The Local Food Myth

~ Laura

Because I'm in a contrarian mood, I feel like linking to people who are questioning a lot of the overblown rhetoric about modern lifestyle. Buy local! Handmade is best! Return to the good old days! The Internet brings people together, creates opportunities, and fosters democracy! The old days sucked!

I have morphed into a grouchy old man today, and you'll just have to deal with it. And get off my porch! 

Mark Bittman tweeted a link to a blog post written by a farmer in upstate New York. While he's committed to ethnical farming, he is questioning the idea that all food should be produced locally on a small scale just as it was in the past. Because he says that there was no magical time in the past.

I discovered that the history we were telling ourselves in the local farm and food systems movement was a myth. It was, in fact, a complete fabrication with no historical basis at all. We had simply wiped G. W. Swift clean from history. We had written away Sinclair’s jungle (and his socialism!). In our tale, Chicago, New York, Philadelphia were fed by local, or maybe even regional, farms. In our tale, Grandma, bought local meat from her neighborhood butcher.

My old books say different. My old books say that we wrote away the perfection of Swift’s refrigerated rail car by 1880, making it possible to slaughter hundreds of thousands of cows, millions of pigs, and millions of lambs in Chicago and ship them to the major population centers of the east.  In other words, we wrote out of existence the great stockyards of Chicago where millions upon millions upon millions of animals from the Western range lands were slaughtered after being fattened on mountains and mountains of corn, which has also been wiped clean from our history.

UPDATE: More from Megan.  

Published by Laura

40 thoughts on “The Local Food Myth”

  1. My grandfather was a buyer in the Omaha stockyards and later re-joined his family in the corn farming business. All of that agricultural production was tied to the east by railroad from the start, unless you want to consider the life of the Pawnee. In the depth of the Depression, when they had no market for much of what they made, they still would hardly eat corn (except boiled sweet corn) if they had something else.

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  2. Yes and no. Back when my grandparents were raising their kids in the 1960s, they provided cattle directly to the town grocery store. I think my grandpa was also slaughtering them, because my dad mentioned that grandpa would keep the hides, salt (?) them, and then take a pile of them to Seattle to sell once a year. The hides funded the family’s yearly pilgrimage to the Seattle home show to get ideas for the house they finished in 1959.
    Eventually things changed. When I was a little kid, we’d truck cattle once a year to a livestock auction a couple of hours away. Eventually, that changed too. The family started making arrangements with feedlots and a big truck would show up at the farm in the fall to pick up the now 500-lb. calves that had been born in the spring. That’s how it is today, although I believe they occasionally take a few animals to auction.

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  3. Were those calves the fringe revenue from a dairy farm? I didn’t know Washington even had beef cattle in any great numbers.

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  4. I agree with Amy (is that a first?)–this is a yes and no thing, as I think the author of the piece himself admits. The “myth” he’s attacking may be one that a lot of people casually buy into, but it isn’t one that has ever stood up to scrutiny, and the best writers on the subject have always known that. Real food localism died–and thank goodness!–with the invention of the railroad (as MH notes) and refrigeration, and the era in which it died was the post-Civil War era of westward expansion and electrification; by the early 20th century, we were an urban nation of specialized workers, and farmers and ranchers operated in that milieu. And since, honestly, almost no one wants to voluntary impose upon themselves a food discipline which denies the existence of mass transport, or electric grids, or big cities, the question is how to inject a little bit of the health and virtues which local practices and local food production can provide into our contemporary existence. As the author says, he’d like us to get to about 30% of all food transactions being local; he doesn’t expect that it could ever, whatever kind of technological innovations come along, get to more than that, and I think he’s probably right. Some of that 30% isn’t lost to us; some of us (like Amy and myself) can remember raising livestock to sell or consume ourselves. Making it possible for the next generation to get back to some of that isn’t impossible, and is certainly a worthy goal.

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  5. MH, there were many local beef operators throughout central, eastern, and southeastern Washington (the Palouse country) in the 1970s and 1980s, and eventually many of them merged into huge feed lots (my father owned one out towards Moses Lake). A lot of that beef would be slaughtered, shipped to the Tri-Cities and loaded on to barges to be taken to Portland, where they’d be loaded on to ships heading out to who knows where. It wasn’t the massive cattle operations you have in parts of the midwest, but more than a few operators did quite well in Washington with beef cattle.

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  6. Eating your own cow is the kind of thing that can’t really happen very often unless you have a home freezer or a really big family.

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  7. RAF, I did some googling and I see that Washington is kind of the smallest of the big cattle states or the biggest of the small cattle states. I didn’t know that.

