The Locavore's Dilemma (6 page)

Writing in 1923, the British professor of agriculture Thomas Hudson Middleton observed that his compatriots were “chiefly fed upon imported food, and are interested in the quality and price of their foodstuffs rather than in its origins, the ordinary consumer takes little interest in the well-being of agriculture.”
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(Most of his compatriots did not even care whether or not foodstuffs were produced in the British Empire, thus prompting the creation of an “Empire Marketing Board” in 1926.) Despite the fact that they have been conditioned to provide SOLE answers when formally quizzed on their shopping habits, today's British consumers are apparently still behaving like previous generations.
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This, we will argue, is the right path for all consumers to pursue. Getting the most for your hard-earned dollar is not only enlightened self-interest, but also the best way to create a better world.

The railroad, the steamship, the telephone, and the tele- graph have opened to us a world market and world com- merce. The novelty of these opportunities has caused them to be used to excess. Man may be said to have gone on a transportation spree, a very orgy of transportation. We have unduly separated man's home space from his sustenance space, to the detriment of both sustenance and home . . . Mr. Ross [Department of Food Supply, Com- mittee of Public Safety of Pennsylvania] worked out a plan which should some day be applied to every community in every civilized country if modern society improves as we have reason to expect it to do. The plan is to study the local food needs and the possibilities of local food production, and so far as is feasible to make the locality feed itself.

—JOSEPH RUSSELL SMITH. 1919.
The World's Food Resources.
H. Holt & Company, pp. 566 and 568
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n the words of urbanists Branden Born and Mark Purcell, the “local trap” is the “tendency of food activists and researchers to assume something inherent about the local scale” in terms of the values they hold dear, from democracy, social justice, and food security to ecological sustainability, better nutrition, freshness, and quality.
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A logical outcome of this stance is to consider large multinational corporations inherently bad and “foreign” goods suspect. According to some evolutionary psychologists, our natural propensity to favor members of our community over distant people
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owes much to our foraging heritage because, for countless generations, human beings were group and territory-based creatures. The fact that these instincts are still very much with us today can be observed at any meaningful sporting event involving rival teams. Nonetheless, all economically prosperous episodes in human history have been characterized to one degree or another by the expansion of a community's food provisioning.

With the exception of nomadic groups, most of the food supply of our hunter and gatherer ancestors came from within a rather limited territory. At some point, though, humans developed what the economist Adam Smith described in 1776 as the propensity “to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another,” a capacity which proved so advantageous in evolutionary terms that it became “common to all men.”
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Although much debate still surrounds the origins of trade (for instance, did it first occur within or between groups?), no one disputes that it is substantially older than the development of agriculture and many suggest that from its beginning it probably entailed interactions between and beyond “local” communities. Until time travel is developed, however, the study of the ancient long distance trade in food will remain difficult as, unlike stones and bones, perishable items left very little trace in the archeological record. More recent evidence nonetheless suggests that it
might have been significant in some locations. For instance, before European contact, the native inhabitants of a portion of northern British Columbia, who lived in three different yet adjacent climatic and biotic zones (the Pacific coast, the boreal forest, and the interior plateau), traded goods such as dried seaweed, edible candlefish grease, and dried salmon for items such as moose hides and caribou and other meat. As stated by some of their descendants: “No one community existed in economic isolation, and the use or value of resources was not limited to its place of harvesting . . . [the regional economy] was never isolationist [and] combined elements of domestic production and consumption with an elaborate complex of trading networks.”
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For approximately 90% of their existence, anatomically modern humans managed to survive without practicing what we now call agriculture.
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In time, though, some wild plant and animal species were domesticated, meaning that they were brought under human control and gradually modified, at first through selection, breeding, hybridization, and grafting to which would later be added exposure to potent chemicals and irradiation,
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and rDNA technologies. As a result, plants and livestock were progressively given features better suited to human ends, from larger seeds and simultaneous ripening to a greater capacity to convert biomass into meat and less aggressive behavior.
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Significant and rapid advances in this respect preceded the advent of modern agribusiness. As the economic historians Alan L. Olmstead and Paul W. Rhode observe in their 2008 survey of American agricultural history, the varieties of corn, wheat, fruits, cotton, and tobacco grown at the beginning of the 20th century were dramatically different from the varieties grown one hundred years earlier, while 1940s farm animals such as swine, sheep, and cattle bore little resemblance to those of 1800.
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Of course, along the way innovative farmers adopted and adapted domesticated plants and animals that had been developed in distant lands, such as in the “Columbian exchange” that followed the incorporation of the Americas into the world economy more than 500 years ago. Native American contributions included edible crops like the tomato,
potato, sweet potato, chili pepper, cocoa, pineapples, beans, cassava, and corn, as well as tobacco and some varieties of cotton. Many products refined in the Old World, from wheat, rice, and soybeans to onions and peaches and virtually all of its domestic animals, traveled west and significantly altered the American landscape.

Along with the rise of agriculture, permanent human settlements gradually increased in size, numbers, and economic diversity. Indeed, regardless of the location or time period, economic growth has never occurred without the development of cities. There are several reasons for this. In short, the geographical agglomeration of diverse economic activities makes possible the profitable operation of a transportation hub through which firms can better serve a broad range of activities (both in local and more distant markets) while facilitating the lucrative transformation of production residuals, such as when a manufacturer of wood alcohol uses as its main input the sawdust created by a nearby sawmill.
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Being located next door to suppliers, customers and creative people in general facilitate the diffusion and development of a broader range of skills and the launching of new innovative businesses. Urban labor markets are also much larger and diversified than those of rural areas and smaller towns, thus making it considerably easier for entrepreneurs and managers to find the specialized or temporary workers they need and for individuals to invest in the acquisition of ever more refined skills.

