash.) Many of the poorer people depended on hunting for a good part of their diet; 120 pounds of venison for the price of a bullet being preferable to paying several hundred dollars you don’t have at the supermarket. Maybe they could have done without, and maybe the fellow with the bear could have chased it away, etc., but the fact is they didn’t think so and neither did any of their peers.

The case of guns in an urban area is more ambiguous. Many people seem to want to own firearms of some sort but not let other people have them, especially those perceived as being of differing tribes. As a result there are a lot of laws and a sort of hierarchy of permission and tolerance favoring the police, politicians, bureaucrats, business owners, their friends and relatives, and so on. I myself would favor universal disarmament, but it’s not a popular idea.

The thing about locavorism is that the amount of food that can be grown “nearby” is fairly fixed, unless you’re actually switching gardens to food production. In the extreme case, recall that 40s Britain was suddenly under the constraint of nearly no imported food, and that was extremely hard to manage. In 2010s Britain, there isn’t enough food for everyone to eat only locally, so explicitly choosing it must simply displace someone else into importing a replacement.

(Less so if you’re actually changing your diet; eliminating NZ lamb probably reduces the miles quite a lot quite easily, whereas eliminating imported citrus is much harder)

“I’m confused, is there some sort of part of libertarianism that says you aren’t allowed to expose idiocy?”

My critique is essentially that the Mercatus article is that is essentially shadowboxing and is not informed by the existing literature on environmental accounting; the latter is a major problem with the piece. There are probably a few people who fetishize “food miles” but there is no one with an informed opinion who would suggest that food miles are a good proxy for environmental impact. There is a massive and robust empirical literature on environmental accounting that the authors do not access. This glaring omission makes this article an enormous waste of time to anyone who is even remotely informed on this issue. Quite frankly, it’s lazy scholarship that would be rejected by almost any peer-reviewed journal.

Put the search terms “ecological footprint” and “agriculture” in google scholar and you will get 14k hits. Replace “ecological footprint” with “environmental accounting” and there are 5.9K hits. Granted, most of these are false positives (in other words not directly relevant to the current discussion) but there are probably at least several hundred articles that the authors should have looked at and at least a few dozen that should have been used to inform their analysis.

The author’s are not wrong to say that food miles are a poor instrument to measure environmental impact and that food miles may be used in a misleading fashion in advertising. My point is that this finding is not interesting or innovative. Any undergraduate in an environmental/ecological/ natural resources economics, environmental sociology or environmental studies program could tell you the same thing. Its not innovative or interesting and ultimately it makes this article rather pointless.

This is one of the the major reasons why I generally avoid scholarship that comes from think tanks. The scholarship typically 1) engages in shadowboxing 2) is not innovative because it 3) ignores relevant literature.

The authors suggest that we need “valid indicators” of sustainable development. There are much better indicators than food miles and no one who knows what they are talking about would suggest that food miles are the penultimate indicator of sustainable development. The ecological footprint has existed since the 1990s and is a much better indicator but there are many others.

Okay rant over. Thanks to any and all who have humored me……I won’t reply to any responses as I have run out of my weekly ration of blogtime already…..

Scott, that’s a function of Germans’ neuroses about Zauberheit more than anything else. They love their <>, though, you’re right about that.

On peanuts, I’m completely perplexed: I found them ridiculously cheap at Lido. Since returning to the States I’ve been unable to find a can/jar of them as affordably as I did there. I don’t know if you need them in significant bulk, or if we simply have different understandings of what counts as quality peanuts (either is possible), but I’m not sure what’s giving you problems.

“There are probably a few people who fetishize “food miles” but there is no one with an informed opinion who would suggest that food miles are a good proxy for environmental impact.”

There are lots of people without informed opinions on lots of topics, from food miles to economic austerity (see German chancellors!) to vaccines to genetically modified food. Sometimes it is good to debunk stupidity for the sake of the not-so-informed opinion. A sad fact of the tribalism noted in this post is that we often can’t count on the people on ‘our’ side to do the debunking. They often don’t want to do it for various reasons–debunking the other side is ‘more’ important, good debunking of our side will tend to strengthen the ‘bad’ side, the ‘bad’ side will misuse my good debunking, etc etc.

In practical reality if you want to see good critique of actual environmentalist stupidity, you normally have to get it from a more right leaning source because the more left leaning sources are going to feel constrained by tribalism. If you want to see a good critique of actual market failures, you normally have to get it from a more left leaning source because the right leaning sources are going to feel constrained by tribalism.

Now before someone tries to completely sidetrack my point by noticing (correctly) that at the moment the right does it worse, I’m aware of that. But tribal discounting of outside reports is a *human* trait, not a right-wing trait.

If you’re going to relentlessly ignore sources from ‘the wrong side’ a la Josh G (currently at #44 but knowing the numbering system who knows where it will end up) you’re not going to end up as one of the informed opinions.

Livestock emissions (belching, in fact, for biological reasons, in the case of cows) represent 28% of total methane emissions – 80 million tons a year, which is equivalent to 2000 million tons of CO2. That’s significantly more than the total CO2 emissions of the entire nation of Russia.

Citation, please? This sounds like bullshit, frankly, and an opening for someone to make some stupid arguments about climate change. “We shouldn’t have to force factories to regulate emissions as long as there are cow farts.”

Bianca, I don’t accept that framework, but even if I did it would still be on a case by case basis. (Again see German chancellors and economic austerity plans, surely you don’t count that as a proposal from the left?).

Locavorism doesn’t hold up well on inspection. That information came from some people vaguely on the right but appears to be accurate. We can either accept that information, critique that information, or reject that information.

A fair number of people above seem to want to reject that information out of tribalism.

Patrick S. O’Donnell 07.09.12 at 3:27 pm

“Otherwise, you indulge in a classic (informal) fallacy of argumentative reasoning, namely, the circumstantial ad hominem. (Being informal, such arguments are not necessarily fallacious, but in this instance, yours clearly is.)”

Please note that an ad hominem argument is one which relies on an irrelevant characteristic, not a relevant one. To the extent that the Mercatus Center is a junk science brothel, the argument that somebody is from the Mercatus Center is not ad hominem.

While Locavorism’s current excuses are a bit twee, there are other, far more interesting arguments to be made for local produce.

Consider a business model such as an existing restaurant and its suppliers. Outfits like Sysco dominate this market in the USA. The truck arrives every morning, offload boxes full of wholesale product, usually on a recurring basis.

Consider an old shopping mall, converted piecemeal to a hydroponic operation. It takes approximately 85 days from planting a beefsteak tomato to fruit maturity. Now the business model becomes a futures market, with options for delivery. If a restaurant can accept four kilos of tomatoes per day, the hydroponic operator can plan accordingly.

I choose the restaurant model because the mark-up percentage will support the admittedly higher cost of production. Yet that tomato will vine ripen to full maturity, producing a better product than Sysco’s tasteless pink musket ball.