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  8. I myself enjoy eating “ethnically” as well as ethically…More “ethnical” farming…Those pesky typos!
    Stockyards have existed for a long time as noted. However, this becomes a bit of a straw person argument as I believe that the REAL difference is how much of the food in our groceries today is unrecognizable by our grandparents. An excess of processed foods made with ingredients we cannot pronounce.
    Generations are growing up with no taste for real food. Forget organic or not, local or not. How about meals beyond those that come in a box or from a drive thru window?

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  9. An excess of processed foods made with ingredients we cannot pronounce.
    That’s why I never eat Polish food.

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  10. “Were those calves the fringe revenue from a dairy farm? I didn’t know Washington even had beef cattle in any great numbers.”
    No. Beef cattle ranching is sort of a fix-it-and-forget it source of side income for a lot of people, very unlike dairy, and the cattle breeds chosen are quite different (my family likes Angus and Saler–pronounced suh-lair). You need grassland, fences, corral and cattle chutes, hay storage, and the equipment to make hay, but 80% of the time, the cows do all the work and don’t need much attention beyond vaccinations, some obstetrical care, winter feeding, and periodically changing out the bulls to keep the bovine family tree branching. You sell in the fall so as not to have to feed hay to the calves over the winter.
    Not too long ago, my grandparents and parents each had 60 mama cows, but now they have more like 20 each. Grandpa said he lost money last year, but they also bought a lot of equipment and beef prices are supposed to be going up, so I expect they’ll do pretty good next year.
    A lot of people have small cattle herds. One of my more vivid memories involves a round up we did to collect some feral Indian reservation cows. Very scary! Those cows didn’t really understand the concept of “fence” and came right through it.
    “I agree with Amy (is that a first?)”
    Not at all, RAF.

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  12. Go to cemeteries in Maine – interments stop about 1850. It wasn’t railroads that killed local food, it was the Erie Canal.

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  14. I bet you’d love oscypek!
    I’m actually a huge pierogi fan, but I hadn’t heard of them until I was in Pittsburgh. Which seems odd given that my home town had enough Polish people that I learned “Dz” is sometimes pronounced “J.”

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  15. Oscypek is a lot easier to pronounce when you see it’s also spelled oszczypek. Never had it when I lived in Poland, though.

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  17. But you don’t need to pronounce ALL Eastern European foods – just find the one that you CAN pronounce. They are pretty much the same no matter which country. The delicacies are what you’d make if you had fat + potatoes + flour + seasonal fruits. All good…

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  18. Darn it, Doug. I can’t believe I missed on the opportunity to drop a “szcz” on MH. I really like the Wikipedia photos, though–they make the cheeses look like Easter eggs. My husband is a big fan–I’m supposed to be on the lookout for it. Quail eggs, too, and gooseberries.

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  19. MH, don’t make me say that Polish is pronounced just like it’s spelled, because then I will have to say the same about Hungarian and Georgian. And then my head will asplode.
    Pierogi are good, though, boiled or fried, sweet or savory.

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  20. I’ve never had sweet pierogi. Or boiled. I always fry onions in butter and then saute the pierogi with the onions. They come frozen in a box.

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  21. “I always fry onions in butter and then saute the pierogi with the onions.”
    That sounds pretty good, even though we OD-ed on frozen Mrs. T pierogis as graduate students.
    My Russian tutor was critiquing a piece in my textbook about how much better homemade pel’meni (same concept, but Russian) are than store bought. She says that there are fantastic store bought pel’meni these days in Russia. It makes sense because they’re traditionally made in big batches and stored frozen, and even the homemade version is easier with an assembly-line production method.
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pelmeni

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  22. The sweet pierogi are great – filled with cherries and topped with fried breadcrumbs, a sprinkle of brown sugar and some sour cream….

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  26. MH:
    You should try lefse, if you haven’t already. It’s potato flatbread (flatter than a tortilla, if properly made), and best served with butter and brown sugar. People will claim you can eat it with other things as well, but they are liars who should not be listened to.

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  28. I believe that the REAL difference is how much of the food in our groceries today is unrecognizable by our grandparents.
    I know- my grandparents ate all sorts of bland crap, and now we have nice, good food from all over, fresh sea food, fruits, etc. Maybe that’s not what you meant, though.
    I always feel annoyed with Poles making people think a pierogi is like a dumpling. A pierogi is a sort of pastry, or a roll-like thing with different sorts of fillings. What Poles call pierogis are pelmeni or vereniki, depending on the filling. Poles just didn’t know better and now have confused people in the US. That’s my Russian-inspired story and I’ll stick with it.

