80,000 Square Yards

The headline on the Treehugger post is: "

Paris to Plant 80,000 Square Yards of Green Roofs and Rooftop Gardens by 2020

That converts to 16.528 acres, which might could provide food for maybe, oh I don't know, 100? gai Parisiennes?

(To give them their due, the actual article doesn't talk about food, but insulation.  But this is a prime example of how to lie with statistics; of course if they'd used square feet the figure would be even more impressive.)

Locavore Water?

Onthepublicrecord is a blog about California water, interesting though sometimes hard to follow for an outsider.  The most recent post discusses squabbling over who has first dibs on California water, morphing into a thesis about shared resources in a political entity.

I wonder what the locavore position on water is: should we use only the rain which falls on our land, or can the whole watershed share the water, and if so what is the watershed?

The Virtues of Community

Going against the flow can be lonely.  A complaint from a locavore:

I live five miles outside a town of 850 people that could be more vibrant, more open to my ideas and goals as a farmer. I know that the customers who buy our eggs and lamb appreciate the work I do to make the food they eat, but I don't see them every day. (In fact, because I sell at an online farmers market, I rarely see any of my customers at all.) There are one or two other farmers in the area who grow things like we do, but we see them about every other month. Folks in my town are nice people, but they generally see nothing wrong with chemical farming or genetically modified seeds, as far as I can tell. Rarely does anyone think that farming without these technologies might be worth something extra. We stand by our values and practice sustainable agriculture, but pay the price of being seen as outsiders.

There can be a tendency to idealize the past. I grew up in an area of small farms and people who commuted to the city for work, but it wouldn't be  terribly warm and welcoming to newcomers.  I don't think the different ideas are as important as the actions and attitudes of the newcomers.  An extrovert who joins in community activities can be accepted regardless of any weird ideas he may have; someone who holds back won't be warmly integrated.

Food Movement as Religion

That's the argument in this long post. An excerpt:

But I couldn’t help but feel I had just attended a religious revival. Lyman’s [the "Mad Vegetarian Cowboy"] talk had all the hallmarks of a revivalist sermon, minus any mention of God or Jesus. He had told of the sinful ways in his youth, his arrogance and his disregard for the wisdom of tradition. He recounted the crisis sparked by illness, a miraculous cure, and the epiphany that allowed him to see the error of his former ways. He then chronicled his path of righteousness. The lecture ended with what felt like an altar call, as Lyman exhorted listeners to renounce the sinful ways of the world and follow the narrow path of righteous eating.

I think it's stretching it a bit.  The food movement can make use, conscious or unconscious, of themes and patterns found in religion, but that doesn't make it a religion.  I would be interested though in how well food evangelism meshes/coexists with religious evangelism.

Local Food, Economics, and Evolution

Freakonomics has a post with this theme:

But implicit in the argument that local farming is better for the environment than industrial agriculture is an assumption that a “relocalized” food system can be just as efficient as today’s modern farming. That assumption is simply wrong. Today’s high crop yields and low costs reflect gains from specialization and trade, as well as scale and scope economies that would be forsaken under the food system that locavores endorse.

Part of the argument is "comparative advantage" and specialization: Iowa gets higher corn yields than Mississippi, Idaho gets higher potato yields than Florida, etc.  Part of the argument is "economies of scale".

Makes sense to me, though it's quite possible over the long long term that arguments from evolution will trump the arguments from economies: remember the dinosaurs.

Charles Kenny Takes on the Food Movement

He writes in Foreign Policy in favor of efficiency and against locavores, supporting GM crops and importing food from the Third World over growing out of season crops in the Northern Hemisphere.

On Over Estimating Gardening Interest

Here's an honest gardener at Treehugger: she realizes her eyes were bigger than her willpower, particularly in North Carolina heat.  One of the weaknesses of the locavore movement is this fact; short term enthusiasms erode under the day to day realities of work, drought, insects, flood, mistakes and entropy.

The Kingsolvers Do Locavore

The Times has a piece on the problems Barbara Kingsolver, or rather her husband Steven Hopp, is having running an upscale locavore restaurant in their area of Virginia.  On the good side it's been in operation for 4 years; on the bad side it apparently is being subsidized by Ms. Kingsolver's income, since it hasn't made a profit.  Mr. Hopp is having to expand into some farming, because he can't get local farmers to produce everything he wants when and how he wants it.  And the locals would really prefer a Pizza Hut or McDonald's because the prices are too high (and I suspect the calorie count too low) for Mr. Hopp's food. 

You've got to credit their good intentions, and the money they've sunk into the place, and the jobs they've created, but I'm too mean and evil to resist a little schadenfreude.

Do We Import Farm Produce, or Farmers?

That's the question the food movement should be asking based on this Hmong high tunnel project in MA. It's  true that immigrants are more likely to work hard for lower returns, thus fitting the niche for locavore agriculture.