A compelling description of some of these unique features of large cities was penned more than two millennia ago by the Greek historian and philosopher Xenophon:

In the end, the crucial differences between urban and rural folks is not that the former are inherently harder working and more creative, but rather that they have access to more opportunities to specialize and act on their insights and vision, and to turn them into economic realities.

In the words of economist Edward Glaeser, there is “a near-perfect correlation between urbanization and prosperity across nations.” This is now as obvious as ever as the per capita income in countries with a majority of people living in cities is nearly four times higher than in countries where a majority of people still live in rural areas.
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And despite long-standing predictions that recent advances in transportation and communication technologies (going back to the development of the railroad and the telegraph) will reverse this trend, it shows no sign of abating.
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To give but a few numbers, the proportion of the world's population living in cities remained below 5% for most of history and even in the most advanced societies of past periods, from the Roman Empire to Ming Dynasty China, probably never exceeded 10%. In 1800, less than 10% of the U.S. population lived in urban areas while between 70 and 80% of the working population in the richest economies of the time was still engaged in agriculture. Back then, only two cities—London and Beijing—had populations exceeding one million individuals. By 2000, there were 378. The average size of the world's 100 largest cities was 0.7 million inhabitants in 1900, 2 million in 1950 and 6.3 million in 2000. In 1900, one could count 6.7 rural dwellers to each urban dweller worldwide. In 2008, for the first time in history, the world's urban population exceeded its rural population, and, at more than 3 billion
people, was actually larger than the world's total population in 1960. According to recent UN projections, by 2025 there will be at least three urban to two rural dwellers. By 2050, approximately 70% of the world's population will be living in cities.
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Urban agglomerations have always proved essential for agricultural advances, be it in terms of providing the best setting for technological innovations, by offering large and concentrated markets for rural goods, and in generating the capital required to invest in rural development. As the urban theorist Jane Jacobs observed in 1969, agriculture “is not even tolerably productive unless it incorporates many goods and services produced in cities or transplanted from cities. The most thoroughly rural countries exhibit the most unproductive agriculture. The most thoroughly urbanized countries, on the other hand, are precisely those that produce food most abundantly.”
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Of course, many past agricultural advances can be traced back to the work of specialists such as livestock and crop breeders, geneticists, nutritionists, chemical and mechanical engineers, veterinarians, plant pathologists, and soil scientists who were sometimes (but often not) based in more rural regions. Yet, these people typically benefited from other advances first developed in urban contexts.

The key point for our discussion, however, is that urbanization has long been impossible without substantial food imports from distant locations. As some of Plato's characters in his
Republic
observed so long ago, to find a city “where nothing need be imported” was already then “impossible.”
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Some of these included grazing and foraging livestock (such as beef, goats, and sheep) that could transport itself over some distance on land despite the poor state of road transportation at the time. Items that could be shipped by boat covered much more distance. In the Ancient Mediterranean era, these included grain, wine, olive oil, fish sauce and paste, salt, and, to a lesser extent, honey, and spices (some of which came from as far away as India and China).

Over time, the development of ever better means of transportation (improved sailing ships, canals, and barges; coal, gasoline, diesel, residual
fuel oil and kerosene-powered rail locomotives, boats, ships, trucks, and cargo planes; and intermodal shipping containers) and improvements in old ways of preserving food and the development of new ones (from fermenting, drying, smoking, salting, and pickling to canning, juicing, chilling, freezing, and irradiation) provided urban consumers first—and rural consumers later—an ever broader range of commodities that had traveled over long distances, from pickled herrings, salted and dried cods, sugar, coffee, tea, and cocoa to canned fruits, frozen meat and eventually fresh produce, meat, fish, seafood, dairy products, and eggs.
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Apart from increased diversity and volume of supply, advances in transportation also equalized prices between locations. For instance, between 1820 and 1830, the development of steamboats helped reduce the price differential between Cincinnati and New Orleans by 19% for wheat, 68% for mess pork, 84% for coffee, and 74% for sugar.
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In the trans-Atlantic trade, the advent of ever better performing steel hull steamships reduced the cost of transporting a bushel of wheat from Chicago to Liverpool from approximately 37 cents in 1869 to approximately 10 cents in 1905.
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Until slightly more than a century ago, much food production for the urban population of the world's most advanced economies still took place within or in close proximity to city limits, especially in the case of items such as produce, animals, and animal products (mostly milk and eggs) that did not travel or keep well, or else could turn urban organic refuse of all kind into edible calories. To give a few less than idyllic illustrations, in Korea and China, “privy pigs” were kept to convert human excrement into meat (in technical terms, these pigs were “scatovores”). Walking through the streets of Manchester, England, in the early 1840s, Friedrich Engels blamed much of the filthy conditions on the Irish workers' “multitude of pigs walking about in all the alleys, rooting into the offal heaps, or kept imprisoned in small pens.” Urban poultry in 19th century London was fed maggots raised on the carcasses of dead urban work horses.
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Dairy cows converted much swill and brewery by-products into milk. Urban work horses and dairy cows not only gave cities
like London a “distinctly agricultural whiff,”
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but also generated valuable manure that was turned to good uses by local produce growers.