The hot term among foodies this year is “locavore”, an idea promoted by well-known chef Alice Waters to encourage people to eat whole foods grown locally (in a perfect world, within 100 miles of where you live) in favor of processed foods or foods grown and shipped in from far away.
Partly, locavorianism is a reaction to the much more common trend among foodies to obsess over exotic foods, always looking for the rarest or most unusual item to consume. It’s also a response to the growing concern over the environmental cost of mass agriculture: why eat a tomato grown in Chile, which has to be flown to a plant in the U.S., then shipped to supermarkets via trucks, when you can eat a tomato grown by a local farmer or even one you grow yourself? There is also the cultural dimension of trying to recreate a more conscious link between the consumer and the producer: food does not come from the supermarket, it comes from farms (and factories). Lastly, there’s also some element of the “Slow Food” movement as well, hoping to preserve and promote traditional methods of producing food products like cheese, or traditional items like heirloom tomatoes.
It’s a noble effort, and I appreciate that it represents a swing away from the trend-whoring that has come to be seen as “being a foodie”. My own take on it is that while it might be a slightly idealistic and overly heroic idea today, within the next decade or so, as our environmental apocalypse descends upon us, locavorianism won’t just be a nice idea, it will reassert itself as the primary model for how we survive.
This Washington Post piece from a few weeks ago reviews a pair of books that follow in the same vein as Michael Pollan’s now-landmark “The Omnivore’s Dilemma”, explaining both the immense infrastructure that provides food to America’s supermarket industry and the social disconnect people have with food created by all those perfect rows of shiny-but-flavorless Red Delicious apples and perfect cuts of meat wrapped in styrofoam and plastic.
This article from The Economist paints a very bleak picture in a report called “The End Of Cheap Food”. The urbanization of people in China and India is already having a profound effect on the demand for commodity food products and will only increase over the next decades, even as agribusiness repurposes some of its products away from use as food to other, more profitable products (namely ethanol). This piece barely even takes into account the impending environmental issues, it does a good job of pointing out how unstable things are from strictly an politico-economic consideration.
The British magazine Prospect ran a piece last month advocating wider adoption of genetically-modified crops as a way to boost production to meet increased global demand. The author of the article, Dick Taverne, pooh-poohs the strong criticism against GM crops (particularly in Europe) as potential vectors for undesirable and unimagined consequences, but the greater likelihood is that smaller, sustainable agriculture predicated on traditional crops will, of necessity, be the better programmatic approach.
Web guru and all-around-smart guy Seth Godin points out a pitfall in encouraging locavorianism now: it’s the old “eat your spinach, it’s good for you” pitch that generations of mothers have used. Being too strident about this at a point where the need isn’t acute might serve the unintended effect of turning people off to an idea they really need to embrace. Particularly in this country, you guarantee a knee-jerk response in the opposite direction if you hammer your point too earnestly. The success of changing attitudes about processed foods has come from the “bubble-up” method through books like Pollan’s and “Fast Food Nation”. It’s easy enough to get a bunch of politically-conscious socially-activist people in places like San Francisco, New York and Cambridge to get on board, but this idea has to be sold to the people in Iowa, South Carolina, and New Hampshire, just like Barack Obama.
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