If the point of this discussion is to stigmatize and ridicule the orthodoxy of "locavorism", I'm on board.
If the point is to ridicule Michael Pollan and Alice Waters, to highlight the fact that the model of production they talk about is a luxury item for the rich and utterly untenable for most of society, I'm even on board with that.
But if the point is to make the argument that there is little benefit to seasonal cooking or small-farm animal husbandry, you lose me completely. There clearly is a benefit:
* Out-of-season vegetables are very often of lower quality than canned; the obvious example is tomatoes, but you're also not going to eat a ramp in December, or a high-quality parsnip in May, or a Vidalia in the fall.
* The consumer embrace of faux-fresh off-season veg actually is a bad thing; it pushes out producers who make real veg in favor of people who are selling wax veg year-round; people are still buying wax tomatoes in July.
* Alienation from seasonal cooking results in home cooks who, like me, had never tasted a ramp or a morel or a vidalia or even a real tomato; seasonal cooking is vector towards good cooking, and one thing that I think is hard to argue is that America needs more and better home cooks.
* Supermarket meat is a bona fide debacle. There's universal agreement that we've managed to breed flavor and health out of pigs almost entirely. Industrial chicken is epsilon away from being grown in vats instead of farms. Beef is being treated with ammonia before grinding (the trend towards buying meat not only pre-ground but pre-shaped is another pathology).
* "Local meat" is in some cases actually cheaper than the supermarket crap; you have to make a lifestyle concession to get access to those prices (ie, you have to have a $150 chest freezer, and you have to be willing to actually cook), but high-quality pig and beef is not out of the reach of a lower-middle-class homeowner.
* I live in the midwest. I'm not a fan of St. Pollan[1], but there are some restaurant owners here that I do admire and who make a point of sticking to midwest-seasonal. I take exception to the idea that it "really sucks". We should meet in the middle. In the colder climes, we should be shipping in "accent" products from the west coast to liven things up, but there's plenty of regional produce that can and should form the staple. Right now, we're at the other extreme: most people in Chicago are happy to eat a caprese with gassed-red wax tomatoes and mutant basil and kraft mozzeralla in the middle of January.
* And don't get me started on our access to cheese here.
[1] Although I like his writing about plants. He's a great garden writer.
But if the point is to make the argument that there is little benefit to seasonal cooking or small-farm animal husbandry, you lose me completely.
He seems to say the opposite. He praises fresh food and praises eating seasonally for its flavor and other benefits. What he objects to is eating locally in a dogmatic way and he objects to trying to use transportation costs as a justification for that. He largely debunks the transportation cost argument and says that forcing crops to grow in inappropriate places (like tomatoes in the Hudson Valley) is worse than shipping them.
one thing that I think is hard to argue is that America needs more and better home cooks.
I would argue that, at least in dense urban areas. There are enormous economies of scale in storing and preparing more food communally. If you look at a college dorm or military barracks, they generally do not have the facilities to store or cook food (I'm excluding pure microwave cooking) in each room, but instead have some form of caffeteria. Thus, they save a huge amount of space in the rooms by not having a kitchen, energy since the refrigeration is done in large, effecient units and so is the cooking, and time for the people living there. I think there would be a cultural resistance to moving this model into a lot of apartment buildings, but there would be a lot of advantages to doing so.
I think we all (so far) clearly reject the orthodoxy of "Locavorism". But in other conversations on HN, the opposition has gone all the way to defenses of February tomatoes and Tyson chicken, and I'll hold the line against that.
There are huge economies of scale to delivering food through McDonalds and Burger King. Unfortunately, those economies are self-evident and effective and are very successfully displacing real food. It's worth some effort to come up with a cost-effective alternative based on actual food, especially if it empowers families with two working parents to actually prepare food with real ingredients.
It's hard to do that, but it can be done, and technology is going to make it easier over the next 10-15 years.
I think we are all in violent agreement here about the main points and have a few minor quibbles about small details. The dismal cuisine of which I spoke was probably more of a visceral memory of early-80s winter food options in the midwest than a reflection of current choices (and as much as I may complain I know I was luckier than most because my mom would visit a sister in Chicago every three months or so to hit the ethnic markets available there and stock up on neat things -- back when an eggroll was considered "exotic" ethnic cuisine for midwesterners not living in Chicago, Madison, or Minneapolis this variety was quite welcome...)
One point you sort of touch upon is a constant mystery to me. Canned/frozen/preserved fruits and veggies have come a long way from the cooked-to-mush-during-canning state I remember from my childhood, but there seems to be some "freshness" fetish that was drummed into the collective consciousness during the 80s and 90s which is no longer serving us very well. I am a fairly sophisticated and knowledgeable customer when visiting the market, but I still find it hard to not be influenced by this fresh > preserved idea. For most tomato use cases a high-quality canned variety will taste better than a "fresh" tomato that was shipped more than 200 miles, but it has taken me quite a while to feel comfortable avoiding the produce section and head for the canned vegetable aisle during large swathes of the year.