“The circumstantial ad hominem argument is the questioning or criticizing of the person circumstances of an arguer, allegedly revealed, for example, in his actions, affiliations, or previous commitments….” This type of argument “is said to occur when the critic questions the sincerity or objectivity of an arguer or suggesting that the arguer has something to gain by supporting the argument he has advocated. The argument has sometimes been called “poisoning the well,” because it suggest that the arguer attacked has a hidden agenda–is supporting his side of the argument for personal gain or for other private and concealed reasons–and therefore cannot be trusted as a fair or reasonable exponent of an argument on this, or indeed, on any, issue.” That comes courtesy of Douglas Walton, one of the foremost authorities on the informal fallicies and indeed informal logic.

The characteristic you cite is not relevant unless you can demonstrate (an argument analysis is required here: e.g., demonstrate the use of ‘junk science’ in their article) precisely in which way it impacts the argument, as I noted above. The argument is found in their book as well, published by PublicAffairs (sic): how is that relevant to their argument? PublicAffairs does not have a reputation for publishing “junk science,” in fact, they have a nice track record for publishing worthwhile books. Again, the argument is presumptively innocent unless you can explain precisely what parts of it demonstrate a fealty to the Mercatus Center that acc0unt for the specifics of an argument that cannot stand by its own merits. If the selfsame argument can stand alone or apart from affiliation with the Center, what does that tell you?

In short, it remains an abusive ad hominem to dismiss their argument merely on the basis of their affiliation here, or because of its origins (oh, perhaps we could raise the genetic fallacy as well!), which is exactly what Josh G. did above.

@40: The supply of local fruit is limited, but in season it can be very good. The regional differences are much more cultural than a matter of commercial farming. In New England you can get very good seafood (expected), but because there is a lot of demand for Italian food we could also get cheap artichokes. In Texas and the southwest, Mexican food is popular and things like red bell peppers are cheaper. In the midwest you can get these things but they are costly.

@57: I know a lot of people who buy food from farmers markets or who are members of a farmshare. I’ve never heard any of them talk about lower greenhouse gas emissions; it’s about getting fresh food, supporting family farms, or getting organic produce. It is important to criticize people for things that they actually believe or value.

I can only second, third etc. the people who wonder about this bizarre strawman that locavores get turned into. I’ve lived in Berkeley, Boulder, and the North Side of Chicago, so I’ve seen and talked to my share of hardcore locavores: When you talk to them, they’ll mention concerns about the local agricultural landscape, supporting local business, knowing your food producer, quality of food, diversity of crops, general distrust of large agribusiness… etc. Food miles is something that rarely comes up, and even more rarely does it come up as a direct proxy for CO2 emissions.

PS- John, you say that “Although they briefly mention the hypothetical possibility of legislation, Desroches and Shimuzu are not primarily concerned with opposing government intervention.”

You are clearly not familiar with the standard structure of phony think-tank policy documents. These are designed to look and feel like real public policy papers so that they will pass muster under all but the most suspicious scrutiny. Then this paper can be quoted, footnoted, used to support talking points, ad infinitem, by lobbyists, columnists, and others who do the actual PR work.

So, when a lobbyist is talking to a legislative aide about country of origin labelling, he can now say, “you know, this whole locavore thing is a load of crap, there’s scientific proof that inefficient localized food production actually increases energy use. It creates less CO2 to ship a tomato from California to Maine than to grow that same tomato in Maine. I’ll send you a paper.” The aide will never read the paper, but the lobbyist has his talking point.

Tom @ #55:

<Livestock emissions (belching, in fact, for biological reasons, in the case of cows) represent 28% of total methane emissions – 80 million tons a year, which is equivalent to 2000 million tons of CO2. That’s significantly more than the total CO2 emissions of the entire nation of Russia.

Citation, please? This sounds like bullshit, frankly, and an opening for someone to make some stupid arguments about climate change. “We shouldn’t have to force factories to regulate emissions as long as there are cow farts.”

I can’t verify off the top of my head the exact numbers for the volume of cow farts, but the 20-year global-warming potential of methane is 72 times that of carbon dioxide.

@57

“Locavorism doesn’t hold up well on inspection. That information came from some people vaguely on the right but appears to be accurate. We can either accept that information, critique that information, or reject that information.”

No, “food miles” don’t hold up well on inspection. That doesn’t tell us much of anything about “locavorism”. This is just abuse of metonymy. “The information” is beside the point. What needs to be rejected is the representation of the opposing argument.

The argument is ignoratio elenchi.

Contra Patrick @ 46 & 62, from an inexpert position, one often has to trust that the arguments offered are relevant. That means one has to depend upon the sincerity of one’s interlocutor. And “sincerity” is an ad-hominem concept, often put to good use in navigating policy debate.

“In short, it remains an abusive ad hominem to dismiss their argument merely on the basis of their affiliation here, or because of its origins (oh, perhaps we could raise the genetic fallacy as well!), which is exactly what Josh G. did above.”

Don’t piss on my head and tell me its raining Patrick. These people are professional hacks. They lie every day, all day for a living. Look I have a romantic partner, a dog, a cat, friends, social commitments, laundry, a gym I should be working out at and more. I don’t have time to spend my life proving what has been proven many times before. Namely, that right wing think-tanks are full of unscrupulous liars. If you haven’t realized that by now you never will.

Dont forget though that cows are carbon neutral as the methane they generate comes from the plants they eat and the carbon of those plants come from the atmosphere. Methane is a stronger greenhouse gas but it has a atmospheric half life of 12 +-3 years meaning that overtime it converts either into plain old co2 or simple carbon dust that becomes the seed point for a water droplet.

Technically if the cows eat plants fed with hydrocarbon based fertilizers then thats going to constitute a net greenhouse gas production, but id blame the oil. Also lots of feedlot, non-organic cows are fed grain that wasn’t grown with super intensive agricultural methods.

North Americans definitely need to eat less meat but don’t forget that pasturage is in fact the ideal use for some agricultural lands such as the Midwest for example.

I can believe the Mercatus paper was funded by industry. But it still remains true that “locavorism” is an aesthetic position masquerading as a political one. This is important because it means that potentially perfectly plausible arguments are discredited by being associated with a non-credible one, that it’s important to “eat locally.” It’s not important to eat locally. Maybe you like locally grown food better (I liked the locally grown heirloom tomatoes you used to be able to get in New Jersey, personally), but that’s an aesthetic choice, not a moral imperative. The important arguments are in favor of organics, and against industrial agriculture, but they get hidden behind this peripheral issue of “eating locally”. The fact that it’s called “locavorism” and not “organivorism” makes it sound like for the promoters of the idea the important issue is eating locally, and the environmental issues are a side-benefit.

@76

Arguments “matching the facts” is a question of truth. Truth and sincerity are not the same thing. In a sincere statement, the assertion matches the internal psychological state.

The only way to determine sincerity is to observe behavior. Sincerity cannot be discursively established – it’s an infinite regress (I swear I’m telling the truth when I swear I’m telling the truth when I swear I’m telling the…)

Note that one can be unintentionally insincere (self-deception) or sincere (the Freudian slip).