The Food Movement's Dilemma

 I think it's fair to say the food movement is mostly left, sometimes libertarian, but still mostly left.  As such I'd expect them to be responsive to this post at Understanding Government, noting an article on hunger in America.

But I'd also expect them to appreciate this guy's efforts, serving as a middleman between his neighbors who grow food and make artisanal products and the residents of the DC area:

A longtime foodie and serial entrepreneur, Kostelac is convinced that his old neighbors in yuppie Washington will pay premium prices for produce and meat from the small farmers who are his new neighbors. Now, in this refuge from his failures in the city, he sees opportunity — in the leaves of the grapevine that wraps around his front gate, the morel mushrooms that sprout beneath a shade tree and the wild raspberries that grow faster than ones he planted — that he might have overlooked before.

 So,  the dilemma is: what does the food movement support? Do they want to raise taxes to provide more food stamps to low-income people so they can pay some of the "premium prices" ($3.25 for a bunch of basil, $29.25 a pound for brisket)? Do they want to spend money to subsidize Mr. Kostelac's neighbors so they can reduce their prices?

A cynic, and I'm occasionally one, might say if everyone is eating organic basil in their pesto, what's the point--where does one turn in the effort to prove one's taste is superior?

Canada and the U.S. Differences

I skim the blog at ourfuture.org, but usually find its posts much too long and lacking focus, as well as being too liberal for my tastes.  But Sara Robinson recently returned to the U.S. from 7 years living in Canada and has a nice post about the differences she's found, particularly the synergy between the foodies (left) and farmers (right) in the Pacific Northwest.

Organic Versus Locavore

EWG has a post on organic gains from which I take this quote:

Organic salad greens have fared even more impressively.  According to Nielsen surveys, fresh cut salad greens increased their market share from 8.3 percent in 2006 to 15 percent so far this year.  Pre-packaged specialty salads have grabbed a whopping 46 percent of that market sector, compared to 29 percent in 2006.

I observe the good news for organic isn't good news for locavores, as I'm assuming the pre-packaged greens are shipped. Once again the consumers' desires are conflicting; healthy--yes; convenience--yes.

Pollan in the NY Review of Books

Michael Pollan has a review article in the NY Review of Books.  Briefly he sees a "food movement"

Among the many threads of advocacy that can be lumped together under that rubric we can include school lunch reform; the campaign for animal rights and welfare; the campaign against genetically modified crops; the rise of organic and locally produced food; efforts to combat obesity and type 2 diabetes; “food sovereignty” (the principle that nations should be allowed to decide their agricultural policies rather than submit to free trade regimes); farm bill reform; food safety regulation; farmland preservation; student organizing around food issues on campus; efforts to promote urban agriculture and ensure that communities have access to healthy food; initiatives to create gardens and cooking classes in schools; farm worker rights; nutrition labeling; feedlot pollution; and the various efforts to regulate food ingredients and marketing, especially to kids. 

He has problems with his facts and history in three cases

The dream that the age-old “food problem” had been largely solved for most Americans was sustained by the tremendous postwar increases in the productivity of American farmers, made possible by cheap fossil fuel (the key ingredient in both chemical fertilizers and pesticides) and changes in agricultural policies. Asked by President Nixon to try to drive down the cost of food after it had spiked in the early 1970s, Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz shifted the historical focus of federal farm policy from supporting prices for farmers to boosting yields of a small handful of commodity crops (corn and soy especially) at any cost.

This is a repeat of an error from The Omnivore's Dilemma, which is wrong.  Butz didn't have this power, the legislation passed by Congress was a change, but in the long view not that big of a change, and the decisions Butz made to lower loan rates were reversed by his successor after he was fired and during President Ford's reelection campaign.

Again:

Beginning in 2001 with the publication of Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation, a surprise best-seller, and, the following year, Marion Nestle’s Food Politics, the food journalism of the last decade has succeeded in making clear and telling connections between the methods of industrial food production, agricultural policy, food-borne illness, childhood obesity, the decline of the family meal as an institution, and, notably, the decline of family income beginning in the 1970s.

Did household income decline since 1970?  No. See this wikipedia article   Or see this for a quick view. Note he doesn't cite women's lib, which some of his readers might be supportive of.

And finally he twice refers to the White House "organic garden".  Wrong--Michelle's garden is not organic, though it leans that way. See Obamafoodorama.

Greenhouse Tomatoes

I've become a bit obsessive about the myths of vertical farming, emphasizing that plants need sunlight. And I noted the White House garden was much less productive in the winter than the other seasons. So as I read today's NYTimes piece on greenhouse tomatoes I was becoming worried.  Backyard Farms, in Madison, Maine has 42 acres of greenhouse, in which they grow tomatoes all year round!

