The Locavore's Dilemma (23 page)

Call us old-fashioned (or even Canadians!) if you will, but a warmer world doesn't worry us all that much in terms of food production. As long as economies develop, scientific and technical knowledge expands, people are free to adapt, and international trade allows the movement of foodstuffs between regions, humanity will thrive as it did in the last century and a half, a period of warming. Whatever the climate change problem may be, locavorism is not the answer.

 

Until very recently, hunger and famines loomed large in the human experience. In relatively recent times, though, modern agricultural technologies and long-distance trade played a crucial role in turning the “third horsemen” into a distant memory for most people on our planet. The globalized food supply chain did come with some problems of its own, but it should be kept in mind that the vast majority of today's
malnourished people are African and South Asian subsistence farmers and rural landless laborers who cannot readily access international food markets.
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Lifting them out of poverty and malnutrition will require more innovation, trade, and, until something better comes along, greenhouse gas emissions. This prospect might worry some, but the evidence is pretty clear: wealthy people can adapt and live well from Singapore to Edmonton while poor people are miserable everywhere.

As estimated by the authors of a recent report from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) on humanity's capacity to feed itself in 2050, even if most of today's less advanced economies are expected to provide for most of their future needs by expanding their own production, they would still need to double their net imports of cereals, from 135 million metric tons in 2008–09 to 300 million by mid-century, and therefore require not only infrastructure improvements, but also a “global trading system that is fair and competitive.”
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Paradoxically, a world where in a few decades 9 billion people could afford to purchase their food from 90 million highly efficient farmers using the planet's most productive locations would be incredibly more food secure than one in which a few billion farmers feed their neighbors but lack the infrastructure to ship their products over long distances. Food insecurity is mainly due to a lack of income opportunities rather than geography, as poor and hungry people cannot afford to purchase food from the international market. Economic development through trade liberalization is what food security should really be about.
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Of all the frauds practiced by mercenary dealers, there is none more reprehensible, and at the same time more prevalent, than the sophistication
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of the various articles of food. This unprincipled and nefarious practice, increasing in degree as it has been found difficult of detection, is now applied to almost every commodity which can be classed among either the necessaries or the luxuries of life, and is carried on to a most alarming extent in every part of the
United Kingdom.

FRIEDRICH CHRISTIAN A. ACCUM. 1820.
A Treatise on Adulterations of Foods, and Culinary Poisons
.
Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, pp. 1–2

 

 

 

 

M
ichael Pollan's influential “Farmer in Chief” essay, published in the October 2008 issue of the
New York Times Magazine,
is a useful summary of the widespread claims that locavorism delivers tastier,
more nutritious, and safer food than the offerings of agribusiness. First, the journalism professor observes, “food eaten closer to where it is grown will be fresher and require less processing, making it more nutritious.” We're not quite sure about the “less processing” part (for example, whether local or imported, potatoes must be cooked, but there is obviously no such need for salads), but what we infer from Pollan's remarks is that food sold at farmers' markets will have been picked in a more ripened state, ensuring superior taste and nutritional value.

Farmers' markets also offer fewer options in terms of “oversalted, oversweetened, transfat rich, and highly preserved” foods designed primarily for microwave ovens. So far, so good. (Well, sort of, as the farmers' markets we visited over the last few years had no shortages of sausages, pates, and sugar-laden homemade pies. One could also remind Pollan of Benjamin Franklin's observation two centuries ago that “[i]n general, mankind, since the improvement in cookery, eats twice as much as nature requires.”
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)

Pollan then points out that a lone factory “grinding 20 million hamburger patties in a week or washing 25 million servings of salad” is not only highly vulnerable to “a single terrorist armed with a canister of toxins,” but “equally susceptible to accidental contamination” because “the bigger and more global the trade in food, the more vulnerable the system is to catastrophe.” The obvious way to avoid such threats, he asserts, is decentralization. Unfortunately, this strategy is now hampered by “a tangle of regulations originally designed to check abuses by the very largest food producers” that now mandate “a huge investment in federally approved facilities” for such innocuous things as farmers smoking a ham and selling it to their neighbors. Food-safety regulations, Pollan argues, should “be made sensitive to scale and marketplace, so that a small producer selling direct off the farm or at a farmers' market is not regulated as onerously as a multinational food manufacturer.” This is not, he adds, “because local food won't ever have food-safety problems—it will—only that its problems will be less catastrophic and easier to manage because local food is inherently more traceable and accountable.”

Although we agree with the basic proposition that government inspection and regulation should be much less intrusive in the realm of personal transactions between consenting adults than they currently are (who needs SWAT teams to take down a raw milk retail operation?), Pollan's view on food safety is too careless not to be dissected. Before we do so, however, we need to illustrate how, over the last few centuries, the globalized food supply chain and agri-business have delivered historically unparalleled nutritional and health benefits.