As I said, the trust is presumptive, which means rebuttable, which means one can demonstrate precisely how and why those making an argument are not trustworthy. As I also said, the researchers in questions are not soley affiliated with Mercatus, it is not equivalent to their professional or academic identity, and the argument appears to me sufficiently strong to be at least plausible, however persuasive or unpersuasive I might find it. Again, their research is published in book form, so set aside Mercatus and look at the book and its publisher. OK, I’ve sufficiently repeated myself, sometimes one’s efforts fall on deaf ears for one reason or another. So be it.

All think tanks deliver what their patrons want in the same way ad agencies, pr firms and law firms do.

Most people do not have means to asses the type of garbage put out by Mercatus and its ilk. When they trot out Veronique de Rugy or Amity Schlaes who are english majors who recite one “zombie” economic idea after another and are never short of airtime or ink w/o meaningful push back it is easy to get cynical.

Rather than “take the argument serious”, I ask why do the patrons want this position advocated? What is their angle to make money off it? What is the think tank trying to do do epistemologically to the electorate or to the average market participant.

As an asset manager w/ 20 yrs experience (rather than a marxist of 35yrs) this borderline reflexive skepticism has served me well.

How seriously should the industry funded agnotology surrounding climate change be taken? That is about where I’m at w/ most rightwing think tanks.

I apologize if pointing this out is “tedious”.

“one has presumptive reason to trust the sincerity of the researchers given their academic and research backgrounds, which go outside of the Center”

I see your informal fallacy and counter it with… an informal fallacy?

Simply put, my position is that the best first question to ask is sometimes not, “is this claim false” but rather, “is this claim deceptive.” If someone is being deceptive you don’t dutifully check their premises, you dutifully check what they don’t say – which is to say you go elsewhere, unless you yourself are already an expert and can tell yourself what has been left out of the picture.

If one were to take that advice, one would quickly find out that ‘locavores’ do not center their position around the issue of food miles, and hence debunking food miles is not to the point of debunking locavorism.

As one review of the book puts it: “Not recommended for readers looking to become more informed about this issue; suitable for those who already align with the authors’ viewpoint.”

…and now a CT thread begins to resemble those commonly found at Volokh Conspiracy.

If you needed further evidence that this sort of topic is infested by tribalism, this thread would provide it. Or at least the first half, as in the second Silly Wabbit, Katherine, bianca.steele and a few others inject some balance to the cries of Stick it to the environmentalist! Even the very first commenter supports locally or small-farm or even occasionally organically grown food for pretty much the same core reasons I and the vast majority of my acquaintances would, but still considers it necessary to stress how cynical he is about the concepts of organic or locally grown food — and then is surprised that the Germans around him recoil. Maybe it’s because I’m German, but I certainly would think, too, that it’s intellectually dishonest to disparage those who profess the very tenets I base my actions on, even if I consider their adherence naive and occasionally mistaken. I, too, am annoyed by self-important middle-class (liberal or conservative) hipster self-confessed locavores who are a ready market for upscale cooking implements and haven’t spent a brain cell on understanding agriculture and food production. From there to put down everyone who comes to the conclusion that supporting local and/or organic food production is a good thing — talk about a strawman! These are hard and fiddly problems with many twists and turns and unforeseen consequences, so cynicism and put-downs are inappropriate.

It is clear that it makes a lot of sense to produce a number of food staples and even non-perishables (such as canned vegetables) in locations where the ingredients grow plentifully, and distribute them widely if shipping can be done with little energy use. When I lived in London, until 1.5 years ago, my local Waitrose (in an affluent neighbourhood — Richmond — full of organic-buying Tory or LibDem voting middle class peoples, often with gardens) beautiful pre-season organic purple-sprouting broccoli. From Zimbabwe. This surprising discovery seems wrong to me if I’m concerned about food production and the environment. (I’m not completely dogmatic about this — a friend of mine defends agriculture in Africa for export purposes to further economic development — but in the long run I just don’t think this is right.) When Eyjafjallajokull erupted, the local supermarkets suddenly had no cheap cut flowers. We discovered they come from Kenya. Oops: we should have. We’re all involved in economic choices regarding our food, and at the very least we should be familiarizing ourselves with the major trade-offs our particular situation and options entail. GM and country/region-of-origin labels don’t all on their own suggest any particular kind of action, but are merely a first step towards providing data about the food we buy (or as it were, don’t).

Now I live in sub-arctic North America, 20 miles outside a (small) city, where I work. We are on the road system — many communities round here are not — and have two major grocery stores and a Walmart, where the quasi totality of the produce is trucked in from many hundreds of miles away. The growing season is short — and freezing can happen any time (some neighboring weather stations for example registered sub-freezing temperatures last night, even though we’ve just had a very hot June) — but at least it’s intense, and some vegetables grow very well here. If I buy locally grown food, I pay substantially more than the cheapest option at the chain grocery store, but a little less than if I bought the trucked-in organic options. We have a garden, as do a large number of my acquaintances. Keeping chickens is common, too — we buy eggs from small hobby producers — and between the local university’s cooperative extension service and other gardener / small-holding farmer clubs a substantial variety and depth of instruction is available. Also, while you may scoff at the idea of berry-picking, those of us who get through the winter with two gallons of frozen lowbush cranberries (lingonberries) won’t. The garden will only pay off over a few years, and the local CSA we subscribe to is also not a money saver, but both clearly add to the quality of food available to us. The reasons for preferring the local products are pretty much the same unobtrusively reasonable ones that others name: I’d like there to be farms around and can see myself how they treat the soil, their animals and the local community (such as, running school gardens in all the elementary schools, which I think is great), so I buy from them; I think a minimum of local production is a wise thing in case the three or so transport routes down to the lower latitudes get interrupted; I believe artisanal skills of living frugally off the earth should be cultivated and not lost; reducing the amount of diesel used transporting mass-produced vegetables is a good thing, as is reducing food waste. This doesn’t make me a hipster locavore. Some things are easier to make locally, some a lot easier to make remotely. And I couldn’t get through the winter, even if I could pick up a quarter of a moose or so, plus a chest freezer to store it in. (I don’t hunt, and that won’t change, but of course I’ve eaten moose and caribou, which can’t be bought, at dinner parties and potlucks.)

This is at topic for thoughtfulness and carefully teasing apart causes, effects and ulterior motives. Not for put-downs and cynicism.

That’s quite a strange post, Mr. Quiggin.

“What’s interesting about this debate is that in intellectual terms both parties are on the opposite side to the the one they imagine.”

What is there to suggest that Mr. Desroches and Mr. Shimizu are on any other side of this issue than the one they think they are?

“If Mercatus won’t support free commercial speech, who will?”

Claiming that someone is saying something stupid and/or dangerous doesnt mean that youre against their right to say it. Que that Voltaire/Tallentyre quote.

“To sum up, true believers in the free market should be entirely indifferent as to the reality or otherwise of ‘food miles’ just as they are to the vast numbers of meaningless marketing claims with which we are bombarded. If ‘buy local’ is a successful sales strategy, why should the Mercatus Centre care whether it is actually saving the planet.”