[And I agree about you about Pollan; he is much like Jared Diamond IMHO, great when doing science/history reporting and it goes downhill fast when they venture closer and closer to politics and policy.]
No. Don't. Don't eat that crap. Not because it's unhealthful. Because it sucks. It's just stringy tofu. Just buy tofu; it'll be cheaper and more versatile.
The rest of us can eat actual chicken, the kind that had feet and beaks.
Since we are talking about a hypothetical product that doesn't exist (at least in a commercial way) yet, I think it is a bit premature to judge its quality.
But even if hypothetically it tasted worse then the real thing, there are likely to be great benefits that will outweight that factor for most occassions
- It avoids the need to kill a normal animal that feels sensations, can experience cruelty, and has emotions that are (debatably) similar to our own.
- It is likely to be more affordable and more sustainable since it likely will need less space and less energy per unit meat produced
Unfortunately, no, we're not talking about a hypothetical product; we're talking about an only slightly hyperbolic assessment of Tyson/Purdue chicken.
If you want to argue about the benefits of e.g. Quorn, I have no problem with it and won't be fun to argue with; it's basically exotic tofu.
But if we're talking about industrialized factory chicken, which is tasteless and loaded with antibiotics (because yields would dramatically drop if an unprotected chicken organism was exposed to the chicken-raising environment) and still arrives rife with salmonella so that cooking with it is a hazmat operation... I think you're on shakier ground.
Better that we not cook with chicken (switch to tofu, it's cheaper) than with crap chicken.
PS: for what it's worth, I don't care about the ethics of animal treatment that much at all. I'm not a fan of needless cruelty, and I do believe that happier animals (incidentally) taste better, but animal welfare is not one of my animating concerns.
Perhaps we are talking at cross purposes, but I know that I was discussing actual vat grown meat, and I strongly believe that is what patio11 was referring to.
Sorry, I think the point I'm making is: "I don't know if you're talking about future-protein or not, but if what you're saying is, 'all progress in meat production sounds good to me, so bring on the cheap Tyson chicken breasts!', yeah, don't do that."
What you do with mycoprotein and cultured meat is between you and your deity. I have no opinions about it. I'm also fine with you consuming all your meals in tablet or milkshake form. Just leave the chickens alone!
I have been known to occasionally attempt to persuade vegetarian acquaintances to eat some chicken on the basis that "Heck, the way they farm chickens they're practically vegetables anyway!"
> In the colder climes, we should be shipping in "accent" products from the west coast to liven things up, but there's plenty of regional produce that can and should form the staple.
Yes! For example: I live in western Illinois, and my seasonal eating involves summers with lots of fresh local fruits and veggies, reserving the jars of pasta sauce and much of the meat for the winter. (Meat, if you think about it, is the original preservative: no need to refrigerate until you kill it, you just need to "fuel" it through the winter.) I certainly don't forsake things that can't be made locally but I try to mostly eat them during the times when the things that can be grown locally are offline. Hence I now think of orange juice and mangoes and such as "winter fruit". :)
If the point is to ridicule Michael Pollan and Alice Waters, to highlight the fact that the model of production they talk about is a luxury item for the rich and utterly untenable for most of society, I'm even on board with that.
But if the point is to make the argument that there is little benefit to seasonal cooking or small-farm animal husbandry, you lose me completely. There clearly is a benefit:
* Out-of-season vegetables are very often of lower quality than canned; the obvious example is tomatoes, but you're also not going to eat a ramp in December, or a high-quality parsnip in May, or a Vidalia in the fall.
* The consumer embrace of faux-fresh off-season veg actually is a bad thing; it pushes out producers who make real veg in favor of people who are selling wax veg year-round; people are still buying wax tomatoes in July.
* Alienation from seasonal cooking results in home cooks who, like me, had never tasted a ramp or a morel or a vidalia or even a real tomato; seasonal cooking is vector towards good cooking, and one thing that I think is hard to argue is that America needs more and better home cooks.
* Supermarket meat is a bona fide debacle. There's universal agreement that we've managed to breed flavor and health out of pigs almost entirely. Industrial chicken is epsilon away from being grown in vats instead of farms. Beef is being treated with ammonia before grinding (the trend towards buying meat not only pre-ground but pre-shaped is another pathology).
* "Local meat" is in some cases actually cheaper than the supermarket crap; you have to make a lifestyle concession to get access to those prices (ie, you have to have a $150 chest freezer, and you have to be willing to actually cook), but high-quality pig and beef is not out of the reach of a lower-middle-class homeowner.
* I live in the midwest. I'm not a fan of St. Pollan[1], but there are some restaurant owners here that I do admire and who make a point of sticking to midwest-seasonal. I take exception to the idea that it "really sucks". We should meet in the middle. In the colder climes, we should be shipping in "accent" products from the west coast to liven things up, but there's plenty of regional produce that can and should form the staple. Right now, we're at the other extreme: most people in Chicago are happy to eat a caprese with gassed-red wax tomatoes and mutant basil and kraft mozzeralla in the middle of January.
* And don't get me started on our access to cheese here.
[1] Although I like his writing about plants. He's a great garden writer.