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BY PIERRE DESROCHERS
Themadnessof “locavorism”
LOCAVORISM—A LIFESTYLE
philosophy that encourages people to eat
only or mostly locally produced food—has
gained many influential adherents in
recent years. Strangely, though, local food
proponents never ask themselves this most
basic question: If things were so great
when most of humanity’s food supply was
produced close to home, why was the
globalized food supply chain developed in
the first place?
Not surprisingly, it turns out there were
many good reasons for going beyond one’s
“foodshed.”
Among other benefits, cost-efficient
long-distance transportation made it
possible to channel the surplus food pro-
duction of regions that had experienced
good harvests to those that didn’t—in
the process, ending famine in developed
economies. As with everything else,
putting all of one’s food-security eggs in
one regional agricultural basket can only
result in disaster when floods, droughts,
frost and other calamities strike one’s
local producers.
Developing large-scale monocultures
in the regions best suited to specific
plants and animals occurred spontane-
ously throughout history because doing
so delivered more food while using much
less land, energy and other resources than
more diverse, but less efficient, smaller
operations. This is why the notion of “food
miles” (the distance food items travel from
farms to consumers) promoted by local
food activists in the name of sustainability
has been repeatedly and rigorously de-
bunked in numerous life-cycle assessment
studies. In short, producing food typically
requires (much) more energy than moving
it around, especially when significant
amounts of heating and/or cold-protection
technologies, irrigation water, fertilizers,
pesticides and other inputs are required
to grow things in one region but not in
another. Furthermore, the distance trav-
elled by food matters less than the mode
of transportation (e.g., a container ship
versus a truck).
Producing more food ever more
efficiently in the best locations delivered
greater abundance at lower prices, and
allowed more people to leave the farm to
apply their talents to other ends. One re-
sult was the creation of many new jobs in
different lines of work. Another was that
large areas of marginal agricultural land
in advanced economies were abandoned
and eventually reforested. Modern agri-
cultural practices thus made it possible to
have both our economic and environmen-
tal cakes, and to eat them both.
Unfortunately, most locavores will not be
bothered with positive long-term historical
trends, nor acknowledge that our current
agricultural technologies are the end result
of a ruthless process of trial and error in
which countless less-efficient alternatives
were discarded over time. As they see
things, the past is largely irrelevant—to-
day’s technologies are imperfect and inno-
vations that echo past practices will forever
change the way food is produced.
Sadly for local food activists, the same
fundamental economic realities that
shaped the development of our globalized
food supply chain are still very much with
us. Indeed, were they to look at the issue,
they would quickly realize that the history
of all advanced economies in the last two
centuries are replete with local food ini-
tiatives. Common triggers have included
economic recessions (to boost regional
economic activity or to protect against
price inflation); wars or the threat of war
(to increase local food security); romantic
impulses during relatively prosperous
times (for environmental and social con-
siderations); alleged excessive commodity
travel (too much transit between various
points versus a more straightforward dis-
tribution itinerary between producers and
consumers); and unnecessary handling by
too many profit-seeking intermediaries.
Yet, none of these local food initiatives
survived the end of armed conflicts, eco-
nomic recovery or competition from more
efficient commercial operations.
What today’s enthusiastic locavores ulti-
mately fail to understand is that their “in-
novative” ideas are not only up against the
(alleged) “Monsatans” and “Monstersan-
tos” of this world, but are also in a direct
collision course with regional advantages
for certain types of food production, econ-
omies of scale of various kinds in all lines
of work, and the fact that pretty much
anything they can achieve in urban envi-
ronments can be replicated at lower costs
in some part of the countryside. These
basic realities defeated sophisticated local
food production systems and initiatives in
the past, and will continue to do so for the
foreseeable future.
Pierre Desrochers is an associate professor
of geography at the University of Toronto and
co-author of
The Locavore’s Dilemma: In
Praise of the 10,000-Mile Diet
.
The Food Issue
2016
Grains
West
42
THE ROMANCEOF EATING LOCALMASKS THE REALITIESOFOUR FOOD SYSTEM
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