This is all wrong. True believers in a free market can certainly recognize that we dont live in such a world. They can certainly also believe some consumer choices are better than others. You dont have to believe that humans are perfectly rational to be a free market advocate.

“Having spent most of my adult life in working class jobs: truck driver (the first time, delivering office furniture, and later for a recycling center back in the days when recycling was a far more labor-intensive operation than it is today: we used to run down the streets picking up bags of newspapers and throwing them on the run into the back of trucks, only to later strap them onto pallets stacked eight feet high), sign shop laborer, dishwasher, security guard, amusement park food service and ride operator, forest service worker (trail construction and maintenance), including time on a fire crew (where I met my future wife over 33 years ago), firefighter (contract fire crew), resident apartment manager (for a little money off the rent), landscape laborer, medical lab services driver, construction laborer, and finish carpenter (among other jobs)”

Luxury. Sheer Luxury. I had to get up in the morning at ten o’clock at night half an hour before I went to bed, drink a cup of sulphuric acid, work twenty-nine hours a day down mill, and pay mill owner for permission to come to work, and when we got home, our Dad and our mother would kill us and dance about on our graves singing Hallelujah.

And you try and tell the young people of today that ….. they won’t believe you.

You are unlikely to impress me with your working class credentials Patrick. I do however apologize for calling you a “pompous twit”. It was uncalled for. I do however stand by my position that if someone lies to me hundreds of times in a row it is reasonable to doubt their claims. That is not called an ad hominem, that is called learning from experience.

Mpavictoria: you knew the names Desroches and Shimizu before today? You were exposed to them in hundreds of papers and found that those two were liars in all of them? Can you narrow it down to the top two other egregious lying papers and tell us about them without consulting google?

What ‘learning from experience’ should we take away if it turns out you had no idea who they were and know nothing about their other papers?

Mpavictoria: you knew the names Desroches and Shimizu before today? You were exposed to them in hundreds of papers and found that those two were liars in all of them? Can you narrow it down to the top two other egregious lying papers and tell us about them without consulting google?

Sebastian H, the same argument applies to you. Since Desroches and Shimizu are arguing against locavorism, how can you be sure that they have provided a fair reflection of all the arguments on behalf of locavorism? You were exposed to them in hundreds of papers and found that they were wrong in all of them?

The comments have certainly shown that tribalism is alive, well, and happy to interfere with rational thought.

I live less than 200 metres from Davies Park, a rugby league club in West End, Brisbane. (I have no doubt that John Quiggin knows the place.) On Saturday mornings and early afternoons, they hold outdoor markets [*]. Because of my location, I know a lot of people who shop there, including my wife. There’s a mix of people that goes there. It’s especially popular with Asian overseas students; I guess the environment reminds them of home, where open air markets are common. A lot of local food is sold there, but then Brisbane is a sub-tropical city where snow is unheard of, and frost is rare; a lot of food can be sourced locally. It’s actually a nice day out wandering along, running into people you know, talking with friends busking.

That’s why I’m finding this thread a little surreal. Reifying the phenomenon as “locavorism” seems to be missing the point. People visit the markets for many reasons, some ideological – there’s less preservatives than your average supermarket, for instance, and a few do like buying locally. Mostly, it’s because they like shopping there and like the food they purchase. At least you get more sunshine than under the fluoros at Coles. If you told people that they were locavores, most would either not understand or look at you as if you were mad.

As for marking the phenomena under the “DFH” label: I pity people like Mercatus who do. In a sane world, visiting the local markets should not mark one as part of a subgroup or a tribe.

[Or markets for short. The term “farmer’s market” is not used in Australia.]

I’m going to gently, ever so slightly abuse my host’s kindness by saying that think tanks serve a purpose and have a function. They provide something which has a family resemblance to scientific research. I think it likely this paper is addressed to the COOL (countries of origin labeling?) legislation; much more so than that is addressed to smug locavores. Because, where’s their nickel in that? Somebody paid for this. It’s not the case that no think tank has ever produced any good work. It is the case that as legislators come in exhausted from fund-raising, wearily starting to fund-raise for the next two-year (or six-year) term, they have to rely on their staff. And the staff, likewise weary, with no Congressional non-partisan research office to rely on, must go and ask the companies proposing the laws (or opposing them as may be) for talking points and ex post facto ‘reasons’ to support (or denounce) the legislation. And then someone hands them a Mercatus paper, or something from the Heritage Foundation, and Bob’s your uncle. Yes, the one who wants to nuke the Gulf of Florida. Sucks to be you, l’il niece chile.

So, certainly it is fair to consider carefully arguments made in good faith. But it cannot always be wrong to say: “life is short, and I need not read this Cato Institute paper on whether to raise the top marginal tax rate in order to grapple with their serious arguments, which have never been made before in such detail or with such care, and also I want to read it to the end to find out what happens–do they support raising taxes or not??!”

Having said that, let me turn around and say three cheers for this: “To various commenters, please stop abusing each other. This kind of slanging match is one of the reasons, I think, why we have trouble attracting and retaining female commenters (not making presumptions about the gender of all participants here, just referring to a general blog problem).”

God yes this type of thread is so tedious. Bianca Steele is, as ever, wading in admirably, while I look at the thread nibbling my bottom lip and saying, “if I get in there I am going to end up talking smack about Patrick S. O’Donnell’s mom, and there ain’t no call for that.”

I will pour oil on the waters by relating some humourous anecdotes. When I was little I lived on an organic farm, that was modestly communal–we had more land so our friends living nearby put in labor to share in the crops. We had some serious problems. We could kill chickens just fine, and home-grown free-range chicken really is the best. And the eggs were great. We couldn’t kill the rabbits. We had to have another friend do it and then they came back dismantled and my brother and I devoured them happily while my mom and dad, really quite amazingly stoned, pushed the rabbit around on the plates sadly. Speaking of which, we grew lots of good things: corn, peanuts, crowder peas, pigeon peas, okra, tomatoes, strawberries, peaches, sunchokes, lettuce, mint, thyme, basil, etc. but our best crop was certified organic, locally grown, deliciously green…well, purple at the ends actually. My dad is the master. He will make you fall out your chair. We cleared out a big patch in the woods, invisible from the house, accessible only by a narrow path, they didn’t used to have helicopters flyover in those days. And I learned to sex plants when I was just a girl; it’s my secret skill. Then there were arguments about proceeds. You see, we seceded from the communal part when we realized we might become profitable rather than just feed all, I don’t know, 11 or 12 adults and a bunch of kids. So we got even more guns and even more pit bulls and we all lived happily ever after. Except my parents got divorced mid-way through, but my step-moms is the best. (N.B. This was all a long time ago. No one in my family is doing anything illegal now at all. Well, I haven’t texted them in 12 hours but how much trouble could they get into? God, don’t answer that.)

From Alex’s quotes:

“While air freight is typically singled out by activists as both the most environmentally damaging and most energy-intensive mode of transport, it is actually a minor contributor (10 percent) to total CO2 emissions.”

