Think locally, but eat globally
LAST OCTOBER, a quiet cluster of men in boots and cowboy hats stood before a banner blocking the entrance to the splendid mine baron's mansion that now serves as the government palace of the state of Zacatecas, high in Mexico's central mountains.
Zacatecas was once one of the world's great silver centers, and its mines still produce a variety of valuable metals for a global market. The demonstrators on the plaza, however, were not miners, but frijoles farmers trying to cope with an overly successful harvest. The "demands" on their banner were for government help: storage facilities for the beans, infrastructure loans, and price supports to allow them to get their crops safely from Zacatecas's arid high plains to the national and international marketplace.
In what might seem a world away, on New England's thin topsoil, a movement is growing to encourage Americans to "eat local" as a way of conserving energy, reducing greenhouse-gas emissions, and fighting the destructive environmental effects of giant commercial farming. There are Vermont diners seeking to find their supplies no further than 50 miles away. Buying from farmers' markets, rather than chain superstores, is promoted as a way of getting better-tasting food at a lower cost in carbon fuels.
The vision of maple syrup and blueberries poured over buckwheat pancakes helping to save the world has its appeal. But seen as a solution to a social and environmental problem of global dimensions, a retreat from the international food chain by the world's wealthy also has its limits -- and its dangers.
First, substituting local for exotic foods, berries for bananas or pears for pineapples, is not simply a blow against giant agribusiness. The majority of the world's population that lives off agriculture, whether Zacatecan bean farmers or the Kenyan coffee growers whose children I taught as a Peace Corps volunteer, are smallholders, if not landless workers toiling for others. A serious movement to eat local in the world's rich countries, if successful, would reduce the demand for smallholders' products as well as those of
If the goal is to work against the environmental callousness and human exploitation of giant agribusiness, it would make more sense, rather than reducing American demand for foreign products, to redirect our dollars to organizations like the "fair trade" networks in coffee and tea, which encourage sustainable agriculture and a just return to farmers, and to spread the fair-marketing principle to other products we buy abroad.
Even if the question is the energy cost -- the carbon footprint -- of transporting food long distances, the issues still are not clear-cut. It is, of course, probably insane to drive irrigation-grown iceberg lettuce 3,000 miles in a fume-spewing truck, if local alternatives are available. But as New Englanders, we should know that productive agriculture on a scale big enough to make a difference may not always be possible on rocky land with comparatively poor nutrients and a comparatively short growing season.
To truly save the planet, the real challenges are the development of energy-efficient transportation and a clear-eyed assessment of the actual energy costs of different types of agriculture: finding the best ways and the best places to grow different crops and adjusting our diets when necessary. To be a little brutal, if semitropical rice and beans can be produced at a lower cost in nutrients and energy than northern wheat and Vermont butter, then perhaps we should be changing our notions of the staff of life rather than trying to support a boutique local agriculture.
The idea of eating local is seductive, and a trip to the farmers' market may indeed raise our consciousness, do no harm and some good, and taste great. It answers our understandable longing to have something immediate we can do, in the words of the mantra, to think globally and act locally. But if it is a substitute for seeing that a global problem needs a global solution, it will be merely a kind of green isolationism, a pulling up of the drawbridge to our high-tech, low-carbon-footprint corner of the world.
Which brings us back to the frijoleros looking for a way to sell their beans and keep their farms. Zacatecas is somewhat hard to get to, but it is easy to leave. Of all the states of Mexico in recent years, it has sent the most emigrants north to American cities. As the state's governor, Amalia García Medina, pointed out in a recent address at the University of California, at any given moment about half the population of Zacatecas is living in the United States.
The mass migration of a half million people back and forth from rural Mexico to America's cities has an immense cost in social disruption and no small carbon footprint of its own. To make ourselves feel better by being satisfied with eating locally, if we ignore the effects of any substantial change in the demand for the world's produce, would once again shift the costs of global warming to the countries and people who did the least to create it and are least able to deal with it. On this shared earth, we need not only to think globally, but to act globally, and -- especially for those of us in the world's richest country to eat globally as well.
George Rosen is a freelance writer. 