Perhaps if it’s repeated enough, we’ll actually believe it, and then begin to spin yarns about the vast implications of this highly disturbing trend.

James McWilliams takes this simplistic view over at the Times’ Freakonomics blog. If good, clean, food is elitist, he argues, then it leaves out the vast majority of shoppers and thus creates a wedge in our communities. So you better watch out! Farmers markets are secretly destroying your neighborhood.

In countering this ludicrous assertion, I’d first ask, Where is the evidence that local foods are elitist? You won’t find it in McWilliams diatribe. He just assumes it.

Sure, I see people who are well-off at the Dupont Circle FreshFarm market in Washington (which is located in a high-income neighborhood). But I also see well-off people buying baby clothes on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. I don’t jump to the conclusion that farm-fresh food or baby clothes are only sought by the wealthy.

This issue actually came up when I was researching my book Organic Inc. I had the notion firmly imprinted in my head that the typical organic shopper was a 30-something, upper-middle class, Volvo-driving, latte-swilling, yoga babe.

But try as I did to find the market-research to support that image, I could not. In fact, the largest and most authoritative study on that issue found that the median income of an organic shopper was right around the national median. The Hartman Group, which studies such things and sells their data in pricey reports to the food industry, has said that income is the least important factor in determining whether someone is an organic shopper or not.

Which is why you find penniless college kids eating organic vegan dishes. Now, programs are sprouting that double the value of food stamps at farmers’ markets. And guess what? They are quite successful.

As it is, ethnically diverse groups are disproportionately represented, Hartman found when studying the organic marketplace. Here’s another factlet: one of the largest factors in determining organic food purchases was availability. What looks like a white, upper-middle class trend might simply be a function of availability. Or to flip the notion on its head, do low-income people prefer buying fast food and chips from corner stores, or are those purchases disproportionate because of the lack of alternatives? Access isn’t the only issue here, but it is a big one.

Take the farmers’ market I visited last weekend in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Sure there were a fair amount of white hipsters and young parents with strollers but there were Latino and Eastern European shoppers as well. “It’s fresh?” asked one babushka eyeing a plump sourdough loaf. Surveying the crowd, you would be hard-pressed to describe it as upper-middle class.

In Washington, D.C., where I live, you see it too at farmers’ markets that straddle neighborhoods with diverse income groups, like Eastern Market. This market is not some homogeneous beast as McWilliams assumes — it’s diverse because, it turns out, a lot of people like good, fresh food from farms.

Here’s the other thing about this community-wilting farmers’ market fantasy McWilliams concocts. Local food represents perhaps 2-3% of all food sales (though farmers’ markets are sprouting extremely fast and not just in upper-income zip codes). It’s so minute it probably has less impact on a community than a public school gardening program.

But as farmers’ markets continue to grow — and there is no indication that they won’t — they will likely add to communities simply by being a gathering place, where people can interact, especially as access increases. In short, there is nothing inherently elitist about local food, which is why all effort should be made in increasing access across the income spectrum.

But following McWilliams’ logic, a superstore would offer more cohesion. They have the lowest prices. Low-income people can afford it. Oh yeah, only one problem. You don’t need a lot of other businesses or even a Main Street when a superstore comes to town. You don’t even need a lot of farmers. Just a few big ones. So how would a superstore create community cohesion? By spinning it from a fantasy determined solely by price.

Originally Published on Chews Wise

At the UC-sponsored professional conference that I recently attended, I had the opportunity to hear historian James McWilliams speak.   I have read some of McWilliams’s work previously and greatly admire his research and work. (He’s also an incredibly likable and humorous man on a personal level). Like me, McWilliams is an historian attempting to use the past to inform current public policy in the nation’s food system. (I like this. We need more historians informing public policy in general, and particularly vis-à-vis food systems). Our research focuses on different areas; we agree on some things, but disagree on others. I will be reviewing his upcoming book, Just Food: How Locavores Are Endangering the Future of Food and How We Can Truly Eat Responsibly (Little Brown, June 2009), for this blog.