If 10% is minor, every factor in CO2 emissions except HGV UK emissions is minor.
There is no tension between being most damaging+intensive, and also being minor. As it stands, air freight makes a relatively gigantic contribution to CO2 emissions from food transit (1% of kilometer tons, 10% of emissions).

To put the argument the right way round, one should have said something like, ‘even though air freight is the most damaging and intensive form of transportation, its use is already effectively minimized among transit sources of CO2 emissions, and transit sources of CO2 emissions are already effectively minimized among all sources of CO2 emissions in agriculture.’

That the authors put the argument a very wrong way around perhaps speaks to the ad-hom debate, but that the argument does, at least, speak to the issue of directing policy in order to best minimize costs perhaps speaks to the original post’s point.

At the same time though, the central concern does not strike me as especially anti-free-marketeer. Minimizing costs is all well and good among free-marketeers. In fact, part of their argument here has to be that prices are doing their jobs – non-local food is cheaper because it is more energy efficient. No need to think about social cost, really, the price signal is doing that work for you. Don’t be silly and try to second guess the market, kiddies.

This perhaps speaks to a general form of anti-fadism a free-marketeer has no problem supporting – any fad which ‘fetishizes’ higher production costs. It seems a little forceful to try to press the free marketeer to declare every choice sacred. Some choices are clearly not sacred: inefficient ones!

In fact there’s a whole array of consumer choices we can reliably predict the free marketeer to oppose: “buy union,” “buy fair-trade,” “buy American,” “boycott sweatshops,” and now, “buy local.”

In all those cases, for the free marketeer, people are not listening to prices, which should be telling them all they need to know – that non-union, non-sweatshop, foreign, free trade goods are inherently more ethical because they are cheaper and hence more efficient. The leftist is trying to obscure the power of the price system, which can do all our thinking and judging for us.

What’s happening here, I think is a manifestation of the fact that, in the US context, tribalism generally trumps ideological consistency. 

Meh. I can point to multiple threads on Dailykos in which Richardson is hounded for her reflexive anti-GMO stance. I found this conclusion uncompelling at best. It reads like an uninspired Malcolm Gladwell “turns out” essay. Mercatur is disingenuously fighting against country of origin labeling and Jill Richardson is responding from her niche as a naively naturalistic enviro advocate. What’s really so interesting about that? And it’s a stretch to conflate the scalabilty of backyard chicken health with Libertarian ideology, to say the least.

On the general topic of motivations for buying produce from the farmer at the local market, my family’s reasons include:

– Driving through the Central Coast of California and seeing the large skull and cross bones warning placards posted at the edges of fields warning of the toxicity of the various agrochemicals being applied, and the workers in the fields wearing protective gear (including some sort of covering for the eyes, nose and mouth). I have various reactions to these sights: relief that there is some sort of requirement that at least some farms/operators are heeding requiring the postings and protective gear; (perhaps unwarranted) suspicion that not all farms are in compliance with such requirements; concern that the protective gear is not as effective as it ought to be; concern that not all humans and other creatures who are exposed to airborne drift/surface water runoff/contaminated groundwater are protected as are the workers actually in the fields during application and/or some time following application. Thus, a large motivation for our purchase of produce farmed with fewer agrochemical inputs is not driven by concerns re: our own consumption of residual pesticides/herbicides, but rather a desire to buy produce from farms where the workers and local communities do not have the same exposure to as wide a range and intense amounts of agrochemicals.

– We pay more to buy from farmers with decent labor practices. Living in California, it is hard for me to conceive of how one could be unaware of the tremendous contribution of immigrant labor to the US food supply, and how poorly these folks are generally treated. We can pay more to buy food from farmers who treat their workers fairly, and to the extent we are able to do so we make this a priority.

– The range of produce and quality from the market are better than we could get in even the best local supermarkets. We pay a premium for this, but I have a background in the food business and we have a strong family tradition focused on buying good food from people we know, taking care in preparing it and enjoying it together and with our friends. Yes, we spend more in time and dollars on our food budget than many other families in equally comfortable circumstances. This is pure choice, and we are incredibly fortunate to be able to make this choice. That said, when we were significantly less comfortable, we still spent what would seem to many a disproportionate amount of time on food (buying, preparing and enjoying), although back in the day remarkably little money. More wine and fewer beans these days, as near as I can tell ;).

For the perspective of an actual farmer, I highly recommend reading the writing of Andy Griffin of Mariquita Farm. He provides a very practical and experienced perspective on the challenges of running a small farm, informed by a long experience in many aspects of agriculture.

Andy on the sorry history of mesclun: http://www.ladybugletter.com/?p=24

On where your tomatoes come from: http://www.ladybugletter.com/?p=51

Encounter with East Coast media establishment: http://www.ladybugletter.com/?p=55

On paying a premium to eat like a campesino: http://www.ladybugletter.com/?p=63

And on the huge blind spot for most “food progressives” that is farm labor: http://www.ladybugletter.com/?p=64

Enjoy . . .

“But it still remains true that “locavorism” is an aesthetic position masquerading as a political one. ”

That’s simply not true. Locavorism is, like many successful political movements, both political and aesthetic. It’s important to understand what “locavorism” – as practiced by anyone who even knows that label – means. It does not mean: “buy from the closest factory farm”. A typical farmers market, the hub of the “buy local” movement, is populated by small farmers, most (in many farmers markets all) of them practicing sustainable agriculture, though only some of them find it feasible and or worthwhile to be certified organic. That means by buying local I
– support local, small business and stay away from large agribusiness
– support sustainable agriculture, including less pesticides, less mono-culture, if animal products are involved less animal cruelty.
– have a direct connection to my food supplier. As this also means I can talk food and food policy with the people producing this, that’s politically quite relevant.
– support a more diverse local agricultural landscape – especially in the midwest that’s a pretty major issue.

As anyone who has spend a little time on the topic knows, “organic,” while on balance usually still a good thing, has become a rather problematic label, diluted by the influx of big business players who push the envelope of what’s still “organic,” and increasingly dominated by big food manufacturers: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/08/business/organic-food-purists-worry-about-big-companies-influence.html?pagewanted=all if you haven’t seen it. It’s increasingly hard to know what you get when you buy “organic.” Afaik the condition of farmworkers on the big organic farms like Earthbound are also quite problematic etc.
On the other hand, with a CSA – the mark of the true locavore – I know exactly where my food comes from, I see photos from the farm, can go visit if I want to, talk to the farmer when I pick up the box , I have a better sense of the working conditions on the farm etc.
While it’s possible to achieve some of these things without buying local, given information issues that’s actually quite hard.
That’s why people who care about the politics of food often start with “buy local”. If you stop right there it probably doesn’t make a lot of sense. But few “locavores” do.

I’m deleting a bunch of back-and-forth abuse – JQ.

Ruminants: http://www.epa.gov/rlep/faq.html
“Globally, ruminant livestock produce about 80 million metric tons of methane annually”

Methane as an equivalent to CO2: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_equivalent
“the GWP for methane over 100 years is 25”.

