Unraveling Reason, Sustaining Food

Reason is a magazine with a fair amount of bluster and intellectual self-importance.  There, I've ruined my chances of ever working for them or making friends with their writers and editors.   I suspect I never had a chance, having gone through only a relatively short Ayn Rand Libertarian phase when I was 17.  Since then I've definitely lacked any enthusiasm for free market philosophy or economics and personally I've not been a very successful capitalist, that's for sure. But I'll take them at their word that their goal is to provide reasoned arguments about critical topics -- and so, I approached this recent piece by Ronald Bailey with a somewhat open mind.  (It was only later that I realized this is the Ron Bailey who champions biotechnology without restraint and thinks global warming is a hoax.  I'm not sure that's a reasonable starting point for someone to consider sustainable practices, do you?).   

Bailey argues that food miles are a bad way to judge the environmental costs of what you're eating.   Food miles are definitely an evolving and ultimately partial concept -- it's the whole life cycle of the food item that matters, the larger perspective on why we eat what we eat, how much of it, and overall, the impact of consuming that produce on a regular basis.  Even a slight reduction in meat, dairy, and sugar consumption (avoiding those things for one day a week, even) would make an enormous dent in our current agricultural environmental mess.

What I'm interested in, though, is why suddenly Reason's interest in food miles when even the mainstream green media has put some boundaries on their usefulness?  Does this diminish the overall "eat local" movement?  Should the 100 mile diet and loca-vore (ugh) attitudes be castigated for being unreasonable?   (Certainly moral superiority is a bad side effect -- I like South Park's "smug alert" about hybrid car drivers, but it won't prevent me from getting one)

First, of course, Bailey's got to position himself as an urban sophisticate (with international friends who can bring him "local" salmon..), disdainful of the young clerk with his Eat Local shirt.   So, it look like that it's maybe not the idea of local foods that annoys him, it's the moral noise behind it (and, eventually, it turns out, the big hand of government guiding the whole thing).  He cites some problematic research on food miles and then says:

As agriculture became more efficient, people were liberated from farms and able to develop other skills that helped raise general living standards. People freed from having to scrabble for food, for instance, could work in factories, write software, or become physicians. Modernization is a process in which people get further and further away from the farm.

Okay, so it just so happens that I am sitting here reading a bunch of historical books on the evolution of American agriculture.  So far as I read, yes, it does indeed seem like people can do a lot more types of production if less of them are involved in the growing and harvesting cycle.   I agree with Rachel Lauden and Jack Goody that global industrial food production has increased the living standards, nutrition, and variety in people's lives.  I don't think we can manage without it.  At the same time (and I think Rachel would agree with me, but I'll have to ask her),  having a working knowledge of how food is grown, who grew it, and what it might taste like in a variety of preparations is a central factor in human social existence.  The less we are involved in that as a species, the more our lives are diminished.   And please don't take that as a Wendell Berry - Barbara Kingsolver nostalgia for a pastoral past.  There are other ways to imagine a good food life, aren't there?

Consider Bailey's example: is factory work or computer programming intrinsically better and less miserable than farming?  And does being "free" from agriculture mean a better life for everyone?  I'm not so sure -- but I do know that there are still plenty of people who have to be involved in growing and producing our food and most of them don't make much money and work under unnecessarily awful conditions that are shaped by this idea of international choice. And it's the global "market" of pushing various countries to focus on single crop exports that is, I hope, ultimately behind the move to more local foods.  French beans in northern Africa, Broccoli in Guatemala, Tomatoes in Mexico -- as they say on Seinfeld, "not that there's anything wrong with it"... EXCEPT that this leaves these economies entirely dependent on income from exported crops and dietary needs provided by imports.   

But Bailey still thinks the "food miles advocates" are stupid because..."[they] fail to grasp the simple idea that food should be grown where it is most economically advantageous to do so. Relevant advantages consist of various combinations of soil, climate, labor, capital, and other factors. It is possible to grow bananas in Iceland, but Costa Rica really has the better climate for that activity... Desrochers and Shimizu argue that concentrating agricultural production in the most favorable regions is the best way to minimize human impacts on the environment."

That sounds just ducky, doesn't it? A world where we grow the right foods in the right climates. (and for the sake of less complexity, let's just bracket the biotech revolution that attempts to create hybrids that can grow just about anywhere.. I am sure Bailey embraces that wholeheartedly.  Again, a place where moral and economic factors are much more complex than a simple "I'm for it or against it"...).   Bailey blames government agricultural subsidies (by wealthier nations) for the distorted global import/export market -- he's not entirely wrong, but again, if you take away the attempts to control production and distribution at the government level, who or what is left to determine what's grown, by whom, and sold where?

Of course, the question we all get down to with this: who gets to decide where it's "most economically advantageous" to grow things? If you answered THE FREE MARKET, then you clearly have been keeping up on your paid subscription to Reason.

For me, I think I'll go waste some of my precious leisure and work time using my non-hybrid car to go pick up some local apples and a challah, some much-less local coffee.    (Oh, and probably the lovely item above, which is sustainably produced, extremely expensive, totally not local, definitely not kosher, and amazingly delicious...)