(Flickr / Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources)
The sustainable-food movement has finally been around long enough to face its first cold front. Pickled okra, critics want the world to know, is not as desirable as sales at the Prospect Park farmers market might indicate. The most recent round of attacks has focused on local food and locavorism: In April, Tyler Cowen took a few glancing blows at local food in An Economist Gets Lunch, and last month, Pierre Desrochers and Hiroko Shimizu—two Canadians trained as economic-policy analysts—released The Locavore’s Dilemma, an all-out assault on local food in which they seek to “slaughter as many sacred cows in the food activists’ intellectual herd as [they] could.” But by focusing on local food, they end up arguing against problems that barely exist or that never will, while ignoring the real environmental costs of our food systems.
David Gumpert at Gristhighlights one of the problems with our bifurcated food-regulation system: In the case of an organic egg producer in Massachusetts, FDA regulations are butting up against the USDA's "Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food" initiative, which promotes more interactions between farmers and the public. The company, Country Hen, has regularly allowed customers to visit, an important part of how they get new customers. But the farm is big enough to be affected by a new FDA regulation that requires poultry farms to limit visitors -- a policy based on the specious evidence suggesting it might control salmonella cases. So the visits have to stop.
Somehow, the point of consciousness-raising efforts like Morgan Spurlock's documentary Super Size Me and Eric Schlosser's investigatory book Fast Food Nation got lost when the organic-loving locavores took over food discussions. The early-aught pieces highlighted problems with companies: how you would find their practices distasteful if you knew about them, and how they were marketing their food as better for you than it really was.