The title of McWilliams’ talk was “Business, But Not Business as Usual: A Proposal for the Future of Sustainable Agriculture.” It was offered to academic and program staff affiliated with UC’s Agriculture and Natural Resources Division, some of us working with Extension, others with campuses.  For an organization charged with working with all aspects of the food system, we don’t actually talk about it at the systems level much. This conference was different: McWilliams offered the plenary, and spoke directly to the topic. There were also two other sessions/workshops that discussed these sorts of issues; they were very well attended, and have provoked discussion and conversation that is continuing in post-conference settings. Not just nationally, but in my own institution, forces and issues and needs and agendas are converging in a perfect storm of interest in the food system. Change is inevitable; nearly every institution is going through a period of “creative destruction” due to budget constraints. There are new challenges and opportunities for all of us.

McWilliams’ opened his talk by asserting that fixing the food system is one of the most pressing tasks we face in this country. Agreed. Nearly every problem we face as a nation can be addressed in some way – and in some big ways – by improving the current food system. But McWilliams made a statement with which I heartily disagree: essentially, that the Locavore movement seeks to “banish to the dustbin” other models.

I’ve never termed myself a “Locavore,” although I’m a strong believer in the value of strong local and regional food systems, and actively promote them. I believe that multiple food systems exist – and probably always will – and that most of us participate in several kinds of food systems simultaneously. I don’t seek the destruction of any food system. I seek instead, the room and opportunity to develop alternatives for the places and situations in our country where the predominant, or meta, food system is not working effectively.

McWilliams argued for a kind of pragmatism that I find appealing in a general and theoretical sense…work within the system rather than against it. There’s a certain logic in that…perhaps…sometimes.  Using the success of Forest Ethics as a model, McWilliams argued that those of us advocating for local food systems should be more pragmatic, reconsider working with agribusiness, find common ground, seek real solutions, and be prepared to compromise some, to seek evolution in the food system rather than revolution. McWilliams presents a persuasive model, in a persuasive way. Evolutionary rather than revolutionary.

But I’ve had other people to persuade me, too, to remind me that real change is needed, and needed now. Will Allen is someone I admire immensely. I heard him speak (again) the week before McWilliams made his presentation at UC. The creator of Growing Power, a MacArthur genius grant recipient, and a national leader in the sustainable food systems movement, Allen provides eloquent testimony about the kinds of changes needed to make the food system more effectively meet the needs of some parts of urban America. In his case, that has involved creating a new kind of food system model. What he has done in Milwaukee within a framework of urban agriculture is simply astounding. There is a lot to be learned from this work. Allen is a big man, physically; he also has big ideas. What I love about his work is that he applies his visionary ideas in ways that are highly impactful on the local level.  I believe his work has the ability to be scaled up, which could have positive implications for other urban areas.

Allen has recently published a manifesto proposing a novel and worthy public policy idea, suggesting the creation of a “public-private enabling institution” called the Centers for Urban Agriculture. Per Allen’s document:

It would incorporate a national training and outreach center, a large working urban farmstead, a research and development center, a policy institute, and a state-of-the-future urban agriculture demonstration center into which all of these elements would be combined in a functioning community food system scaled to the needs of a large city. We proposed that this working institution – not a “think tank” but a “do tank” – be based in Milwaukee, where Growing Power has already created an operating model on just two acres. But ultimately, satellite centers would become established in urban areas across the nation. Each would be the hub of a local or regional farm-to-market community food system that would provide sustainable jobs, job training, food production and food distribution to those most in need of nutritional support and security.

