The Locavore's Dilemma (11 page)

Another recurring complaint related to vanishing social capital is that megastores and international chains are rapidly eradicating “mom-and-pop” operations. Such a stance, however, ignores the fact that consumers ultimately determine the outlook of the retail landscape through their decisions on where they spend their money (including online shopping). As such, one can hardly deny that they have long favored the greater variety and lower prices of large retail stores over their alleged special relationships with smaller outlets.
²⁹
True, the world is becoming more homogenized as each city or town increasingly features the same stores and restaurant chains.
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This reality hurts the sensibilities of well-off tourists, cultural critics, and activists who would rather have each location be more “authentic”—except typically for the one where they personally reside, which must readily offer the best of everything. Yet, national and international retail chains still ultimately get the bulk of their business from physical stores located in specific communities where local inhabitants are free to patronize them, their large competitors, or smaller outlets. As such, they add value to the lives of their customers as long as they remain profitable, for consumers ultimately express their appreciation with their shopping dollars. Besides, many local retail outlets of “national” corporations sponsor local activities. By providing more convenient and affordable shopping experiences, they also leave otherwise busy people more time and money to volunteer or donate to various causes and activities. Nurturing social capital is not a small business monopoly.

Many locavores bemoan the dislocation or obliteration of traditional lifestyles in the pursuit of greater material wealth. In their opinion, more abundant consumer offerings are poor substitutes for friendly smiles, ready laughter, and communal bliss. This romantic longing for a way of life from the distant past is probably as old as urbanization and the
existence of wealthy individuals—from aristocrats to the progeny of prosperous urban merchants and professionals—who could afford to see urbanization, long-distance trade, and new technologies as fundamentally incompatible with the “natural” order of things. This attitude goes back at least to Roman antiquity
³¹
as exemplified in Virgil's
Eclogues
(or
Bucolics
, poems written in a classical style on a rural subject)
³²
and Horace's references to big city life as a “bit of Hell” and his observation that “the whole choir of poets loves woods, and hates the city.”
³³
In England and the United States, a long line of activists, writers, poets, craftspeople, visual artists, and documentary filmmakers have expressed such pastoral and anti-urban feelings.
³⁴

Yet the fact remains that, throughout history, significant migratory movements of populations have taken place from the countryside to the cities and not the other way around—in fact, some ancestors of today's most fervent urban and suburban locavores must have been part of this movement. From the perspective of individuals caught in the urban rat race, small-scale farming and the promise of a simpler life often looks appealing. But the harsh reality is that agricultural production has never been all that enjoyable, as working outside not only meant fresh air but also burning sun, rain, insects, snakes, large dangerous animals, mud, and dust—all for a typically meager and uncertain return. As one African rural migrant observes: “My mother still sleeps in a mud house, drinks from polluted streams, and walks for long distances carrying heavy loads of cocoa… This is not because it is idyllic to do so, and neither is it because it is part of her culture; it is because she has no choice!”
³⁵

Wasn't it also Adam who, upon being chased out of the Garden of Eden, was condemned to a life of agricultural toil and unrelenting drudgery after he had eaten the forbidden fruit? Whatever else they may have gotten wrong about the origins of life and pre-agricultural societies, the authors of the book of Genesis knew firsthand the reality of primitive agriculture when they wrote that “Cursed is the ground . . . through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life. It will produce
thorns and thistles for you . . . By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground . . .”
³⁶
Also cursed, observed Thoreau in
Walden,
were the young men living in the vicinity of Concord, Massachusetts, “whose misfortune it is to have inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools; for these are more easily acquired than got rid of. Better if they had been born in the open pasture and suckled by a wolf, that they might have seen with clearer eyes what field they were called to labor in.”
³⁷

From the real-world perspective of a subsistence farmer or farm laborer, the lure of city lights is easily understood. As the Marxist theorist Karl Kautsky observed over a century ago, “towns offer wage-labourers quite different opportunities for employment than rural areas, much more opportunity for establishing a household, more freedom and more culture. The larger the town, the more these advantages grow, and the greater its drawing power.”
³⁸
The same process has also occurred more recently and for the same reasons in less advanced economies, as observed by the Canadian regional economist Mario Polèse:

Polèse also observes that it “should thus come as no surprise that attempts to slow down or to stop urbanization have failed miserably” and
that in places like China where political authorities were able to do so temporarily, the result was “even greater rural-urban income disparities and an explosion of urbanization once the measures [were] lifted.”
⁴⁰
People should be given the alternatives that only large and prosperous, if chaotic and unsettling, cities can offer. As the economist Edward Glaeser observes: “Megacities are not too big. Limiting their growth would cause significantly more hardship than gain, and urban growth is a great way to reduce rural poverty.”
⁴¹
And reducing rural poverty, we suggest, is a great way to improve social capital.