CO2 emissions by country: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dioxide_emissions

The problem for me, and for people like me, is there is no agreed and consistent way of measuring “impact”. It’s simply not feasible to expect every person to know how to balance food miles with diesel efficiency with cultivation efficiency in different countries etc etc down an enormous list of variables.

That’s why we have to rely on marks and accreditations and the like by people who do have the information and the knowledge and experience to interpret and present it. Any volunteers?

BWaring 107
Agree that think tanks sometimes serve a purpose but re “no Congressional non-partisan research office”: there is the Congressional Research Service, though I’m pretty sure it does not have the resources to churn out lots of short-turn-around papers on particular items in bills. Does more long-term analysis, I think.

Um, public transportation? There are places where few people drive personal cars to either supermarket or farmers market.

John Quiggin @119:

” I think the relevant question is whether the supermarket is closer (by car) than the farmers market or other source of local food.”

If you’re replying to Katherine @ 188, I believe that the point she was making could be expressed as the fact that there are three majors steps here: local production/bulking, distance shipping/mass processing and finally local break-in-bulk/take to the house.

Localvorism removes step 2.

@John Quiggin

Few organisation do more repeating of what you would call “Zombie Economic Ideas” than the Mercatus center. Organisations like Mercatus ARE the reason why these economic ideas won’t die! In your opinion is the organisation acting in good faith with the economic ideas they promote (Krugman does not think they are) or are they cynically promoting ideas the underwriters want promoted.

If you don’t trust or believe them in your area of expertise why should anyone who is not an expert in environmental issues allow themselves to be influenced by work they fund in there? Most people are not sophisticated enough to identify “zombie ideas” in areas outside of their area of expertise..or for most of the electorate/mkt participants..ANY plausible sounding zombie ideas!

I apologize if this is considered off topic or ad hominem.

The food miles concept is just the most recent influx of environmental mercantilism. The point is that humans are naturally inclined to see the world in oversimplified and wholly incorrect mercantilist terms. Economists do us a favor by pointing out these cognitive biases before they gain political or social momentum.

Mercatus is providing illumination to counter our ignorance. Since when is telling the truth and educating people on important but counterintuitive concepts an example of “tribalism?”

J.Q., #119:

I think the relevant question is whether the supermarket is closer (by car) than the farmers market or other source of local food.

Yes and no. As with so many things about food production and distribution, there is a strong local component to this. So decisions should be made based on knowing the full range of options available at one point in space and time, and their consequences, locally and remotely. Some relevant thoughts:

1. From a text quoted by Desrochers, I get a number of approx. 1500 g CO2/km and ton of produce for transport in a refrigerated truck. The AlCan highway is 2500 km long, and that only gets me to the middle of British Columbia. Let’s say we double the distance. That gets me to about 1500 g CO2 per apple or 15000 g for 2 kg of produce (a realistic amount I may buy at one sitting). I drive a car with a terrible fuel economy, pretty typical for around here, let’s say 300 g CO2 per km. Going to the supermarket (or the farmers market) may add anything between 2 and 10 km to that day’s drive: 600-3000 g CO2. (Yes, that’s what we call, sexistically, a milk maid’s calculation in German.)

2. When I lived in the UK and France, none of this would have mattered because I pretty much never drove to either the supermarket or the farmer’s market (or the other open-air food market which only partially consisted of farmers selling their own harvest). I walked or biked. Also, the distances were small enough that pretty much anything produced in the country, and even the EU, could for practical purposes considered “local”. Other factors were much more important.

(2a. To the commenter who said that the farmer’s market is on the average nearly always farther away than the supermarket, that’s only true if you strictly buy at the closest supermarket. In my experience people have preferences.)

3. There’s stewardship for the local environment. And there’s reaching a minimum level of independence of not-always-reliable transport routes. Earlier this year, a simple wash-out due to flooding closed down the AlCan for a few days. Trucks got backed up somewhere in the Yukon. The produce departments developed visible gaps within days.

4. There’s no either-or between farmer’s and supermarket, at least not realistically for the mass consumer. We are also completely neglecting transformed/processed food, where transport of the ingredients to the processing plant, and the transformation process itself have to be taken into account. (The very first example I remember being confronted with about travel distances of foodstuffs was, as a child in the 80s, a diagram that showed how strawberry yogurt involved shipping berries from Spain and milk from Poland to some other country to be processed. So much for the anecdote.)

5. I agree with those who point out that the Desrochers paper and your argument are relying too much on everything else staying equal. Once we’ve figured out what reorganisations of the food production and distribution system would be beneficial, pressures can emerge to implement changes. That very much includes reducing energy consumption at the end consumer.

6. If it needs stressing, I agree that it is vital to consider the type of data that Desrochers points to, if only to eradicate any remaining prejudices one might hold. I _like_ our local tomatoes, but am aware that most hothouse production methods will be vastly more energy wasteful than if they were shipped efficiently from Mexico. (Parallel to his Holland/Spain example.) However again, local changes can make huge differences. What if the Alaskan or Canadian hothouse is fed by a geothermal source? (This is not hypothetical – I have actual hothouse vegetable available to me that are grown in a resort down the road that is off the electric grid and *nearly* has managed to survive without the diesel generator.)

http://mercatus.org/veronique-de-rugy. You have heard of Tyler Cowen also?

Small sample. I will say it explicitly… Mecatus promotes economic ideas John considers “zombie” relentlessly and successfully and maybe …cynically?

As market participant I try not to “have a side”. I try to question my actions and epistemology as well as that of other participants.

Upon first glance the work the John cites reminds me of industry funded climate change agnotology..just done for global agribusiness in this case. I admit I am much more knowledgeable in economic/finance than environmental issues so I was reflexively skeptical. On Wallstreet if paid research says buy..it make me more tempted to get bearish. Paid advertising and PR are not always completely corrupt, deceptive and misleading though.

Where I am in the prop trading/hedgefund world, the groupthink pitfall locations are in much different places than the world of academia which is where I assume you are . In 2007 the group think in my world was very much centered in Mercatus world. I was lucky enough to be to take the work of Quiggen and Krugman and their world view seriously and I prospered as a result of their descriptions and prescriptions of the nature of the crisis. I come to this site for fresh perspective and to help get me out of my world of groupthink. As a result of this I could not agree with you points about the perils of groupthink.

Maybe the last 20 years wallstreet/think tank/pr based research have made me too cynical regarding any hired research.

Right, it would require a careful calculation to determine which way the effect would go. Which means that it’s incredibly unpromising grounds to make public policy on, or to make individual choices by.

