Mark Bittman gave a shout-out to my old friend, Maggie Grey, yesterday. In Labor and the Locavore: The Making of a Comprehensive Food Ethic
As Margaret Gray discusses in her excellent book, “Labor and the Locavore,” we cannot achieve ethical consistency in producing food without paying attention to labor. (Animals are important too, but I suppose I’m an anthro-chauvinist.) For food to be affordable, people — all people — must earn living wages; alternatively, good food must be subsidized. Both conditions would be even better. (As almost every foodie knows, we’re currently subsidizing bad food.)
Some of these qualities can be controlled by individuals: Most of us can eat real and healthier food easily enough, and, as it happens, growing such food tends to be more sustainable. On a grand scale, we need societal changes and government support to make this more accessible to everyone. But — and this is the part I like best — making good food fair and affordable cannot be achieved without affecting the whole system. These are not just food questions; they are questions of justice and equality and rights, of enhancing rather than restricting democracy, of making a more rational, legitimate economy. In other words, working to make food fair and affordable is an opportunity for this country to live up to its founding principles.
To be a true food activist, one has to do more than buy organic strawberries at Whole Foods.
Apt. 11d 
I’m going to Nebraska this afternoon. Should I scowl at the corn?
LikeLike
I don’t really understand locavorism. I like to bake: should I be concerned about where the wheat and sugar are grown? Also, I like nice clothes: do the sheep and goats have to live in New York?
Or does the whole thing only apply to produce? That seems to be the only thing any one talks about and pretty much the only thing they have at farmers’ markets. I don’t understand the rationale for that, however.
LikeLike
I think locally grown fruit tastes different and that the drive towards transportable fruit twisted fruit markets in favor of particular cultivars of a large variety of produce (tomatoes, apples, bananas). Bananas have their own issues (with the virus), but the variety of bananas, mangoes, etc. available in places where they grew them is tremendous and quite noticeable. Of course, we have access to those things here because of the ability to transport some of them (the two kinds of mangoes we get here, for example), but, we also have access to fruits (apples, for example, and many berries) that would allow us the same kind of variety.
I don’t know where a farmers’ market in NYC gets its food, so can’t say whether you actually get anything out of “locavore” produce there. But, say, in Davis, CA, the farmer’s market fruit is fabulous, and, so is the fruit (nectarines, lemons, persimmons) you can pick from the back yard (and, that’s without significant cultivation). My focus on locavore is to eat the things you can grow nearby, and, to recognize that not every place can be so fortunate. In my neck of the woods, we can grow apples, peaches, berries, lettuce, peas, onions. We don’t do so well at tomatoes and chillis, but sometimes they’re good. We can’t grow oranges, mangoes, bananas (and I’m not going to give them up).
LikeLike
“But, say, in Davis, CA, the farmer’s market fruit is fabulous, and, so is the fruit…”
Yeah, no kidding. Winter-time produce in my last two places of residence — Berlin in Moscow — is an entirely different kettle of fish.
LikeLike
Berlin *and* Moscow.
Typos, grr.
LikeLike
Seasonal produce is not amazing in certain locations.
When I was a Peace Corps Volunteer in the Russian Far East in the mid/later 90s, the previous batches of PCVs had survived on what they called “the white diet” (namely flour, potatoes, milk, sugar and similar–namely all the stuff that paleos think will kill you).
LikeLike
Yes, I don’t actually live in Davis, but I’m jealous every time I hear about the fruit picked off the trees in the backyard. Not sure if they were smuggled (who knows what the ag rules are), but the last tangerines were fabulous.
(but our cherries, apples, and peaches are yummy, too, though we haven’t been able to figure out how to grow any of those things in the back yard, without pesticides and nets and more work than we’re willing to do).
LikeLike
Produce from the farmers’ market is certainly better (i.e., fresher, and in some respects more varied) than produce from the local supermarket. It is also more expensive. I consider that a matter of taste, where someone chooses to spend their money, not an ethical question. I mean, I don’t consider that our Ethan Allen furniture makes us morally superior to people with Pottery Barn furniture, or morally inferior to people with Baker furniture. Choose your price point and buy what pleases you.
LikeLike
There’s a long term ethical issue, of whether those local produce, the varieties, will continue to exist if we aren’t willing to pay for them.
