The Locavore's Dilemma Read Online Free PDF Page A

not remain confined to one geographical location? In the end, why are modern agricultural producers willing to purchase costly synthetic inputs, hormonal growth promoters, antibiotics, and genetically modified seeds when the methods agri-intellectuals prefer are either completely free (such as giving up on the use of these inputs and on equipment such as poultry housing) or seemingly much cheaper (such as feeding cattle entirely on pastureland and saving one’s seeds instead of relying on those marketed by specialized producers)?
    On the retail side, perhaps supermarkets and large chain stores displaced farmers’ markets because of their more convenient hours, better parking conditions, greater mastery of logistics and inventory management, higher quality products, lower prices, and superior record in terms of food safety. On the latter topic, couldn’t it be the case that the risk that large processing plants will spread pathogens over long distances is mitigated by the fact that they have better technologies to detect, control, and track such problems in the first place? And let’s not forget that the long distance trade in food and agricultural inputs had the not inconsequential result of eradicating famine and malnutrition wherever it became significant.
    Some locavores may continue to believe that our globalized food supply chain is the result of colonial and corporate agri-business raiders who crushed small farmers, packers, and retailers the world over simply because they could. But we contend that modern practices are but the latest in a long line of innovations, the ultimate goal of which has always been to increase the accessibility, quality, reliability, and affordability of humanity’s food supply. And if we may be so blunt, how many activists still use locally manufactured electric typewriters and copper-wired rotary-dial phones to spread their message and set up “grassroots” links between food consumers and producers? 3 How many move around in horse-drawn tramways, Ford Model Ts, or even old-fashioned roller
skates with parallel wheels? How many would trust doctors, meteorologists and computer engineers clinging to 1940s technology? If nonlocal modern technologies are good enough to serve the locavores’ needs, why aren’t they also desirable for agricultural producers?
    We covered much historical material in this book in our attempt to look beyond the anti-corporate, romantic, and protectionist underpinnings of locavorism and to illustrate the rationale behind improvements in food production, processing, and transportation technologies, along with the benefits of an ever broader division of agricultural labor. To quote the historian Paul Johnson, the study of history “is a powerful antidote to contemporary arrogance,” for it is always humbling “to discover how many of our glib assumptions, which seem to us novel and plausible, have been tested before, not once but many times, and in innumerable guises; and discovered to be, at great human cost, wholly false.” 4 The available historical evidence tells us that locavorism, far from being a step forward, can only deliver the world our ancestors gladly escaped from,s and which subsistence farmers mired in similar circumstances around the world would also escape if given opportunities to trade. It would not only mean lower standards of living and shorter life expectancy, but also increased environmental damage and social turmoil.
    Perhaps the most fitting conclusion to our book is in the words of the American lawyer and legislator William Bourke Cockran, made famous by Winston Churchill in his 1946 “iron curtain” speech: “There is enough for all. The earth is a generous mother; she will provide in plentiful abundance for all her children if they will but cultivate her soil in justice and peace.” 5 And, we would add, if they will trade ever more with each other.

EPILOGUE

    It was during the