Sustainable Living? Questioning the Locavore Movement

A friend of mine recently loaned me Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, which tells the story of the author's year-long sustainable living experiment in which she transplanted her Tucson-based family to Appalachia in order to see what it would be like to spend a year growing food and eating local.  "If every U.S. citizen ate just one meal a week (any meal) composed of locally and organically raised meats and produce, we would reduce our country's oil consumption by over 1.1 million barrels of oil every week."  An inspiring idea, but let's remind ourselves that the author moved away from Tucson because Arizona's arid land "had a drinking problem".

So is buying local always better?  Your answer depends on what lens you apply to the question.  Judging from fuel use alone, there is no question that buying local has serious advantages to society.  From a quality perspective, it depends on how much money you have in your wallet when you head over to the farmer's market (if you can afford to shop at farmer's markets!).

Just as there was a reason that pesticides were developed (besides to poison us!), there was also a reason that people started shipping goods from all around the world.  Think about Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, in which he puts forth the advantages of a division of labor.  Specialization is good because it allows everybody to do what he or she does best.  When we are talking about growing food, we speak not only of the skill of farmers, but also of the relatively bounty of the land being farmed.

The person who loaned me Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is heavily involved in the local food movement---she actually runs the local farmers markets in the city where we live.  But even she will point out that sometimes the local economy doesn't provide the best--- or enough of the best--- of every food.  If you think local is necessarily delicious, think carefully about how much you are able to spend to afford food that is both local and delicious.  And then consider whether the bounty of your local land can produce enough food that your neighbors scraping by can afford to eat the quality that you've grown to expect from your local farmer's market.

And here's the biggest twist of all.  The green living umbrella provides shade for a wide array of idealistic concepts, some of which can be odds with one another. If you think that everybody in your city should eat local, would you support allowing the local farmers to use pesticides to make sure that they can guarantee enough of a harvest to support the dietary needs of the local economy?

I wonder how successful Barbara Kingsolver's experiment would have been had she decided to perform it in Tucson instead of in Appalachia.  Would she have been happy with the fare she grew from her garden?  And would she have been able to feed her family a healthy diet?

Photo credit: Pam Ramsey