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;
2. They care little, if at all, about a holistic solution to the food crisis, and just want to feel the cheap thrill of taking part in a faux-activist fad;
3. They do not compost, garden, or raise microlivestock (or do they? McWilliams briefly mentions backyard hens and rooftop gardens when he wants to poke fun at the urban homestead mystique, but ignores them when they prove inconvenient to his argument. He claims, for example, that locavores freak out about food miles but happily toss all their kitchen scraps into the trash).
4. They are exclusively upper-middle class, with the leisure to discuss lofty concepts that only affect them in the most abstract way – with the added consequence of only being exposed to pesticides at the table (although, in another puzzling contradiction, McWilliams suddenly remembers that farm workers are people when he’s criticizing organic pesticides);
5. They eat lots and lots of meat, like a pig a day or something;
6. They demand fresh tropical fruit in the dead of winter and can’t handle the idea of a cannery near their neighborhood.
And, just because I don’t know where else to put it, here’s a winner of a quote from the introduction:
It’s hard to identify exactly when my skepticism became committed doubt, but several random observations nudged me down the path of crankiness. Maybe it was watching one too many times the pretentious woman with the hemp shopping bag declaring “This bag is not plastic!” make her way to the market in an SUV the size of my house. Or maybe it was the baffling association between buying local food and dressing as if it were Haight-Ashbury circa 1968 that got me thinking that my sacred farmers’ market was a stage set more for posturing [point of interest: McWilliams’ author photo shows him sporting gigantic Buddy Holly specs] than for environmental activism.
If you tell me there exists a hypocrite in an SUV, I’ll believe you, but what if the hippies are just buying their groceries?
“We must… stop insisting that our behavior is, if universalized, a viable answer to the world’s present and future problems,” he declares. But who exactly is insisting this? Although he drops the names of a few mainstream luminaries, he almost never responds to any specific thing anyone actually said, except to shoot down a couple of Carlo Petrini and Vandana Shiva quotes that, removed from all context, become easy targets.* Other than that, it’s always “the locavores” with this guy. “The locavores” claim that such-and-such, “the locavores” insist that so-and-so. Look, I haven’t read every locavore book out there – I’m sure there’s plenty of naivete. But is that naivete really endemic to the entire movement? Consistently arguing with a vaguely defined, unidentified collective instead of an actual opponent, as McWilliams does throughout the book, is the clumsiest kind of strawman.
Anyway, aside from the perplexing lack of self-awareness, how does the rest of the book stand up? Actually, a lot of it is pretty interesting. Many factoids, like the problem of grass-fed cattle producing four times as much methane as feedlot cattle, were enlightening (albeit in a depressing sort of way). The chapter on aquaponics, detailing a style of farming in which fish are raised and vegetables grown in the same space, was the most hopeful in the book. Overall, McWilliams’ argument focuses on sustainable global trade, which is a useful complement to visions of healthy local economies (even if it does have a whiff of the Western savior complex, rushing seed to helpless African farmers rather than looking at root causes).
Other parts of the book, however, are underdeveloped, impractical, or ripped off from other writers. In “Food Miles or Friendly Miles?,” McWilliams states that factors like cooking and harvesting methods actually eat up much more energy than transportation – but then doesn’t explain which cooking methods are wasteful, or what exactly he expects the average person to do about nets versus trawls (although throwing out that tie-dye shirt and getting a haircut is apparently a good first step). “Meat – The New Caviar” mostly rehashes what other food activists have been saying for years, and “Frankenfood?: A Case for Genetically Modified Crops” makes the plausible-sounding argument that GM seed could be used for the forces of good… but only if control of said seed is magically transferred from Monsanto to the average Global South farmer. And after shaking his head at Vandana Shiva’s supposed myopia, he goes on to criticize some of the same harmful practices that she herself has campaigned against.
Of course, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that he’s unfamiliar with the food justice work being done on the ground, because it’s clear that he hasn’t actually researched any food justice movements, other than the “glossy coffee-table cookbook[s]” he complains about at the beginning. “Most people I know who work outside of elite professions such as academia and journalism would roll their eyes at such antiestablishment prescriptions,” he sneers when criticizing the overlap between food justice and anti-globalization movements, effectively erasing every single low-to-middle-income or non-academic activist, writer, or thinker in existence. If he doesn’t know them personally, then they must not be real.
Oy. You know, this book would have been terrific had it been a completely different book. If McWilliams had chosen to work with locavores rather than picking a fight with them – if he’d managed to separate his irritation with some posers at a famers’ market from his understanding of movements like Slow Food – then this would have been a valuable and welcome addition to any food justice library. As it is, though, it’s hardly worth digging through the drek to find the hidden jewels inside.
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* I haven’t read much Petrini, but I know that locavorism is only a fraction of Shiva’s food justice activism. Furthermore, her emphasis on local agriculture is as much about the health, cultures, and livelihoods of Global South farmers, all of which are threatened by industrial agriculture, as it is about environmentalism.