At present we grow enough grains alone to satisfy the caloric needs of about 20 billion people. Agriculturally, we are living in a post-scarcity world, unless the population triples again, and we have been for forty years. What we need in agriculture today is not more efficiency, but more resilience and more justice in the distribution of the results.
It is inexcusable that today, forty years since the end of food scarcity, poor people starve to death every day while steers are fatted on corn and soybeans for the rich. Through efficiency, we've achieved a post-scarcity world. Now we need to achieve a post-poverty world. Efficiency is not going to get us there.
Locavorism might promote greater resiliency; but does it? Does the long-distance and international food trade ameliorate or exacerbate the privation of crop failures? Do small, local farms produce less fertilizer runoff per acre than big agribusiness operations? (Historically, in first place, with the most agrochemicals applied per acre, has been the suburban lawn.) Is locavorism an effective hedge against new pests devastating monoculture crops? Does it effectively break down hierarchies of richer and poorer regions by reducing long-distance exploitation, or does it reinforce them by keeping the money of the rich close to home?
I don't know. But when you're sitting in a fancy restaurant, pondering whether the lamb on the menu, priced the same as 100 kilos of soybeans, comes from Niman Ranch down the road or from a giant ranch in New Zealand — don't delude yourself into thinking that that's a serious food policy issue.
Let's see if we can't get locavorism to address nuclear nonproliferation, while we're at it. Jeepers.
Whether we should be eating more or less meat, whether meat should be priced massively higher or not, why can't we agree that most other things being equal, we should eat better meat when possible?
Cargill meat is inflicting all the same imbalances on the world food market, and loading our food with antibiotics while still increasing foodborne illness, and reducing the overall quality of our meals.
Niman Ranch, for what it's worth, is a consortium of independent small farms spread all over the place.
As far as I can tell, there's no connection between the structure of the food supply chain and nuclear proliferation. On the other hand, locavorism consists of advocacy of a particular structure for the food supply chain, which necessarily has profound implications for all attributes of the food supply chain, including resiliency, affordability, and environmental impact. It isn't obvious to me which way those implications run, but I am claiming that those are the important aspects to investigate, not energy-efficiency or flavor.
I agree that big meat producers like Cargill (and, apparently, Niman Ranch) harm resiliency and the environment.
I think that your questions, like how much fecal contamination is in your meat, and how it tastes, are rounding errors when compared to questions like how much farmland had to be saturated with ammonium nitrate to feed it, how much methane it emitted, and how much downstream spinach was contaminated with Salmonella — from a public policy perspective, that is.
As long as a substantial number of people in the world who are starving to death, many more people are eating meals of very low overall quality and suffering serious illness as a result. This is the important issue.
You're right about Niman Ranch. Thanks for the tip. They had me fooled; I thought Niman Ranch was a ranch in Marin County, California. I didn't realize they were a nationwide marketer of grain-fed feedlot-finished beef (it explains this in the FAQ on their web site) and that Bill Niman now refuses to eat Niman Ranch products!
I think the Niman Ranch backlash is quite a bit overblown, but that the brand commands a premium that the product quality doesn't justify.
Your concerns about the food supply chain are valid. I just don't think it's reasonable to make one food issue ("locavorism: fate or fad?") a proxy for every food issue.
I didn't know there was a Niman Ranch backlash; I thought it was just Bill.
I agree that different issues relate to different degrees to each other. But locavorism is advocacy of a deeply different structure for the entire food supply chain, and that does relate to every other food issue. If we're going to restructure the whole food supply chain, we should focus on issues that really matter, like whether the resulting structure is just and resilient, not on the flavor of the resulting veal.
Edit: although of course your personal locavorism may not be any kind of advocacy at all, which would explain your puzzlement at political issues being raised.
It is inexcusable that today, forty years since the end of food scarcity, poor people starve to death every day while steers are fatted on corn and soybeans for the rich. Through efficiency, we've achieved a post-scarcity world. Now we need to achieve a post-poverty world. Efficiency is not going to get us there.
Locavorism might promote greater resiliency; but does it? Does the long-distance and international food trade ameliorate or exacerbate the privation of crop failures? Do small, local farms produce less fertilizer runoff per acre than big agribusiness operations? (Historically, in first place, with the most agrochemicals applied per acre, has been the suburban lawn.) Is locavorism an effective hedge against new pests devastating monoculture crops? Does it effectively break down hierarchies of richer and poorer regions by reducing long-distance exploitation, or does it reinforce them by keeping the money of the rich close to home?
I don't know. But when you're sitting in a fancy restaurant, pondering whether the lamb on the menu, priced the same as 100 kilos of soybeans, comes from Niman Ranch down the road or from a giant ranch in New Zealand — don't delude yourself into thinking that that's a serious food policy issue.