Local diets have always been more monotonous and less nutritious than our present day food cornucopia. True, some past locavores used available resources rather creatively. For instance, some Native Americans seasoned wild rice with the excrements of rabbits, roasted entrails with their original content, and used Caribou droppings to thicken blood soup.
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The fact remains, though, that throughout history most people were not only always on the verge of hunger and starvation, but also that whenever the food supply was sufficient it was typically problematic on some level. For instance, the historians Frances and Joseph Gies tell us that the diet of Western Medieval European peasants was not only low in calories and proteins, but also often lacking in lipids, calcium, and vitamins A, C, and D.
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Until the mid-1800s, most Europeans remained “in a chronic state of undernourishment” while only the upper class could expect a daily intake of white bread and meat.
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The standard fare of an 18th century German rural laborer was “gruel and mush,” a soupy combination of grains and lentils.
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Despite improvements over past circumstances, the diet of a typical English farm worker at the turn of the 19th century still consisted of “bread, a little cheese, bacon fat, and weak tea, supplemented for adult males by beer,” its monotony only “relieved to some degree by the harvest period” and, on good days, modest amounts of beef and mutton. Hot meals were also few, since cooking fuel was expensive. For this pittance, the laborer spent nearly
three-quarters of his income, with starches such as bread accounting for the bulk of that expenditure.
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And in the United States, vitamin deficiency diseases such as anemia, beriberi, and pellagra were common before 1940.
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As a result of nutritional inequalities, members from the richer groups in Western Europe and the United States were historically “taller and heavier than those from poorer backgrounds,” suffered less from chronic and debilitating diseases, lived longer, and were capable of harder and more sustained work.
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For instance, British aristocrats were about 6 inches (15 centimeters) taller than average in 1800.
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The same trend could also be observed in other locations, such as in pre-Columbian times in the Mayan city of Tikal, where well-fed nobles were on average 4 inches (10 centimeters) taller than commoners.
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(Of course, taller does not necessarily mean healthier in the context of a group, but height is considered a good indicator of the quality and quantity of nutrition over a lifetime and is especially relevant when used as a measure of the change in the average of a group over time.) Gaps of this kind have now largely been closed in advanced economies thanks to improved overall nutrition made possible by the development of the globalized food supply chain. British aristocrats are now only only 2 inches taller than average and, as the Marxist historian Jeffrey M. Pilcher observes, while there is much debate as to the actual timing, there is no controversy over the fact that “when nutrition did improve for common [British] people, it came at the price of a growing distance between producer and consumer.”
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Probably the most underappreciated benefit of the global food supply chain is the role it played in transforming human bodies. In the words of Nobel laureate economist Robert W. Fogel and his collaborators, “in most if not quite all parts of the world, the size, shape, and longevity of the human body have changed more substantially, and much more rapidly, during the past three centuries than over many previous millennia.”
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For instance, the average adult man in 1850 America was about 5 feet 7 inches tall, weighed about 146 pounds, and could
expect to live until about 45 years of age. His countrymen of the time expected to develop chronic diseases in their forties and fifties and, since they were the lucky ones who had survived childbirth, to die in their fifties and sixties. In the 1980s, a typical American man in his early thirties was about 5 feet 10 inches tall, weighed about 174 pounds, was likely to pass his 75th birthday and then die of a stroke, cancer, or heart or respiratory disease since he was no longer dying of other things, such as diphtheria, smallpox, polio, cholera, and malaria. In the last few decades, the onset of these ailments, along with nonlethal ones like arthritis, has since been delayed on average between ten and twenty-five years. In 1900, 13% of people who were 65 could expect to live until 85, whereas the proportion is now closer to 50%.
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Other American data suggest that the average consumption of proteins, vitamins, and minerals is now virtually identical among poor and upper middle-class children, in both cases being comparably excessive and well above recommended norms for most children (in other words, too many kids eat too much). Poor American boys today at ages 18 and 19 are taller and heavier than middle-class boys of similar age in the late 1950s. They are also a full inch taller and 10 pounds heavier than American soldiers who fought in World War II. The major dietary problem facing poor Americans is now, like most Americans, eating too much and being overweight.
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Similar positive and sometimes problematic trends can be observed in all developed and rapidly developing economies. For instance, gains in height between the preindustrial world and today were about 12 centimeters (about 5 inches) in Japan and 7 centimeters (about 3 inches) in England. The height of Chinese students increased rapidly following the introduction of economic and agricultural reforms in 1979.
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In what is perhaps history's most dramatic case of anthropometric divergence in a genetically homogenous population, preschool children raised in (autarkic) North Korea are up to 13 cm (about 5 inches) shorter and up to 7 kg (slightly more than 15 pounds) lighter than children who were brought up in (globalized) South Korea; North Korean women weighed up to 9 kg
(almost 20 pounds) less on average than their southern counterparts; and North Korean refugees between 20 and 39 years of age (admittedly, not the most representative sample) were on average 7 centimeters (almost 3 inches) smaller than their southern counterparts. Interestingly, before its partition, the north was the most prosperous portion of the Korean peninsula and its inhabitants were on average between 1.1 and 1.4 centimeters (about half an inch) taller than their southern counterparts.
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In better but still problematic news, according to the World Health Organization, more than half of the population in 18 countries today is either overweight or obese while in 7 countries—including Egypt, Mexico and South Africa—more than two-thirds of all adults are overweight or obese.
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Overall, there are now at least one and a half overfed individuals for every malnourished one. While the problem is not insignificant, as the journalist Greg Easterbrook observes, “four generations ago, the poor were lean as fence posts, their arms bony and faces gaunt. To our recent ancestors, the idea that even the poor eat too much might be harder to fathom than a jetliner rising from the runway.”
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Of course, nutrition alone does not explain all positive trends; advances in sanitation (from improved water supplies to sewage systems), medicine (from antibiotics and disinfectants to hand washing and sterilization in hospitals), and food preservation technologies (especially refrigeration, but also packaging) obviously played their part. Yet, many infectious diseases that plagued previous generations, especially those afflicting children, were made worse by calorie, protein, minerals, and vitamin deficiencies. And again, none of the technological advances that made current living standards possible would have taken place in the absence of long-distance trade and urbanization. With these facts in mind, let us turn to the locavores' case on behalf of taste, nutrition and food safety.