The Locavore's Dilemma (9 page)

Meanwhile, a Pennsylvania agricultural extension employee by the name of A. B. Ross proposed a “point of origin plan for marketing” whose key objective was to “reduce transportation to a minimum.” This, in turn, would allow

Ross argued that this plan had been built upon “ten years of patient study, labor, and experimental marketing carried on jointly by
farmers and myself” and had met “with the instant, unqualified, and enthusiastic endorsement of the great mass of farmers to whom it has been submitted, and who joined the ranks of nonproducers of city food because they could not make production profitable.” His most detailed case study had been conducted in Altoona, then a railroad hub of 58,000 inhabitants. According to his 1915 food survey, of a total annual food bill of $4,200,000, “not less than $1,680,000 [had been spent] for a riot of transportation and retransportation, handling and rehandling, commissioning, jobbing, and the allowance for waste which the retailer must make knowing the condition of the produce when it reaches him.”
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Commenting on Ross's proposal, the economic geographer Joseph Russell Smith added that approximately 80% of the city's perishable goods were delivered by train, “often [from] long distances” and were therefore chiefly “stale and therefore tasteless, unappetizing and partially inedible vegetables.” This situation was actually “typical not only of the small town, but also of the great city” and helped “explain why the way of the vegetarian [was] hard” to follow and why Americans farmers were keen to convert most of their crops into animal meat.
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If replicated on a large scale, the geographer argued, Ross's plan would allow

In subsequent years, a number of grants were made available to agricultural economists to study local food markets and assess the sensibility of these earlier “eat local” proposals.
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In recent decades, too, numerous governmental and activist-based initiatives have promoted local food production in contexts ranging from American inner cities to Native American reservations.
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Clearly, much historical and recent material can be brought to bear on the current “local food” rhetoric—and we haven't even said anything about the history of similar attempts in Europe.
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As we will now argue, all the available evidence suggests that locavorism is a fundamentally futile and counterproductive endeavor that repeatedly failed because of sound reasons and not because of conspiracies involving big agricultural interests. Locavores might wax poetic about wartime gardening and other past initiatives, but the fact remains that none of them lasted once most people had other options available to them. As the social reformer Frederic Clemson Howe observed nearly a century ago:

We will now begin our detailed critique of the locavore rhetoric and policy agenda with the seemingly innocuous claim that getting farmers and end consumers to know each other directly improves a community's social capital.

When each village was a virtually self-sufficing economic unit, some sense that he was helping to feed his neighbor must have accompanied the work of the husbandman who tilled the soil; but the Dakota farmer, whose wheat will pass into an elevator in Chicago and after long travel will go to feed some unknown family in Glasgow or in Hamburg can hardly be expected to have the same feeling for the social end which his tilling serves.

—JOHN ATKINSON HOBSON. 1910.
The Industrial System: An Inquiry into Earned and Unearned Income.
Longmans, Green & Co, p. 320

 

 

 

 

F
rom the beginning of markets and civilization, intermediaries have been engaged in the assembling, grading, packaging, processing, storing, transporting, financing, distributing, and advertising of goods and services of all kinds. As a result of their activities, primary producers and final consumers quickly lost track of each other. Writing more than two millennia ago, Plato described in his
Republic
a class of
“retailers” who “sit in the market-place [and] engaged in buying and selling.” These individuals proved especially useful when a farmer brought “some production to market . . . at a time when there is no one to exchange with him.”
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Closer to us, in an economic fable written in the 1840s, the economist Frédéric Bastiat described a French shoemaker who could not identify the countries of origins for the wheat that fed him, the coal that kept him warm, and the leather, nails, and hammer that he used in his trade.
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In
Tess of the d'Ubervilles
, Thomas Hardy's 1891 novel, two protagonists talk about the milk they have just loaded onto a train in the following way:

By the early 1920s, the geographer Ray Hughes Whitbeck documented how “one or more railway companies, several truckmen, a wholesale dealer or two, a retail dealer and his clerks, a delivery boy, and perhaps several other persons or corporations” along with perhaps even “one or more brokers” stood between a grapefruit grower and his laborers and his final consumer in a northern American city.
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Not surprisingly, these activities have long been decried as superfluous and parasitical by critics who, as Bastiat observed in 1848, “would willingly eliminate the capitalist, the banker, the speculator, the entrepreneur, the businessman, and the merchant, accusing them of interposing
themselves between producer and consumer in order to fleece them both, without giving them anything of value.”
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Antipathy against intermediaries was always heightened during food crises. Writing in the early years of the Napoleonic wars, a time of rapid price increases, the political economist Robert Thomas Malthus observed that the general indignation of common people had fallen upon “monopolizers, forestallers, and regraters—words, that are . . . applied indiscriminately to all middle men whatever, to every kind of trader that goes between the grower of the commodity and the consumer . . .”
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Today's locavores are but the latest activists to echo this sentiment with their contention that direct relationships between producers and consumers will improve a community's social capital while putting more money directly into farmers' (as opposed to intermediaries') pockets. Another frequent claim is that the prying eyes of nearby consumers will drastically accelerate the adoption of more sustainable farming practices than if food is sourced from distant producers subject to impersonal competitive pressures. To quote activist Jill Richardson:

Despite its appeal, the locavores' well-meaning longings for direct relationships will prove inherently expensive and wasteful—and, as such, unlikely to promote the creation of much social capital. Our point here
is not that all intermediaries necessarily add value; rather, what we challenge is the belief that the elimination of intermediaries will in itself benefit both producers and consumers.
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In order to make our case, though, a few words are warranted on some underappreciated mechanisms and institutions that underpin modern market transactions.

Consumers can typically learn about the variety, quality, and countries of origins of the fruits, vegetables, meat, and farm-raised fish and seafood they purchase on a regular basis, but not necessarily the name of specific producers.
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So why do we buy specific grades of different types of apples rather than the offerings of farmer McDonald? Simply put, because the advantages of such a system were too great for both consumers and the most efficient producers to be ignored. Think of it this way. While most apples in retail stores have become “undifferentiated” as far as their appearance and quality are concerned, not all apples - even if grown on the same tree—are treated the same. In our country, they are classified according to quality and consistency: Canada Extra Fancy, Canada Fancy, Canada Commercial, Canada Hailed, Canada Commercial Cookers, Canada No. 1 Peelers, and Canada No. 2 Peelers. Depending on their grade, apples will be sold directly to consumers or to food manufacturers who need “good enough” apples for making juice, pie and pastry fillings, jelly and other products rather than the perfect apples sold directly to consumers.

Grades and standards help to ensure that producers of quality output obtain maximum value; that buyers of all kinds of agricultural commodities know exactly what they are getting without having to inspect every shipment; that handling (regular size and shape are essential for most efficient and secure packaging) and transportation can be done more effectively by combining the production of similar goods from different producers; and that commodities not deemed suitable for human consumption are nonetheless put to other appropriate uses (from animal
feed to industrial grade alcohol). This system had many pioneers, but Danish pig producers were once among the most celebrated. As the geographer Joseph Russell Smith wrote admiringly in 1917, the “marvelous [standardized Danish pig] is a certain cross of breeds being grown by thousands of farmers, fed in approximately the same way, slaughtered at the uniform size of maximum efficiency for food consumption, cut up and cured in the prescribed way so that a piece of Danish bacon is a piece of Danish bacon, and you can buy it with your eyes shut.”
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One often-highlighted advantage of product standardization in its early days was that it significantly reduced food waste. Manufacturers were able “to pack the produce of a hundred gardens from a hundred nearby farms or backyards, freely commingling them if need be, and put up standardized packages of peas, beans and beets of the same variety, picked in the same degree of ripeness and thus acceptable in any market to which they could be easily sent.”
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By facilitating sales in a wide variety of markets, grades and standards ensured that orders could be made in advance and perishable produce shipped around most efficiently where there was an effective demand.
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Predictably, the geographical origins of standardized commodities became increasingly distant from their points of sale. In 1925, the Deputy Secretary of Agriculture of Pennsylvania observed that, despite the initiatives of local food activists described in chapter 1, chain stores had from their beginning been “more inclined to buy in carload lots from the large producing centers, where they can get a standard grade of product which will run more uniform than the seasonal output of local producers.” Nonetheless, local producers who could supply a “substantial quantity of graded, dependable products” were able to thrive. He further added that through modern methods “the number of intermediate handlings are reduced very greatly and transportation charges are at a minimum with the result that both producer and consumer find the outcome satisfactory.”
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However, as could be expected of all public officials whose support relied to some extent on local farmers threatened by
“outside” competition (in this case, mostly from Virginia, Delaware, and Maryland), he insisted that a “better balance between local production and consumption is in the interest of society as a whole” and that it would “seem desirable from many standpoints for our population to spread out in more moderate-sized centers, within easy reach of extensive food production areas, rather than to further congest in large cities.”
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As we now know, none of this happened in following decades as customers typically insisted on maximum value for their dollars rather than giving priority to geographical origins.