An excerpt:

 But with shoppers willing to pay a premium — even $4 to $5 a pound — for red vine-ripened ones with more flavor, greenhouse tomatoes now represent more than half of every dollar spent on fresh tomatoes in American supermarkets, according to figures from the Perishables Group, a market research firm in Chicago.

The article goes on and on describing the varieties, the culture, etc.--all of it very interesting. The tomato vines, which must be indeterminate varieties, grow to tremendous lengths.  It's only in the last third that the writer addresses the problem of light. As a side note, Leamington, Canada has 1,600 acres of greenhouses and it is further south than Madison. But the Canadians can't grow tomatoes in the winter.

I was relieved to read this:

it employs some 20,000 high-pressure sodium lights, fueled by cheap power from Madison’s town-owned hydroelectric plant. Switched on, the lights use as much electricity in 32 minutes as the average American household does in a year. 

And the writer closes by noting a British study that compared UK greenhouse tomatoes to ones grown in Spain, and found the greenhouse ones accounted for four times the carbon emissions as those shipped from a distance.

Locavore and Farmers Markets

Over 200 years ago my ancestors left the York, PA area for upstate NY, a fact which leaves me with a casual interest in York, an interest sparked by a couple interesting web sites.  Here's an article, with links to more articles, on  the old York farmers markets, and the new ones.

Times on Local Slaughterhouses

It's official: both the Post and the Times have now written about a shortage of local slaughterhouses, particularly in Vermont.  I'm waiting for all those farmers to beat a path to Walt Jeffries' door, either to ask him to slaughter for them or to show them how to build their own.

Post on Local Slaughterhouses

I'm late in putting this up--the Post had an article on the growth of small local slaughterhouses. It fits with my earlier post on the Creekstone beef outfit.

Natural Beef in New York City: Creekstone Farms

A long and interesting article in the Times today on Creekstone Farms, which is providing beef to a number of NYC's better restaurants.  An excerpt:

Close to a fourth of Creekstone’s meat is “natural,” meaning free from antibiotics and growth-producing hormones; cattle are given vegetarian feed and, as a quality-control measure, it is noted which ranch each came from. In 2005, after adopting stringent standards, the company won certification to provide its highest-end products to theEuropean Union, Japan and Korea.

“We want to know that the animals are raised responsibly,” said Riad Nasr, an executive chef at Minetta Tavern.

And customers do, too, because “they can’t trust the regulators,” said Malcolm M. Knapp, who heads a restaurant consulting company in Manhattan that bears his name. “These days, diners can use their phones right in the restaurant to check beef out on the Internet. And they do.”

It looks like a trend.  (Later on in the article they note the higher prices Creekstone has to charge.) There are those small livestock farmers who oppose NAIS, but there are those who are finding a niche by marketing a history along with the meat.  Maybe we'll end with a 3-tier system: the mass market meat, the quality market meat with a history, and the local market meat with a face.

Community Supported Agriculture--the Limits of Locavore

The Post had a brief mention (today or yesterday) of someone who had had a CSA agreement with a farmer.  Paid $750 but the farmer had problems, whether weather or management it isn't clear in my mind, and she ended up unhappy with the deal.  She's trying again this year with another farmer.

I think this points to one of the issues with the new-ag type ventures and, perhaps, one of the advantages of the much derided "production agriculture".  I'd make the leap and say it's similar to the problems with charter schools and public eduction.  Or, it's like the 1960's again when no one got fired for buying IBM.  I guess for you youngsters the almost modern reference would be no one got fired for buying Microsoft.

What am I talking about?  Call it the dominant paradigm, to dress the idea up in fancy jargon.  Production agriculture, the chain of big farms, big wholesalers, chain groceries is the dominant, the majority way most people in the US get most of their food.  The public school system is the way most children get their K-12 eduction. The IBM main frame used to define the word "computer", as Microsoft defines "personal computer".  Some people try to come up with a new and better idea.  Typically that involves lots of experimentation, lots of learning by failing, lots of people who con others or con themselves, lots of adversity. When DC opened up to charter schools, the Post had horror stories of abuses and failures for several years.

To simplify further, the dominant paradigm offers the consumer safety: what's being sold is known and you know you're very sure of getting it.  Venture outside that paradigm and you increase your chance of rewards but you also increase your risk of disappointment.

"Maintaining the Story" and Local Food

Here's a UWisconsin-Madison  release on the problems of interfacing (my term) farmers and customers of locally grown food. It's hyping a study they did.  They see rising demand but problems in meeting it.  One problem:

"One common concern cited in the report is maintaining the story behind locally grown food. People who buy local food are often willing to pay a premium for knowing where and how it was grown, a big part of the appeal of farmers' markets."

To me that almost sounds like a version of NAIS--associating a product with a story.  So if big retailers push big packers into animal identification, maybe locavore buyers push the locavore farmers into identification of produce?