Eat homegrown tomatoes, cage-free eggs from the nearby farm, and locally baked bread, and you can save the world.
Or so argue eat-local advocates. They make a powerful case. "Eating local" definitely helps small farmers and redirects U.S. agriculture toward a smaller and more sustainable future. It dramatically cuts the "food miles" that our broccoli and apples travel to get to our table and thus reduces our energy use. And it restores flavor to our meals.
Every decade or so, American consumers come up with a new way to use their wallets and stomachs to change the world. Vegetarians and their diet for a small planet urged Americans to eat more grains, beans, and other foods lower down the food chain to make more food available for the world's hungry. Organic food proponents, riding the crest of the environmental movement, targeted the chemicals we ingest that have compromised our soil's fertility and our water's purity. More recently, in the age of globalization, fair-trade activists have pushed consumers to pay more for coffee, bananas, and a host of other foods so that the growers in Ecuador, Kenya, and elsewhere get a fair wage.
Today, the cutting edge is eating local. Farmers markets can be found in the unlikeliest places, like the parking lots of malls and the downtowns of huge cities. Community-supported agriculture connects small farms directly to nearby consumers. Upscale restaurants feature menus of local produce. The food service company Bon Appetit, which caters to college kids and corporate cafeterias, has run a yearly Eat Local Challenge in which all the ingredients are sourced within 150 miles of their kitchens.
Eating local can make middle-class consumers feel better about their bodies, themselves, perhaps even their country.
But how do "locavores" help the more than 70% of the world's poor, who live in rural areas and whose livelihoods are increasingly tied to the global market? Are we robbing Campesino Pedro to pay Farmer Paul in our town when we buy a local tomato and not its Mexican cousin? As the eat-local movement reaches critical mass, it must grapple with these larger questions of global equity or else slip into a form of epicurean isolationism.
Eating local can indeed have a positive global impact. Right now, the greatest threat to farmers around the world is heavily subsidized industrial agriculture, most of it here in the United States and in Europe. Our cheap food, made all the more competitive by lopsided free trade agreements like NAFTA, drives farmers in the global South out of business. This food trade boom has bolstered U.S. demand for Mexico's winter-grown raspberries, but the flip side is that Mexican corn farmers can't compete with cheap U.S. imports.
Our scientific advances enabling mega-farms to grow yet more food only compound the problem. So, anything we can do on our end to undermine industrial agriculture helps us and helps the world's poor farmers.
Eating local is not a commandment. It would be ridiculous to try to grow bananas in New York or coffee in Minnesota. But agricultural trade should be fair. We in the northern countries should pay more, not less, for the food that we import from the Southern Hemisphere, and thereby help bridge the growing economic divide between the global haves and have-nots.
And, finally, we should be modest. Lifestyles don't change the world. We need to supplement our purchasing decisions with activism to end United States subsidies of corporate agriculture in the federal budget. We should rally against free trade agreements that drive farmers off their land, into overcrowded cities, or into exile. We must treat with great skepticism "quick fixes" like genetic engineering and cloning that promise cornucopia without addressing fundamental inequities in the distribution of food and wealth, or adequately dealing with the potential risks these new inventions pose to us or to the food chain.
Eating local makes sense. It tastes great and is less polluting. But we mustn't keep our heads down in our plates of local salad and lose sight of the wide world around us.
John Feffer is the co-director of Foreign Policy In Focus (www.fpif.org) at the International Relations Center.
