A final (imported) nail in the Locavore coffin

You might remember the "Locavore" movement, the anti-growth/anti-globalism folks who want to mandate that we supply ourselves within spitting distance of our front yards, or some such silliness.  At one time they were proposing legislation that required grocery stores to show how many "food miles" each product had travelled. 
Yeah.  Seriously. 

Yes, I guess you could grow oranges in Fort Worth, Texas, but they would have bigger carbon footprints than Al Gore's mansion(s).  And they would probably be so crappy that the producers couldn't get any economies of scale in their orange shipments.  I could go on and on, but there's no point in it. 

Here's another argument against the Locavores by Tim Worstall.  I found it on Samizdata:

Take local food. So, if everyone in North-Eastern Japan were to be reliant upon local food supplies then everyone in North-Eastern Japan would now be condemned to starvation in the next month or so. Not just the ten or twenty thousand who have already died, but the hundreds of thousands, millions, that make up the entire population. For in the wake of an earthquake that destroyed much and a tsunami that swamped the rest, there is no food, no saved food storage and no damn chance of growing any for the forseeable future.


"Localism” would kill all of these people. And the same would be true of localism in Pakistan when it floods, Queensland when it floods, Cockermouth when it floods, any damn where when there’s a drought and, in fact, any part of the planet that could be hit by any of those natural disasters which a vengeful planet can plop upon us, from the flood and drought already mentioned through to hurricanes, cyclones, potato or banana blight and plagues of frogs.

Think about any place suffering from a famine.  Famines happen when the local food supply doesn't come through, and the locals haven't been allowed to trade with neighboring (or faraway) nations. 

Ok, but what about the disruption to supply chains?  Haven't we all read about how Toyota plants in the U.S. and other a few other automakers are having to shut down assembly lines because they relied on Japanese parts? 
Wal-Mart figured that one out a long, long time ago.  They have a minimum of two suppliers for everything, just in case one of them goes broke, gets hit with an earthquake, a tsunami, or gets too uppity.  Within a couple of years, every one of Japane's major customers will have done the same. 

So good riddance to the Locavores.  If they had their way, I would be stuck eating local Texas barbeque. 

If you've got a few more minutes to kill, go here to read an account of a Locavore in British Colombia who drove all over town in a damn SUV to pick up food to serve at a locally-grown meal designed to get neighbors to turn off their floodlights.  I don't think he meant that part of it to be funny.  These are nice people, but they don't understand economies of scale. 

Insane Locavore quote of the day

Various people have told me to broaden my horizons and stop reading and viewing so much libertarian propaganda.
So yesterday I went to Barnes & Noble and picked up this month's copy of Adbusters, the most anti-capitalist publication I could get my hands on.  (The New York Holy Times was sold out.) 

Adbusters is a big-time environmentalist, anti-capitalist, anti-consumption and anti-marketing periodical.  They have a visceral hatred of shopping malls.  Adbusters gives the impression that the Soviet empire fell because of bad luck and poor execution of the Marxist roadmap.  "Profit", the concept that supports Adbusters, is in such ill-repute that I would feel guilty about ever purchasing a copy.   

Adbusters supports something called "Buy Nothing Day"

(It's on November 26th.  You're supposed to purchase nothing.  Don't support your neighbors, your friends, or anyone but yourself.  Don't swap your own stuff for anyone else's. Regardless of their intent, that'll be the result.)

They do have some cool advertising parodies.  Here's one taking a stab at Joe Camel.

I was kind of enjoying their (ahem) unique point of view until I got to this quote.  It's from a guy named Bill Mollison, founder of something called the Permaculture Movement.

"We're only truly secure when we can look out our kitchen window and see our food growing and our friends working nearby." - Bill Mollison

Oh for the love of God.  Where to begin, where to begin. 

We are more secure than we've ever been because we can't look out our kitchen windows and see our entire food supply.  If the view from your kitchen is your only food supply, and something happens to the area in front of the kitchen window, you're in deep, deep shit.  Google the word "famine" when time permits. 

But if you have cheerfully taken part in the capitalist evils of globalization, you don't have to worry as much.  Iowa could waste its entire wheat crop by converting it to enthanol or some other useless boondoggle, and it will hurt me.  But there's always Nebraska.  And Canada.  And Russia.  The Ukraine.  As long as those places are growing wheat, and as long as someone in our government doesn't shut down the supply of wheat (to protect American jobs), then I'll probably be okay. 

As long as some raving locavore doesn't require me to live off what's visible from my kitchen window, I'll be okay. 