Allen is not only proposing a new kind of model for urban food systems…it seems to me that he is proposing a (largely) new location for Extension work and new kind of Extension model.   Allen’s proposal seems to combine elements of working both within and outside of the system. Especially because I’m familiar with his work, I find it compelling and thought-provoking. It is clear to me that our current land grant system – in a national sense – has not put enough muscle into urban agricultural and local food systems efforts.  We have made many notable contributions, to be certain, but our institutional resources have not flowed into this area in the large way that would be needed to effect national change. There are many reasons for this: years of declining funding; the relative dearth of funded research opportunities in this area, at least until recently; political pressures; lack of mandate; lack of understanding of the interconnectedness of our work in agriculture and human areas; a failure to fully anticipate the converging crises and challenges facing us; and perhaps even a lack of awareness of how large, mainstream and dynamic the interest in sustainable foods systems has become.

I’d suggest that everyone reading this blog read Will Allen’s proposal and James McWilliams’ soon-to-be-released book. Their work represents stark differences in opinion on options for local food systems. Point and counter-point.

A final note: As we participated in this UC conference, which was focused on creating implementation strategies for a Strategic Vision plan UC Cooperative Extension and its related components have developed relating to our work for the next 15 years, we were initially told to “think out of the box.”

Then a better framing statement was offered…”There is no box.”

McWilliams’ ideas actually retain the box – or framework – of the existing national and largely industrialized food system. Allen’s work assumes no box.

The food policy wonks leaped, quickly exposing the holes in McWilliams’ alarmist piece.  (My two-cents is here) It seemed that leaving out the important details above left the author without a leg to stand on, yet The Atlantic was quick to give McWilliams a platform. He weakly defended his position, calling the National Pork Board funding matter a distraction, and half-heartedly admitted that he may have been wrong to leave out the details of seropositivity.  His limp-wristed retort included an admission that he was in fact a sustainable food supporter, playing devil’s advocate.

The only problem is, as McWilliams admits, this was a piece for lay readers, who without further information, could stop buying sustainable pork after reading such claims (and they won’t just be going vegetarian, as the author might have hoped).

Its worth congratulating the food writers who gave a retort to this piece, and it speaks to an important fact McWilliams seems not to have gotten: established sustainable food advocates and newbies alike can handle transparency.

This got me thinking about what a more considered and productive devil’s advocate would have done in this situation.  Instead of seeking only to shock the public with misleading information, a more nuanced critique (I’ll admit, it might not have made it into the Times, but thats another matter) could have presented the possibility that free-range pork is not all it’s cracked up to be, and balanced out this one-sided slam.

The root of the story, and the one I’d like to understand better, is the role of antibiotics in pig husbandry, and by extension, whether antibiotics are necessary or positive in any way.  An honest contrarian would have also disclosed the role of other serious pathogens like MRSA, which have been found in industrial pig operations where antibiotics are being used liberally to fatten up pigs. This would have served to give a better picture of hog confinement in general –  otherwise, McWilliams is only hurting the cause he claims to care about.

A well-rounded critique of the work sustainable food advocates are doing in all arenas is valid. However in misleading the general public, and laying the contrarianism on thick, McWilliams didn’t start a conversation, but instead just threw in a rotten tomato.

The issues our food system faces are very serious, and one thing we can safely say is that industrial-scale animal operations have seen their day in the sun. Consumers are becoming more conscious of the treatment of the animals they eat, and from a food safety perspective, we can pretty confidently say that industrially raised meat is less safe. (Fortunately, there is more than one study to back this up). That being said, we have a lot of work to do, and everything we do will not be perfect.

Unfortunately, it seems that McWilliams has fallen prey to the wiles of marketing.  In seeking to market himself as a contrarian, he has even penned a book called Just Food: How Locavores are Endangering the Future of Food and How We Can Truly Eat Responsibly.  Now honestly, did he pick out that title to scare the trichonosis out of people, or what? If he were a true sustainable food advocate, perhaps he would have written a book titled, A Closer Look at Locavorism: What’s Not Working and How We Can Fix It.  I might have been more excited to read that.