Having spent an hour this afternoon potting up chilli plants instead of working on a paper, I wonder what Desroches & Shimizu would make of the whole grow-your-own thing (if anything, in the absence of any forthcoming legislation to lobby about). Costed in terms of my own time, these will probably be the most ridiculously expensive chillis ever, and the absence of a Caribbean climate in the West Country means that I’d probably get more Scoville units for my buck from an import, but how to reckon up the carbon footprint of a bag of peat-free compost delivered by the local hardware store versus flying the chillis in from Kenya or wherever?

chris @ 122
Here there are “farmer’s markets,” usually every week in summer, at the town common or the parking lot Walmart’s now taken over for RV’s, and which probably wouldn’t exist without the interest in local food (and which are partly things like jam and crafts and fish (25 mi inland), and “farm stands,” at the farms, which might sell stuff from outside, and which might be out of the way, or might be on the state highway between towns, so you’d pass them anyway.

Sebastian H @ 130
On the other side I suppose, there’s a positive definition for “tribalism,” which means something like, “we can get things done if everybody pretty much agrees already, so it’s efficient to sort people out so everybody on one side is doing the same thing.” There’s certainly something to be said for paying closer attention to arguments against your of your own position, to make it stronger, than to those of the other side, whether for or against. That’s not at all the same thing as only listening to people who share your position, but it’s also not the same thing as only listening to people who oppose your position while only being nice to people who never oppose you.

And that’s a different definition of “tribalism” from the one that I assumed JQ was using, which assumes there’s an accepted, bipartisan truth that’s only opposed by the less educated among us.

Katherine, it’s not clear which way they add up. A total switch to locavorism could lead to a net increase in energy use, since it involves eliminating large-scale shipping by sea in favor of many small-scale trips over land. So collectively you could make the global warming problem worse.

Yes, thank you, please read comment 121, wherein I in fact make this very point. That any single individual is very unlikely to have the resources and knowledge to find out, and wouldn’t it be nice if someone with the knowledge and resources did so.

Oops, don’t know how that happened.

And how about fertilizers which are made from petro chemicals and shipped around the globe rather than as byproduct of the organic waste on site, water table depletion, soil erosion.

How about local economics? Doesn’t the local community benefit from a farmer driving his produce to the local farmers market, taking all of his income back to his farm which he can spend in his local community, rather than funneling cash as licensing fees and for sterile seed, fertilizer and pesticides & herbicides, sometimes half way around the world to Monsanto?

Seems this debate is futile if it revolves only around food miles and resulting carbon emissions.

Apples are pretty unusual in sea-transportability. A hell of a lot of food is air-freighted, which makes no kind of environmental sense at all, and as has been noted above, in general anyone who knows enough to describe themselves as a “locavore” knows enough to take a fairly nuanced and heuristic view of “food miles”. This is a big difference between left and right think tanks, in terms of the propagation of zombie ideas; food miles is now pretty much brown bread as a concept among left-environmentalist experts and it had a really quite short half-life.

In unrelated news, I do not go out and see every Michael Bay movie when it comes out, on the off chance that this time he might have come up with a modern Casablanca. I am surprised that so many of our commenters apparently do.

Local accountability sounds a lot more promising than energy savings. It would be nice if the producers of my foods lived closely enough to ensure I could go throw pebbles at their livestock if they did something unconscionable. I guess this falls under AAMCommons’ externalities? Anything that makes commercial infrastructure easier to disrupt ought to be welcome, even if its purported energy/carbon savings turn out to be ephemeral…

bianca steele’s mention at #141 of receptiveness towards contrarian views, from your own camp vs. from an opposing ideological position, is relevant to the meta-conversation on debate style going on in several CT threads. I’d like to evaluate anyone’s argument on its own merits but realistically there will be intellectually dishonest people who’re out only for one-upmanship, gotchas and being perceived as the winner. Thus the invaluable character of honest critique from within one’s own “tribe” (to come back to this word, little fitting as it is here). Conversely, I can’t stand those who choose to put down the very position they base their actual attitudes on just because a few of the more mainstream representatives of the position turn somewhat faddish. There is value in loyalty to those who honestly pursue compatible goals (and to be courteous to those who profess such goals even if their position is incoherent).

If Mr Desrochers advances some small and approximately reasonable, if limited points with the ulterior motive to convince us that country-of-origin labeling is harmful (because he really believes it or because he’s paid to advance the notion, no matter), then shame on him. And those benighted consumers should be given access to information to correctly evaluate such labels, not be protected from their noxious influence.

I tried to figure out his data on Kenyan versus Dutch cut roses. First of all, it must date back from the first half of the 2000s, and second, the paper he’s referencing turns out to be a 3-page synopsis that is thin in methodology and detail. Despite having, through my employer, access to a pretty complete set of literature in Natural Resource Management (the researcher’s field), I couldn’t find a peer-reviewed publication (or indeed anything a little more substantial). Not that I precisely doubt their results, but I’d like to evaluate how the findings — approx. a factor 6 more CO2 emissions per 12,000 cut flowers for the Dutch producer than for the Kenyan — would evolve in time and how they are exactly toted up. For example, for the Dutch case, 99% fossil fuel for the energy production is indicated. Now the Netherlands is advancing innovative methods of “zero-emissions” greenhouses, that is, greenhouse units that are integrated with renewable energy sources. This sort of thing is not only a possible contribution to the wider economy in the Netherlands — sustainable engineering etc — but may have the potential to be rolled out in larger scale in, say, Dutch cut flower production. At the same time, I’d guess that Kenya’s revenues from horticulture (which I do not want to disparage at all!) will have the tendency of increasing carbon emissions in this country in the future. Nothing’s easy. Kenya deserves development. (No one really needs cut flowers, though.)

“This is a big difference between left and right think tanks, in terms of the propagation of zombie ideas; food miles is now pretty much brown bread as a concept among left-environmentalist experts and it had a really quite short half-life.”

We in the Antipodes still get US/UK TV shows with a lag of several months, and the lag of ideas is probably even longer – ideas that are shambling zombies in their country of origin can be tarted up as new and fresh for us – I’m still seeing food miles and virtual water here.

But the Left-Right difference is important, and is now, I think, deeply entrenched in the structure of the rightwing tanks. The general style on the right is to defend every inch against the left. But once someone is paid to do that, they will also hold their ground against anyone on the right who dares to suggest that some particular point of orthodoxy has outlived its usefulness. Orchestrating a unanimous switch can be done (eg the mandate) but it’s hard to do.

John Quiggin, #154:

It’s not obvious to me that “produced for local market” = “not industrial”. Using greenhouses to produce warm-climate plants in a cold country is an obvious counter-example.

Could you elaborate? Does the addition of artificial heating make an industrial undertaking out of a small-scale greenhouse operation? Does it make a difference of the heating comes from a local geothermal source? (This is the kind of options that I have in my cold corner of the world — and the local hothouse tomatoes still taste a lot better than those trucked in thousands of miles from Mexico, possibly because they’ve been developed from “heirloom” varieties that have been grown in the region for a while. But what the CO2 impact is I shudder to think, in some cases. My own tomatoes, however, are only beginning to blush and will probably still mostly get me green salsa (with no greenhouse at all).)

Otherwise, I’d agree with your thrust and think that there’s just no way of analysing case-by-case the ecological (including water, CO2/greenhouse emissions, soil, toxic emissions and residues, erosion, euthrophication, impact on heat budgets) and economic/development impact of each production mode, at the source, during transport and transformation, and at the end consumer.