 But wait, Mr. Bill Mollison, founder of the Permaculture Movement, there's more.  I've got more for you.  Where are you going to get your kitchen, the kitchen you're going to look out from to view your wheat, your bananas, your strawberries, your lowfat decaf triple-skinny mocha, your carrots, lettuce, arugula, your mineral supplements and your chicken, fish, and occasional slice of roast beef?  Where will this kitchen be produced?  The kitchen itself.  The wood, the brick, the sheetrock, the heat and air vents, the electrical wiring, the ducts, the oven, the stove, the sink and the water faucets?  The refrigerator?  Pots, pans, and George Foreman Grill?  Does that have to come from your front yard?   

Will you need to grow the trees for wood within view of the damn kitchen, just to feel safe?  Are you going to set up a kiln to make bricks out of local mud?  Mr. Mollison, have you ever looked at the different locations that Adam Smith's Invisible Hand blindly coordinates in a united effort to put ceramic tile on your countertops and your floors?  Are you going to go off into a blind lefty panic if some of that stuff is manufactured by little dark people who don't look like you, you racist son of a bitch? 

Sorry about that.  I can't stand racism masquerading as compassionate save-the-earth do-goodism.  Back to the topic at hand....

Let's get to the window itself, that window Mollison is looking out of to see his garden and his wheat field and chickens and goats and fish tank and brick kiln and lumber forest and all the other things required to make Bill Mollison feel safe from the efforts of other people in strange places with funny names. 

Bill, do you have any idea, any idea at all, what goes into making a damn window?  Do you want all that going on in your front yard?  Or is food the only thing that makes you break out in fantods if it's handled by Mexicans?  Is it ok if Mexicans or Canadians, or people from across the county line make your window? 

"We're only truly secure when we can look out our kitchen window and see our food growing and our friends working nearby." - Bill Mollison

Ok, we're getting to the end of that insane sentence.  "We're only truly secure when we can look out our kitchen window....and see our friends working nearby."  Hell, is there going to be room for them if Bill Mollison requires all of this industry in his front yard?  Or are they all going to be Bill Mollison's employees? 
What will the view have to look like from their kitchen windows if they have the same phobias and anxieties that afflict Bill Mollison? 

Do you think we might all be better off if we allow everyone else in the world to compete for the honor and privilege of producing our food, kitchens and windows?  And we can give them what we produce in return?  And maybe, just maybe, they can one day have a kitchen of their own?  With windows? 

Sorry for such an ill-tempered rant.  I wrote Mollison's sentence down in my notepad yesterday and just found it a few minutes ago.  If you want to read a more calm and measured explanation of the evils (yeah, evils) of Bill Mollison's worldview, check out "The Future And Its Enemies" by Virginia Postrel. 

The Evolution Of God, by Robert Wright

For the next few days, Andrew Sullivan has turned his site, the Daily Dish. over to Robert Wright, author of "The Evolution Of God".

I'm about halfway through the book, and it's pure, undiluted greatness.

Brilliant.

Since I'm not through with the book, I'm not going to attempt a summary. Here's a good one, though, from a Disciples Of Christ minister in Troy, Michigan.

The idea that God has evolved may be off-putting to some and welcomed by others. How one responds to this idea may depend both on what is meant by the phrase and where one stands in regards to the idea of God. A believer may take this idea differently than will an unbeliever. Philip Clayton, in his book Adventures in the Spirit (Fortress, 2008) encourages believers in God to welcome dialog with science and philosophy, and not to fear any challenging implications to faith. It is with that sense of openness that I came to Robert Wright’s fascinating study of the evolution of the idea of God, from its origins in hunter/gather societies to the development of the great religions – especially the three Abrahamic religions. Wright admits that he approached this study with an agnostic sensibility. Indeed, the focus here is not on whether God exists, but how humans have envisioned and approached the idea of God. His is a materialist description, assuming that ideas of faith have evolved because they fulfill a role in society. Indeed, when he speaks of specific religious expressions he takes a rather minimalist view – that is Jesus said and did little of what has been ascribed to him, and the stories of early Judaism, from Abraham to Moses, likely did not happen.

Wright will be posting on the Daily Dish for the rest of this week. Go there.

Buying Locally Grown - No matter how far you have to drive

I don't go out looking for this stuff. Salon.com emails it to me every morning.....


How I Seduced My Neighbors Into Going Green - By James Glave
I didn't want to be an eco-jerk. So I consulted a "global warming negotiator." That's when the fun began.


James Glave is a good writer. Lives in British Colombia. He's a good photographer (here's his Flickr photostream). But he apparently developed an obsession with the CO2 emissions required to power his neighbor's yard lighting.


Five of them (floodlights) were mounted across the front of his house. I had not inspected them up close but each likely contained a 65-watt incandescent bulb. As far as I could discern, they illuminated his front yard for no particular reason..... But those five beacons across the way were still doing atmospheric damage. I had already done the math on what we might delicately call my neighbor's nocturnal emissions, and as best as I could calculate, the lamps were kicking up something in the range of 95 pounds of carbon dioxide a year.

