The Bogus Economic Arguments Used to Attack Local Food

A new book, The Locavore’s Dilemma: In Praise of the 10,000 Mile Diet by Pierre Desroches and Hiroku Shimizu, uses argu­ments from neolib­eral eco­nom­ics to explain why those who advo­cate eat­ing local food are wrong. Often, their argu­ments require assump­tions as silly as the one in the joke. For exam­ple, in mak­ing the case that the world moved from a diet of local food to a global food sys­tem for a good rea­son (and there­fore we should not return to eat­ing local), they assume that mod­ern loca­vores will face the same tech­no­log­i­cal lim­i­ta­tions as our ances­tors, who were also loca­vores. But aside from the numer­ous straw­man argu­ments found through­out the book, there are sev­eral points where eco­nom­ics are prop­erly applied to food and agri­cul­ture and—the authors charge—prove that local food is a bad idea.

But per­haps the oppo­site is true instead; that the mod­els used in neolib­eral eco­nom­ics do not accu­rately apply here. Here are six eco­nomic prin­ci­ples that do not fit when it comes to food and agriculture:

1. Assume the Players are Rational: In eco­nom­ics, one assumes all of the play­ers are ratio­nal. When it comes to food, we are far from it. For exam­ple, frozen din­ners had been intro­duced to super­mar­kets unsuc­cess­fully before the TV din­ner came along. The TV din­ner suc­ceeded because Americans were excited about TVs. When the Pepsi Challenge showed that Americans pre­fer the fla­vor of Pepsi to Coke, Coca-Cola took the bait and intro­duced New Coke, which tested bet­ter than Coke and Pepsi in taste tests. Turned out, con­sumers don’t drink Coke because of the fla­vor. They drink it because it’s “American” and “fun.” Coke learned its les­son, and its slo­gans have reflected it ever since (“Open happiness”).

2. Standardization of Food: Much of eco­nomic the­ory rests on the assump­tion that the goods in ques­tion are com­modi­ties. Our food is stan­dard­ized so that it can be treated as a com­mod­ity. One Granny Smith apple is the same as any other Granny Smith apple, no mat­ter where it’s from or how it was pro­duced. But many foods are not so inter­change­able, and indeed, when they are stan­dard­ized, they often become stan­dardly bad.

Take the straw­berry. There’s noth­ing like the fla­vor of a fresh-picked, juicy straw­berry. But if you pay $3.99 a pint for straw­ber­ries in your super­mar­ket in January, the berries you buy will hardly even give a hint of fla­vor. They’ll be big and red, but who cares if the berry is per­fectly red if it doesn’t deliver on straw­berry flavor?

The mar­ket can deliver on the idea of year-round straw­ber­ries, but it can­not deliver on the delec­table fla­vor one asso­ciates with those berries. Truly ripe straw­ber­ries are highly per­ish­able, so they can’t be too ripe when picked. And straw­berry fla­vor dete­ri­o­rates when the berry goes in the fridge, but there’s no way to trans­port per­ish­able berries across the coun­try with­out refrig­er­a­tion. Even in California, where nature pro­vides fresh, local berries for about half the year, the fla­vor changes through­out the sea­son. Early sea­son berries aren’t very sweet or fla­vor­ful, unfor­tu­nately. It takes until May or June to get per­fect, sweet, juicy straw­ber­ries. That good­ness is fleet­ing and ephemeral, and it only comes once a year.

In addi­tion to fla­vor, foods are not iden­ti­cal in terms of nutri­tion. It’s likely that super­mar­ket eggs are stan­dard­ized, all with roughly the same nutri­tion con­tent. They were all pro­duced in nearly iden­ti­cal con­di­tions from genet­i­cally iden­ti­cal birds who were fed exactly the same feed. But when chick­ens can roam freely, eat­ing grass and bugs in addi­tion to chicken feed, their eggs become more nutri­tious. It would be extremely dif­fi­cult to pro­duce eggs this way on a large scale and do so prof­itably. But it’s easy and fun to do for home­own­ers with small back­yard flocks.

Another fac­tor is genet­ics. It’s cer­tainly con­ve­nient to pro­duce genet­i­cally iden­ti­cal food for the mar­ket, espe­cially if you find the per­fect com­bi­na­tion of genet­ics to give you a high yield and great taste with dis­ease and pest resis­tance. But what hap­pens when Mother Nature throws a curve­ball at you and a dis­ease comes along that your crop has no resis­tance to? You need new genes. Sure, sci­en­tists can keep a sup­ply of bio­di­ver­sity in a seed vault and that might pro­vide the new genes you’re look­ing for. But for genes that really keep up with the cur­rent chal­lenges of nature, you need genetic diver­sity grown in nature, under con­di­tions that change over time.

When gov­ern­ments signed NAFTA, they assumed that corn is corn is corn, and the U.S. pro­duces corn cheaper than Mexican peas­ants are able to pro­duce it. But those Mexican peas­ants are the guardians of the world’s most valu­able sup­ply of corn genet­ics. And in that sense, they can hardly be com­pared to an Iowa corn farmer who buys seeds each year from DuPont or Monsanto.

Click here to read the rest of this arti­cle at AlterNet.org.