Just Food: Where Locavores Get It Wrong and How We Can Truly Eat Responsibly
by James E. McWilliams
(Little, Brown)
Say what you want about publishers, but they know how to sell a book.
Let’s say a manuscript ended up on an editor’s desk with a title like Some More Things You Need to be Aware of About Our Food System or Why Aquaponics are Great. Boring! They’d toss it aside, right? Or at least send it back to the author with a request for a different angle.
But what if that same manuscript landed on that same desk with the words “Where Locavores Get It Wrong” splashed across the cover sheet? If it called the “eat local” ethic “not only pragmatically unachievable but simplistically smug” and called itself “an attack on the food world’s sacred cow”? Why, that editor would spit out their organic spinach-on-nine-grain-whole-wheat cibatta sandwich and start drawing up a contract!
Okay, I’m probably being unfair. Perhaps the birth of Just Food: Where Locavores Get it Wrong and How We Can Truly Eat Responsibly didn’t go quite like that. But I’m always skeptical of everything-you-know-is-wrong books – and James McWilliams’ polemic against the locavore movement is so full of questionable assumptions and faulty logic that it’s hard not to be suspicious of his motives.
The premise of the book is this: eating local isn’t enough, in and of itself, to solve our broken food system. Although it feels good to shop at farmers’ markets and subscribe to CSA boxes, there are many other factors that need to be addressed before problems with food production can be solved.
Sounds… obvious, doesn’t it?
Not in the world McWilliams seems to be living in. Although he claims, over and over again, that his goal isn’t to bash locavores for the sake of bashing locavores, he makes some pretty stunning assumptions about them. Here’s a list of things he seems to believe about people who support local agriculture:
1. They have zero experience with farming, and thus have no idea what it takes to grow and raise food;
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