Geez, people. What did a happy little locavore ever do to you?
Authors Pierre Desrochers and Hiroko Shimizu have set up the entire concept of their book The Locavore's Dilemma: In Praise of the 10,000 Mile Diet, as a shooting gallery against the locavore lifestyle. The entire table of contents is set up as Locavore Myth #1, Locavore Myth #2 and on through Locavore Myth #7. As someone who likes to eat local and support local producers, I find that very insulting and off-putting.
However, the "locavores" that the authors are really referring to are the politicians and poseurs (Oprah Winfrey, Michael Pollan) who are trying to convince America that ALL farmers should produce only organic market vegetables and personally deliver them to your front door in a classic truck. The authors hammer home the point that in spite of our Norman Rockwell visions of what food production should be, what we as a market prefer is something else entirely.
The book is a litany of praises for commercial food production: better hygiene, organized exports, efficient transportation, more seed and cultivar choices, lower costs, advanced research. If you like facts and stats, this book will be a rich harvest of quotable statistics and facts.
And The Locavore's Dilemma has a lot of really good points to make, in spite of it's condescending concept. Even if you are an avid anti-GMO, pro-organic shopper, if you are seriously interested in how our food supply is really grown, transported, and marketed I do urge you to read the book. It will give you a richer sense of what food production is really all about, and a deeper appreciation for what's on our grocery shelves.
I found one of the most entertaining sections of the book, actually, to be the foreword, which was written by Blake Hurst, a fourth-generation Missouri farmer and owner of Hurst Greenery. In the foreword he says:
Michael Pollan spends a few days with an Iowa corn farmer in one of the early chapters of The Omnivore's Dilemma. By the end of the chapter, I felt like sending the farmer a bus ticket to the nearest homeless shelter. The combination of monopolistic purchasers of his products, price gouging suppliers, and the general tendency of everyone in our economy to stick it to the small farmer made Pollan's aggie quite a sympathetic character. Except the book gives just enough information for me to estimate his income in the past year, and if he didn't make $150k in 2011, I'll eat my hat.
The book also gives plenty of historical references of disasters and near-disasters that could have been diverted, or were actually prevented, by expanding agricultural frontiers and trading foodstuffs in the form of finished products or seeds. Chronologically, it skips around a lot because it's organized by topic, but if it were organized differently it would be a fascinating timeline of how hard all of us, farmers and villagers alike, have fought to survive both literally and economically. Even one chapter organized chronologically would have been, I think, more compelling and memorable than the pot-shot approach.
The book mentions genetic engineering twice. That's two sentences in the whole book. So it's not an ode to genetically engineered crops, if that's what you're thinking. But it does look at things like carbon footprints (including transportation), third world economies, pests vs. pesticide use and other issues that anyone who loves food should be thinking about.
One point the authors continually bring home is the similarity between demands that we "buy local" and the dangers of regional protectionism. While protectionism almost always has adverse effects, the authors treat these issues as an either-or scenario, without acknowledging that maybe we consumers would just like to find some middle ground so we have more local, organic sources and can throw some support to local growers, as an antidote to subsidized monocultures and dumbed down produce sections.
Except for the foreword, the book is utterly lacking in humor and devoid of interviews or personal interest stories. It often reads like a series of college-level topical reports--no surprise as Desrochers is an associate professor of geography at the University of Toronto, and Shimizu has a master's degree in international public policy from Osaka University.
Unfortunately, the people who would most benefit from reading this book are the people least likely to read it, which would be those who persist in believing that every farm should look like the old TV show Green Acres. And why would they ever want to read it? It's bone dry, doesn't fit their world view and ridicules locavores. It may be an "important book" as Hurst calls it in the foreword, but I don't know what the publisher, Perseus Books, was thinking. Here you've got this huge push, from consumers to powerful politicos, to eat and buy local—a market demand big enough to inspire this book—and the entire premise of the book is designed to alienate that reading audience.
Why?
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