The greatest social blow delivered by locavorism, however, is ultimately much reduced food diversity (for no location can produce more than a fraction of the world's offering) and higher food prices that will either force people to cut down on overall consumption or switch to less interesting alternatives. Michael Pollan's mantra to “pay more, eat less” may seem eminently sensible to upper middle class consumers who can always cut back on the cappuccinos in order to spend eight dollars for a dozen eggs and $3.90 for a pound of Frog Hollow peaches.
⁴²
Yet, we somehow doubt that most folks who do their best to stretch their food budget—not to mention malnourished people the world over—will become more likely to contribute to a thriving community life as a result once they leave the cash register.

The basic contention of local food activists that their initiatives promote the acquaintance of food producers and consumers is unassailable. Yet, because something is true does not make it significant or worth pursuing at all costs. In the end, as the agricultural policy analyst Gary Blumenthal reminds us, “while 70 percent of the world's poor may be farmers, 100 percent are consumers and the fastest way to elevate the well-being of poor consumers is to reduce their share of income spent on food.”
⁴³
Providing the basic necessities of life at ever more affordable prices should be the starting point of all discussions on local social
capital. Locavorism should at least do as well as our modern food system in this respect. To underline this point, let's start with a current benchmark: In 2010, American families and individuals spent 9.4% of their disposable income on food compared to more than 23% in 1929; in terms of home food consumption expenditures, Americans only spent 6.4% of their disposable income compared to about 15% in Japan and European Union countries, and more than 40% in some African countries.
⁴⁴
As we will explain in the next chapter, the real price tag of locavorism would be much closer to that higher figure.

Message to the Shopping Public—British First! Buying Empire goods means buying the produce of your own Country and of the Empire Overseas, instead of the pro- duce of foreign countries . . . Support your own Best Cus- tomers. Last year the Nations of the Empire Overseas spent the enormous sum of nearly £335,000,000 on goods produced in the United Kingdom. Man for man, they are your best customers. And that is a sound practical reason for “shopping within the Empire” yourself. Every time you buy Canadian salmon, Australian fruit, New Zealand lamb, South African wine, Indian tea, you are dealing with the very people who go out of the way to spend money on the goods made in your own country, and so to create em- ployment, pay wages and increase prosperity here. Buy Empire Goods. Ask—Is it British?

—EMPIRE MARKETING BOARD,
proposed advertisement for British newspapers, 1926
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P
erhaps the most appealing claim of locavores is that diverting consumer dollars once spent on “distant” food items towards others produced nearby will boost local employment. But as with all protectionist schemes that keep more affordable foreign products out of a local economy and undermine the production of things in the locations where they make the most economic sense, locavorism can only deliver poorly paid jobs and massive wealth destruction.

Apart from encouraging consumers to spend more of their own money on local food, a key belief of locavores is that a greater percentage of governmental food purchases for school lunches, prisons, military bases, hospitals, and other agencies and bureaucracies spent “within 100 miles [will] revive local agriculture… create more jobs on farms [and promote] rural redevelopment.”
²
Channeling “even a small portion of institutional food purchasing to local food,” Michael Pollan argues, “would vastly expand regional agriculture and improve the diet of the millions of people these institutions feed.”
³
The reasoning underlying such proposals was spelled out more explicitly by the writer and communication consultant Leah Bloom:

The fundamental problem with this argument was perhaps best addressed by the economist Frédéric Bastiat in his classic 1848 essay,
What
Is Seen and What Is Not Seen
, in which he states that a good economist will take “into account both the effect that can be seen and those effects that must be
foreseen.
” This difference is crucial, “for it almost always happens that when the immediate consequence is favorable, the later consequences are disastrous, and vice versa.” A bad economist, Bastiat wrote, will pursue a “small present good that will be followed by a great evil to come.” A good one, on the other hand, will pursue instead a “great good to come, at the risk of a small present evil.”
⁵

Bastiat illustrated this insight by imagining an all too typical reaction from an onlooker reflecting on the accidental breaking of a store window. “Everybody has to make a living,” he observes. Besides, what “would become of the glaziers if no one ever broke a window?” Fair enough. But the passerby then observes that “it is good to break windows” because “it helps to circulate money,” something which benefits the economy in general. Well then, the economist interjects, don't you see that “since our citizen has spent six francs for one thing, he will not be able to spend them for another?” If the windowpane was still in one piece, the store owner would have spent his money on something else, perhaps a new pair of shoes or a book. What is true for this citizen is also true for industry in general. “If the window had not been broken, the shoe industry (or some other) would have received six francs'worth of encouragement;
that is what is not seen.
” In one case you have an economy in which a window has been broken and replaced. In another, you have an economy that has a perfectly good window
plus something else
. Despite the recurring nonsense emanating from the media in the wake of wars and natural catastrophes, no economic blessings stem from destruction.