Okay, folks.  After a reprieve, it’s time to revisit Mercatus Policy Primer No 8:  “Yes, We have No Bananas: A Critique of the ‘Food Miles’ Perspective.”  I had promised a look at how local food movements take into account questions of efficiency, economic or otherwise.

Today, the focus is on the extent to which local food activists work with economic efficiency and plain old efficiency in general.  First, the study authors heartily support the idea that food should be produced where it is efficient to do so.  I absolutely agree.  They also argue that food should be eaten seasonally.  Authors Desrochers and Shimizu claim that “the importance of seasonality [...] is also easily forgotten by activists and consumers.”  If such is the case (and it may well be, though I’d certainly like some stats on that), it’s not a flaw in the local food movement, but rather a problem with its interpretation at the individual level.  The Eat Local Challenge website, a blog which describes itself as a group blog written by authors who are interested in the benefits of eating food grown and produced in their local foodshed, has several articles about the importance of eating seasonally.  Both Alice Waters and Michael Pollan, key figures in the local food movement, liberally pepper their interviews and writings with references to the importance of seasonal eating, as do other leaders such as Barbara Kingsolver and Gary Paul Nabhan. In short, the planning is sound, even if the execution could use some tweaking.

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I promised I’d hold off on a full analysis of the policy primer, “Yes, We Have No Bananas: A Critique of the ‘Food Miles’ Perspective” until I had done all the backtracking to do it up right, but it turns out that this project is big enough that it’s best handled in several installments.  Today, I’d like to welcome you to the first.  One of the major concerns of the authors of policy primer, Pierre Desrochers and Hiroko Shimizu, is how local food movements might adversely impact free trade and developing nations.  To that end, it’s worth taking a look at how free trade has itself affected developing nations.

Throughout the policy primer, the authors take more than a few swipes at local food enthusiasts.  One of the most interesting for me is the authors’ claim that locavores have a “romanticized” notion of eating local–which, by the way, they characterize as “subsistence farming.”  This is a misuse of the term.   “Subsistence farming” refers to farming in which the farmers raise just enough for their families and any federal dues with little or nothing left over. If in doubt, consult the Encyclopedia Britannica or the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, for starters. In fact, you’ll find that a secondary definition describes subsistence farming as “farming or a system of farming that produces a minimum and often inadequate return to the farmer.”  Since one of the major objectives of the Eat Local movement is to encourage local farms, keep local farms in business, and provide farmers with a living wage, painting local food production as “subsistence farming” is a gross miscategorization. The locavore movement does not advocate a return to subsistence farming; rather it advocates a re-valuation of the work farmers do and the importance of a healthy food source close to where you live.

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Robin Wheeler’s new book, Food Security for the Faint of Heart: Keeping Your Larder Full in Lean Times, may be a mouthful of a title, but that’s appropriate when you consider that the author’s purpose is, in fact, to keep your mouth full when the going gets tough.

Wheeler has a background in the kinds of skills that are just plain handy, whether you’re in a crisis situation or not.  A Canadian, she teaches traditional skills (like canning and seed saving), gardening, and medicinals in British Columbia.  She also started the Sustainable Living Arts School in Roberts Creek, British Columbia, and has previously written one other book, entitled Gardening for the Faint of Heart.  Considering that, perhaps it’s not surprising that the structure of Wheeler’s book reminded me a bit of an eclectic neighbor’s garden: a patch of earth richly populated with the old stand-bys, some intriguing and unexpected nuggets here and there, and an unusual twist on some staples.   She covers a surprising amount of ground, going from how to salvage as much food as possible when the power goes out indefinitely, to how to plan and plant a garden.  She talks about water collection, cooperatives, and how to cook a surprisingly good meal out of what you can scavenge from your surroundings in a disaster.

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On most of my flight from Arizona to Pennsylvania and back last week, I had my nose buried in Russ Parson’s book How to Pick a Peach: The Search for Flavor from Farm to Table.  It’s one of those books I bought and then left sitting on the shelf for months while I went around, you know, living my life.  Once I’d cracked the spine, I couldn’t help what I’d been busy doing that was so important that I’d left it untouched for so long.  This book is, in a word, wonderful.  Parsons, a food and wine columnist for the LA Times, is more than a foodie–he’s a food geek.  Not only does he clearly love food, but he knows an immense amount about it.  How to Pick a Peach is a rich source of information, a straightforward type of poetry about food, and an intriguing collection of recipes.

You can see Parsons talk about his book in the video below.

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