LikeLike
That’s really a function of where you live. I grew up in an agricultural region, and fruit directly from the farmers was always much cheaper. You’d buy berries or apples or whatever off the back of a truck or at a little stand on the outskirts of town for a fraction of the price. In the city there was a farmer’s coop, which was a big indoor market place which sold local fruit for pretty cheap. U-pick was even cheaper. We’d pick a summer’s worth of strawberries, gorge ourselves while picking, and freeze the rest for homemade ice cream. Same with raspberries and marionberries. Blackberries grew wild as weeds, so we’d pick them in vacant lots in the city. The whole expensive yuppie/hipster local fruit thing seems to really be an East coast phenomenon.* And honestly, if farmers can get yuppies to pay a lot to pick their fruit, why not?
*Though the Brooklynites are trying to make it a thing in my city. I’m not sure they’ve noticed that locals still pick up cheap bulk produce from actual farmers on the outskirts of town. My mother joined a CSA, but she was so disgusted at the quality of produce for the price that she decided she’d just grow all her own on a friend’s plot. She and her friend have a two-person CSA with far better results. My mother works a full time job and is not a farmer, but she is a very excellent gardener.
LikeLike
The thrust of the book deals with labor issues for migrant workers. We think buying local is good, yet the laborers have poor conditions. (Over simplification of Maggie’s book, but this is what she highlights.)
LikeLike
The laborers have poor conditions compared to whom?
LikeLike
Where I live the farmer’s market stuff is more expensive – I’m not in Davis! And what I would pay for is the gas for an F150 to bring six boxes of tomatoes from 30 miles out and the wage for the person to sit there selling the tomatoes. It’s not at all clear to me that that’s a particularly ethical choice compared to paying for a tiny fraction of the load of an 18-wheeler bringing the tomatoes from South Carolina. Much less gasoline per tomato.
LikeLike
Like many opinion articles, it chooses to end in the cloudy lands of overreach. La, la, we all must push for Nirvana.
Pretty silly.
Look, the gov’t hasn’t managed to stop the abusive (to animals) and outright dangerous policy of allowing the use of antibiotics to bulk up animals for slaughter. The drugs are also used to compensate for unhealthy farm ing practices. http://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/issue-briefs/2014/02/11/new-fda-policies-on-antibiotics-use-in-food-animal-production
So it fails on an issue which has killed people, and will continue to kill people until corrected. Not, oh-my-shouldn’t-the-masses-have-access-to-affordable-kale, but encouraging the growth of antibiotic resistant bacteria in the food supply. Such bacteria are equal-opportunity killers. They also maim.
I blame the lobbyists.
The only way to work against this is to try to buy products which conform to better standards. Big industry can buy lobbyists to hamstring government, but they can’t lobby you to buy things you don’t want, aside from marketing. I remember when we were told by industry shills that Cheap Food was the greatest good, so everyone who wanted to buy organic food, locally produced food, or humanely raised food, was sadly confused, and probably an enemy of Human Progress.
Fast forward some 10-20 years. I can now easily buy products which do not contain high fructose corn syrup. I can buy dairy products produced by cows which are not given hormones to produce unnatural amounts of milk. I can buy eggs from backyard chicken farmers, most of whom do it as a hobby. I can buy meat raised humanely. I may buy less meat, but I have a choice.
I have a choice because many consumers are willing to act like “foodies.”
Now, I do shop for groceries in several towns. I have noticed that stores in upper-class towns offer different products for sale. However, I’m not willing to say, “well, the inhabitants of the working class town won’t buy kale or vegetables.” When a store offers kale, they’re often competing with the local Whole Foods. It’s very hard for a customer to buy products a store doesn’t stock.
LikeLike
“I have a choice because many consumers are willing to act like “foodies.””
Yes, this is the ethics. It might not be enough, though, without regulation, and talking about the ways that government fails doesn’t mean that regulation can’t play a role as well (while fully admitting that regulations will also have unintended consequences). As you say, people can’t buy something if it’s not there. Produce is hard to offer without certainty of purchase, since it spoils and is a big loss, if no one buys. Somehow, we have to balance those two needs.
On the way back from the Big Island of Hawaii, we stumbled on a long article on GMO (Genetically Modified Organism) regulation in the NY Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/05/us/on-hawaii-a-lonely-quest-for-facts-about-gmos.html?_r=0
It was a fascinating read, pointing out some of the issues about GMO regulation (the Big Island was planning on not just labeling, but banning GMO crops; there’s at least one variety of papaya, a GMO, that is resistant to the virus that would destroy papaya farming on the Big Island).
Reading the article in the context of the locally grown movement that had a substantial effect on our eating while we were vacation was fascinating. We’ve been to the Big Island before, and a notable change in the few years is the growth of the locavore movement, and the change in the foods available. Sometimes, the food was actually local (Kula greens, for example), but, the existence of the local foods, spawned a foodie culture that has also meant that the imported strawberries have to be good.
LikeLike