In the grand scheme of things, that's atmospheric chump change. It is the equivalent of about three return trips to Grandma's house in my father-in-law's hand-me-down Lexus SUV, and I easily find ways to justify those excursions. Hell, I probably endanger more polar bears just by vacuuming the house and doing my laundry, which amasses around my house in great fuzzy piles like Tribbles on the Starship Enterprise.

It was unfair of me to pick on my neighbor, whom I shall call David. But there was something about his all-night Light Show for Nobody that I couldn't quite keep my mouth shut about. In my head, his lamps had come to symbolize all the little things we all could be doing to save ourselves from extinction if we only knew better. If each of us took all the baby steps to overcome unconscious bad habits we didn't even know we had, we could dial back the planetary thermostat. We could unleash staggeringly good changes.

James, to his eternal credit, doesn't want to be an eco-jerk. He admits that he can't bring too much righteous indignation to bear on the outrage in his neighbor's yard, since JAMES IS RUNNING AROUND TOWN IN A LEXUS SUV. (I'm betting that the neighbor has a bigger house, bigger yard, and makes the most money. The people of my acquaintance who want "Change" generally want The Change to apply mostly to those who are one or two notches up the food chain.... I could be wrong.)


But how does one bring neighbors into a state of SUV-driving, yet floodlight extinguishing grace without being offensive and causing them to rebel against The One True Faith?


You bring in a consultant. Yes, a consultant, from Futerra Sustainability Communications. You can read that middle part yourself. The idea of bringing in a damn consultant to get yer damn neighbor to turn off his damn floodlights is too much for me to damn copy. Sorry. Anyway, the consultant, after charging him God Knows What for her services, suggests that James have a neighborhood "green" party. Plus, she says, "Food Helps".

"Food helps," said (the consultant). "Having food and alcohol at a meeting really helps. If you offer a really nice evening, maybe trying a whole load of local foods, and they have eaten your food and drunk your wine, then -- and only then -- do you introduce the idea of changing habits as a group. You could approach it as a challenge to the next town over. But however you approach it, wait until they have eaten your food and drunk your wine. Then they'll feel beholden to you."


If you've read this far, I hate to tell you this, but this is just the introduction. All of that was merely my preliminary throat-clearing, for which I apologize. Now I can get to the point. James lives in British Colombia, and is determined to serve nothing but food produced in British Colombia.


JAMES GOES SHOPPING


I wanted to serve a local dinner. Of course, winter is about the worst time to try such a stunt. But Townsend had told me to make my neighbors comfortable, show them a good time. So I trucked down to my local Whole Foods and asked the butcher for some organic beef that was as regional as possible, within reason.
"All of our beef comes from an open-range ranch in British Columbia," she said, offering me a pamphlet with a picture of what looked like an honest-to-God cowboy on the front. The steer pictured inside looked happy enough; a few dozen of them browsed in a grassy field.
"I'd like to do a roast for about eight people. What are my options?"
"The prime rib is our best cut, lots of marble in the meat," she replied. "That would be very tender, really nice."
"How much?"
"Eight people?" She did the math. "You're looking at about $85."
I like my neighbors, but not that much. "What are my other options?"
"Chuck roast is a leaner cut," she explained. "But it'll be very nice if you cook it for a long time at a low heat."
Sounds easy enough. And at $26, I could afford to buy it, with enough left over for hundred-mile-compliant carrots.

(For the uninitiated, for something to be 100 mile compliant, it has to be grown within 100 miles of the store.)
"Keep a lid on it, keep it moist," she instructed, as she handed it (the roast) over. "You'll do well with that."
Everything in the Whole Foods vegetable section was from California, so I dialed Capers, a natural-foods market a couple miles down the street that I knew specialized in local produce. "We've got Jerusalem artichokes and celery root," the produce manager offered. "Not too much else from around here at this time of year. Everything is sort of finished."
I had no idea what to do with either. "I'll be right over," I said.
Saturday rolled around. I couldn't quite remember, but I think the butcher instructed me to cook the beef for four or five hours at 275 degrees. Dinner was at 7 p.m. I carefully installed my precious planet-friendly roast on the oven's middle rack early in the afternoon. I placed it under a tent of foil with some water in the pan. A couple of hours later, as delicious aromas filled the kitchen, it was time to check on the meat's progress toward perfection. I extracted the evening's piece de resistance, pulled back the foil, and stuck my friend chuck with a meat thermometer.
Hope turned to dread as the red needle instantly zoomed past "beef-rare," "beef-medium," and "beef-well." Like a runaway boxcar, the thermometer's pointer only picked up speed from there. It moved onto other animals, rocketing right through "lamb" and barely pausing at "poultry." Finally, the gauge ran out of livestock options altogether and, after pulling a double-jointed full rotation, came to rest off the scale, in an unmarked zone that should properly be labeled tanned goods.
In panic, I reached for my mobile and dialed Beef 911. My wife, Elle, answered, and after listening to me describe the symptoms, pronounced the roast dead over the phone. "It's lunch meat," she said, clearly disgusted with me. "Go get something else and start over."
I hopped in the SUV and drove to my island's gourmet butcher shop. There I shelled out $60 for a prime rib roast from Alberta, for eight people, proving once again that when it comes to sustainable consumption, you can always do it almost right the second time -- for more than what it would've cost you from the beginning.

