How locavores will not destroy the world, an essay on conscious eating.

In the last 20 years, the amount of local foods consumed in the American diet has tripled, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture, and now comprises 2 percent of food consumed in the U.S. As with anything that’s popular, some have seen fit to tear it down. Why do they do this? Do they find the locavores annoying, or do they seriously believe, as many argue, that local food enthusiasts pose a threat to the planet?

In the book The Locavore’s Dilemma: In Praise of the 10,000-mile Diet, economists Pierre Desrochers and Hiroko Shimizu argue that if everyone focused on local foods, agriculture would do more damage to the environment. Their case rests on a statistic that many locavores might not want to hear: that transportation of food accounts for about 5 percent of food-related carbon emissions, while production can create a lot more. Thus local foods can have a larger carbon footprint than imported foods, if the imports were grown in regions where they can be coaxed from the soil with less energy. Greenhouse tomatoes in the U.K., for example, have been shown to produce three times the greenhouse gas emissions as tomatoes imported from Spain.

The well-rounded locavore would do well to consider such nuance. At the same time, many things about this book make it insincere. In an interview with Grist, Desrochers admitted to writing it, primarily, “to save my marriage.” The impetus came when a visiting locavore gave a lecture in which he called Japan parasitic because it imports so much food. “My wife was born and raised in Tokyo. She made me promise that I would do something about it.” The book’s intro bluntly states the authors’ objective: To “slaughter as many sacred cows in the food activists’ intellectual herd as we could.”

Similar arguments have been made. Stephen Budiansky did so in a 2010 New York Times editorial “Math Lessons for Locavores,” as have the books Just Food, An Economist Gets Lunch, and Food Police. These arguments, based on economic concepts like efficiency, comparative advantage and economies of scale, assume that all advantages and disadvantages of a given food chain can be accounted for. But can they?

It’s often pointed out that local food is more expensive than imported factory farmed foods. Cheaper food leaves more money in the wallets of consumers to spend elsewhere, goes the logic. But when L.A. Times writer Isabella Alsobrook tried a 100-mile diet, she found that while the produce indeed cost more, she saved money overall, because by avoiding non-local foods she also avoided processed foods. She had to cook more from scratch, with fresh, local ingredients, and saved money. And it’s been shown this is a healthier way to eat.

Taken to their extremes, the economics-based arguments would label most gardens as inefficient. And most gardeners would agree that it would be more efficient, and even cheaper, to spend a few extra hours at work and buy all their food. But they choose to garden just the same. Quality of life is hard to quantify.

A recent article by two economics professors, Anita Dancs and Helen Sharber, takes the efficiency arguments to task in the economists’ own language. While California can grow a lot of produce, they point out, the economic calculations don’t account for the state’s dwindling aquifer. Florida may grow cheap tomatoes, but the calculations don’t account for the near-slavery conditions in which the workers toil. Power imbalances, they note, aren’t incorporated into the 10,000-mile diet’s calculus: “Looking through the conceptual lens of power relations – between agribusiness and contract farmers, farm owners and farmworkers, food corporations and low-income consumers, the government and immigrant workers – gives us a clearer picture of who determines what costs and benefits are created in the food system and how these costs and benefits are distributed. Paying attention to power allows for the possibility that the falling food prices attributed to comparative advantage and economies of scale may be related, instead, to the ability of the powerful to offload social and environmental costs onto the powerless.”

“I can’t believe that people are trying to argue that communities feeding themselves is a bad thing,” said Josh Slotnick, a farmer in Missoula, Montana, when I confronted him with the efficiency arguments. He believes the 100-mile diet is empowering to local producers, workers, consumers and the communities they share. “Growing food in just a few places and shipping it around the world from there doesn’t sound like efficiency. It sounds like slavery.”

Eating locally, he argues, makes you a better citizen. “Food is a medium for creating culture. It’s a medium for people falling in love with their places. And when people love where they live, all kinds of great behavior follows, little of which is economically rational. It’s a red herring to say, ‘Because the industrial food system is so efficient and its carbon footprint is so small, it’s a good thing.’ Agribusiness isn’t about making food and places better. It will make us better consumers, not better people or better citizens.”

For the extended cut of this story, visit www.mcweekly.com/edible