Hi Patrick @148. I’m afraid John beat you to the punch on getting married, although he didn’t actually ask my dad for my hand in marriage first, causing much anger and grief in the Waring home. I thought my dad would think that kind of thing “too square” but it turned out he likes being the patriarch and was angry for years. He still has guns useful for country living, and a whole bunch not useful for country living, but that are just awesome and fun to fire at the range, like my stepmom’s chromed Colt .45 revolver. That is a lot of gun. He also has pit bulls and everything else needed to make sitting down on the floating dock on the May river as the sun sets and the stars come out be a beautiful proposition. Also, due to practicing many times every day since 1966(!) he can roll the most perfect…ah…handrolled cigarette containing only tobacco that you can imagine. I would say he’d love to meet you, but you know, he’s incredibly paranoid for some reason.

My own intuition is, roughly, that production that takes place under a roof is industrial, while production that takes place in the open air is not.

That’s a very strange assumption. Every farm I’ve ever seen had a barn to house livestock – it gets really cold in Europe. According to your definition farming in Europe is per se industrial and has always been.

I don’t think zeroing in on any one aspect of food production is helpful. I like saffron and olive oil, which would be rather hard to produce locally, but generally agree with the agenda of Slow Food.

John Quiggin, #159:

My own intuition is, roughly, that production that takes place under a roof is industrial, while production that takes place in the open air is not.

Yeah, no, that one looks like it’s more useful in your corner of the world than in my cold one, where even small-scale hobby gardening (done by people with full-time non-farming jobs) can benefit from a (cold) greenhouse or a shelter for chickens or rabbits, even if they don’t overwinter. Also, aquaculture, some forms of commercial fisheries, large-scale monoculture staple crop farming of the kind you see in France or the US, don’t work. Even the “industrial” label isn’t all that helpful — I’d expect it to imply mass production (both 2000 and 50 heads of cattle would qualify), standardization (likely the case) and an artificial, usually technogenic work and production environment. It’s not clear where many farm types fall on this industrial/artisanal spectrum and how their location correlates with potential beneficial or noxious ecological effects.

Compare to more mainstream categories for farming practices: intensive vs. extensive; organic soil and livestock management vs. conventional; family/small business sized companies vs. third party owned, which I think are more useful though of course the naive approach that would equate large, corporate-owned and conventional with “bad” is way too coarse. It’s a fascinating research area, though with sometimes surprising results and a lot of space for creativity and innovation. Realistically, we also need the ability to produce large amounts of food and to ensure each locality’s food security (including robustness against disruption of transport), and as another commenter said, even small operations can have terrible impacts.

For the record, of course my hunch would be largely in favour of I eating your free-roaming Australian beef, provided it can be shipped to me efficiently, compared to feedlot farmed Mid-Western meat, but we’re not great meat eaters at home and pretty much all beef I buy for cooking, via a local grocery store, comes from a farm I drive by twice a day and can see the 40 or so heads of black Angus on their 100+ ha pasture. It’s even cheaper than the high-quality range from the big-box grocery store.

Just a (almost) random pick: “While air freight is typically singled out by activists as both the most environmentally damaging and most energy-intensive mode of transport, it is actually a minor contributor (10 percent) to total CO2 emissions.”

10% is not minor, and the share is likely to increase unless oil prices prevent further expansion of air traffic. And of course, while air freight causes less emissions in absolute terms, per unit it is without doubt the most environmentally damaging and most energy-intensive mode of transport. To call this concoction an “engineering-based (and entirely convincing) debunking of the concept of food miles” – I’m sorry. I’ll put this down to tribalism. Quiggin wouldn’t swallow such a nonsense if it weren’t for a tribal aversion to the alternative food movement.

Thanks Alex 96, merian 93 and others.

A hell of a lot of food is air-freighted, which makes no kind of environmental sense at all

It’s not as insane as might be imagined. In general, food is airfreighted between countries where there is a significant mismatch between demand in different directions (and hence, a significant mismatch between price in different directions). Lots of important things are airfreighted to Mombasa, whereas Kenya has few exports that generally require airfreighting to the UK, so planes typically fly back with the hold half-empty.

This means that the (financial and environmental) cost of transporting beans or broccoli by air from Mombasa to London is solely the marginal cost of the extra fuel required to lift said beans, which is a substantial degree lower than would generally be the case for airfreight. If capacity were charged on the basis of average cost, the business wouldn’t be financially viable.

I’d be skeptical of the proposition of following Michael Pollan’s path down too far. Admittedly, many people I’m in broad agreement with admire him, but I’m afraid there’s just too much about him that’s not going anywhere. His anti-scientific stances, for example, and his quasi-fetishistic noble-savage-like attitude to certain ancestral diets, while waving away contradictions. But all that isn’t really hitting what rubs me the wrong way, so I consulted a friend who’s had a long-standing interest in agriculture. To repeat her point here, Pollan is an advocate of the consumer, and doesn’t seem to care or actually know much anything of the constraints under which producers do their work. It’s all very two-dimensional. There are the good local organic small-scale farmers, and the evil conventional food system. Like, where do these guys fit in? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48H7zOQrX3U . And yeah, gotta feed everybody — I also want to get the industrial mass-production and the corporate profits out of farming. But we DO need to scale up, both globally and regionally/locally, and also scale DOWN to the poorest, both globally and within the societies where we live. So things are connected. A society that allows their poorest to be very much poorer than the median has a harder time feeding everyone quality food.

Well merian take from Pollan what you like. It seems however that you’ve read a different book because I don’t remember anything about noble savages. He does have a short chapter on wild foods where he says that it would be good to have some wild food in our diet, while also discussing possible downsides. Or maybe what you are referring to is his discussion that the American culture is perhaps the first in history that doesn’t have a traditional food culture, and the problems that this creates. I thought that discussion was quite insightful. However, there might be people who mistake that as nostalgia. Maybe it just isn’t possible to point out that our present society has certain problems that weren’t present in non-traditional societies without being accused of either having a noble-savage fetishism, being anti-scientific, or wanting to go back to living in caves. I thought we had left those stupid non-sequitur false dichotomy strawman arguments behind us, or at least we had left them to the professional right-wing shills. But apparently, the Noble Strawman is alive and well even in left liberal circles, as this thread amply demonstrates.

173 Just noticed I misspoke. Should read “Maybe it just isn’t possible to point out that our (non-traditional) society has certain problems that weren’t present in traditional societies…”

(Editing issues in #178… best simply scrap “contradicting his assertion that”. I was trying to weave in something about his way of talking about “8000” food items that we used to consume as opposed to the meagre choice now available to us, according to him.)

Nostalgia for the grass-fed beef available until about 1960 = romantic primitivism and fetishism of the “noble savage”?

Well, Harold, that’s pretty disingenuous given I’ve already identified myself as a member of the locally-eating grassfed-only crowd. In general, though, I do consider nostalgia to be pernicious. A guilty pleasure and means to rally one’s troops at best.