The meal was a success. Everyone had a great time. The neighbor voluntarily turned off his prison-yard floodlights.


But at what cost? In parts of this essay, James is poking fun at his own inefficiency. In other parts, I think he's unknowningly "showing" more than he's "telling".


For instance, what are the environmental implications of cooking a roast for a long, long, long time over low heat, as compared to yard floodlights? Especially when you could've served something pre-cooked, like Spam?

Second, James was at the O So Politically Correct Whole Foods Market, but their produce was from shipped in from Politically Incorrect California. The fact that the California produce was grown, harvested, shipped, and unloaded in one of the most efficient processes devised by humans doesn't matter. It's not "local". So James admits in an essay read by millions of people on Salon.com, he admits, without a gun pointed at his head, he declares that he hopped in an SUV that weighs somewhere between 2,000 and 8,00 pounds and uses that thing to drive his righteous butt A COUPLE OF MILES DOWN THE STREET, and I assume A COUPLE OF MILES BACK so he can do the right thing and buy local produce. The freight costs on shipping an identical amount of produce in bulk shipping containers from Taiwan to British Columbia would be lower than that.

Jesus Christ Almighty.

Then you get into the multiple trips for the meat, which are merely funny.


So here's my question: I don't know how much of this is James poking fun at his environmentalist pretensions, and how much of this is cluelessness. I honestly don't.

Because every conversation that I have with a locavore makes me think that they don't have any idea how to look at true freight and shipping costs.

There's little or no difference between the James Glave comedy of errors and the locavore behavior that I see every day. They insist on locally grown food, and don't care how far they have to drive to get it.

Unbelieveable.

**************************

On a slightly related note, here's something from "Environmental Science And Technology"

The researchers looked at the total life cycle of greenhouse gases emitted to produce the food consumed by an average American household. It turns out that transportation as a whole is not the main offender. It accounts for about 11 percent of those food-related emissions, with only 4 percent in the final delivery stage from producer to retailer. Agricultural and production practices are responsible for almost all the rest.


Here's a chart of how "all the rest" breaks out:

Enjoy the guilt. Or eat whatever you want to eat at the lowest price possible. You're probably wasting less resources that way.

NOT Locally Grown. Not Even Close

Joel Stein has a hilarious piece in this week's Time magazine.
He takes the "locally grown" fad to the opposite extreme.....

To prove how wrong the farm-to-table movement is, I cooked a dinner purely of farm-to-airplane food. Nothing I made was grown within 3,000 miles of where I live in Los Angeles. And to completely give the finger to the locavores, I bought the entire meal in the local-food movement's most treasured supermarket, the one that has huge locally grown signs next to the fruits and vegetables: Whole Foods.

Here's more from Mr. Stein, stating that the locally grown movement is about self-denial.
I suffer, therefore, I am superior:

My distavore meal was more a smorgasbord than a smart fusion of cultures, but I still ate the way only a very rich person could have dined just 15 years ago. The local-food movement is deeply Luddite, part of the green lobby that measures improvement by self-denial more than by actual impact—considering shipping food in containers is often more energy-efficient than a local farmer trucking small amounts that are then purchased on a separate weekend farmers'-market trip you take in your SUV. So I'm going to keep buying food from my foreign neighbors. Because it's the only way we Americans learn about other countries, other than by bombing them.

We've already seen an era when everything was locally grown, according to Don Boudreaux at Cafe Hayek.

It was called "The Dark Ages".

There are plenty of good reasons to buy locally grown food.

Conservation isn't one of them.

Signage from EcoSherpa

Also, Perry De Havilland of Samizdata linked to this post some time last night. It's a piece called "Dear Third World Farmer", which looks at the unexamined impact of buying locally.

If you don't really understand what's wrong with Farm Subsidies, click here for a rundown of what's wrong with the current farm bill.

And speaking of another group of Farmers that need help, check out another post of mine on the same topic: "The Farmers of Manhattan Need Your Money".