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  29. I believe that the REAL difference is how much of the food in our groceries today is unrecognizable by our grandparents.
    I know- my grandparents ate all sorts of bland crap, and now we have nice, good food from all over, fresh sea food, fruits, etc. Maybe that’s not what you meant, though.
    I always find the “eat what your grandparents ate” advice funny too, since it seems to assume we are all the grandchildren of French farmwives. My grandparents liked spam and cream of chicken canned soup. My the cuisine of my “ethnic heritage” involves a lot of butter, potatoes, and fish in various states of decomposition, with some pig offal thrown in for good measure. I’m pretty sure my great grandparents didn’t see a green vegetable for a good 5 months out of the year.
    I don’t completely disagree with the sentiment, but I think people from climates with bad growing seasons feel very differently about this “eat only local” all the time stuff.

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  30. “I always find the “eat what your grandparents ate” advice funny too, since it seems to assume we are all the grandchildren of French farmwives. My grandparents liked spam and cream of chicken canned soup. My the cuisine of my “ethnic heritage” involves a lot of butter, potatoes, and fish in various states of decomposition, with some pig offal thrown in for good measure. I’m pretty sure my great grandparents didn’t see a green vegetable for a good 5 months out of the year.”
    Indeed. There are some very good scenes in the movie Babette’s Feast where Babette (a French chef and refugee) is coping with the local cuisine in a godforsaken Danish village. It’s pretty bad.
    I’m also of somewhat Swedish ancestry (3/16) and thanks to the memoirs of a school teacher who boarded with my great-great-grandparents on the homestead, I have a pretty good notion of turn of the century Swedish cooking. To the school teacher’s dismay, my great-great-grandmother boiled EVERYTHING, including venison. Interestingly, that’s very similar to the Danish village cuisine that Babette suffers through in the movie.

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  31. I always feel annoyed with Poles making people think a pierogi is like a dumpling.
    I think that might just be people around you or something. A pierogi is Polish ravioli and not at all like dumplings.

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  33. Yes- like a ravioloi is what I meant. I don’t know why I couldn’t think of it. But I’d say that a pierogi is what Poles call a pelmeni or vereniki (my wife would die a bit to hear me use the plural as a singular noun, but I try to tell her that’s what they are called in English, like belini) while a pierogi is a sort of pie.

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  34. Matt,
    I was puzzled by the fact that a pirog is a pie but pirozhki are yeast-based pastries with filling (cabbage, potato, meat, etc.), so I was looking it up on Wikipedia, and they say that a pirog is usually yeast-based. I’d always wondered why a pirog looks nothing like an American pie, even though that’s how the textbooks always translate it, so that clears the mystery up a bit.
    During Peace Corps training in the Russian Far East, people joked about getting a kapustavac or a kartoshkavac (as a variation on a medevac).

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  35. Eat what your grandparents ate? My Granny saved all her bacon grease and used it to make cornbread. Yum!

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  36. “My Granny saved all her bacon grease and used it to make cornbread. Yum!”
    My mom keeps a tin can in the freezer and then empties grease into it in successive layers. I have no idea what she does with it.
    The “eat what your grandparents ate” advice would actually work pretty well for me, but I have my doubts about just about all the other generations.

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  37. My mom kept bacon grease too…Ah the old working class days. I remember my dad sewing up rips in the wall-to-wall carpet with one of those curved needles.
    And it’s not literally eat what your grandparents eat but avoid eating what they wouldn’t recognize – all the boxed, processed food in the middle aisles of the grocery store. More the spirit of the comment.

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  38. My mom keeps a tin can in the freezer and then empties grease into it in successive layers. I have no idea what she does with it.
    Scented candle?

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  39. I save bacon grease (and duck fat) for frying things in to make them taste wonderful, but my mother used to save grease in a can (from all sorts of things, like ground beef) to get rid of it more easily w/o putting it down the drain. She’s fill up the can in the fridge and then throw it away all together.
    As for grandparents, I don’t know how old all of yours are, but mine, only one of whom is still alive, and he’s quite old, of course remember lots of canned foods, spam, etc. In general, they ate much worse than I do, and they “wouldn’t recognize” all sorts of things that are fresh, healthy, and great, because food was generally harder to get and crappier in the US in the later 40’s and 50’s (let alone the 30’s and war years.) The “grandparents” stuff is just misleading. People should say, “avoid over-processed stuff” if that’s what they mean. (My grandparents thought processed stuff was great!)

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  40. Oh, if you’re still feeling contrary, you’ll enjoy Rachel Laudan’s “Plea for Culinary Modernism”: https://docs.google.com/leaf?id=0B9HbgKDkUrDEM2NjOThkZjAtYTUyNS00NDYxLWI0NDMtMDUwYzcwODQyOWY1&hl=en&authkey=CP2XufED
    here’s her blog post on it: http://www.rachellaudan.com/2010/08/fast-food-was-better-food-idea-of-the-day-in-the-new-york-times.html
    You would also probably enjoy many of the chapters in James McWilliams’ “Just Food: How Locavores Are Endangering the Future of Food and How We Can Truly Eat Responsibly”: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6058223-just-food

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