It takes only 12 words before he drops Michael Pollan’s name, whose best-selling books argue eloquently for a better food system, and in the next paragraph he mentions Michelle Obama’s organic garden at the White House, though he makes no mention of her new “Let’s Move!” campaign against childhood obesity, for which this garden is a tool.

I was going to dismiss Mr. Darlin’s piece as not worthy of notice despite its prominent placement in the Paper of Record and thus avoid writing my third column lamenting this misplaced disrespect for eaters who care what they eat (I swear I do have better, more enjoyable things to write about), but then he said this:

Some of these so-called locavores may think they are part of a national movement that will replace corporate food factories with small family farms. But as much of the East Coast lies blanketed beneath a foot or more of snow, it’s as good a time as any to raise a few questions about the trend’s viability.

What struck me first about this statement was that it came the same week that talking heads in the media and politics (And even Donald Trump?) were blindly arguing that all this snow was proof that climate change was a hoax (perpetrated to what end? I’ve always wondered). The irony is that these bigger storms are likely a symptom of that same climate change, caused in no small measure by industrial agriculture.

Then I noticed the condescension. These so-called locavores may think they are part of a national movement. Mr. Darlin, we are part of a national movement, an international movement in fact, led by dozens of very worthy organizations working hard to create a food system that is good, clean, and fair. Our current system is none of these things. I happen to sit on the board of directors of one such organization, Slow Food USA, which has 26,000 members nationwide and over 100,000 members worldwide. Pretty sure that alone qualifies as a movement, but as I said we are not alone.

What Mr. Darlin seems not to understand though is that there is so much more to this movement. We are not a bunch of yuppie foodies stuffing our craws with foie gras, as he and others might have their readers believe. The system we envision, as I said, is one that is:

1. Good – meaning that the food tastes good and is nutritious
2. Clean – meaning that producing the food has only beneficial and not negative effects on the environment in which it is produced, and that there is nothing in the food that isn’t food (and if it wasn’t food 100 years ago, it is not food now)
3. Fair – meaning that the people who produce the food should be justly compensated for their work.

This is not an effort to create some Utopian state, nor is it a recreation of Mao’s “Great Leap Forward,” (another accusation Darlin hurls). It is a wholehearted effort to improve the lives of everyone who eats. We do not say: good food for us, we say good food for all! And when Darlin states, “People who grow vegetables in empty lots and schoolyards have a nice, wholesome hobby–but one that can make little sense economically,” he needs to do a bit more research than reading William Alexander’s “The $64 Tomato.”

In fact, during World Wars I, II and the Great Depression for example, more than half of America’s produce came from privately held or community-based “Victory Gardens.” But Americans have been sold a bill of goods, by Big Ag and other industrial interests, that has us all thinking that cooking, much less growing our own food, is a chore akin to washing windows, one to be avoided whenever possible and then done grudgingly only when absolutely necessary. In fact cooking is far more important. It is an almost spiritual act to provide nourishment to our loved ones, yet as a society we have come to mistake frenzy for efficiency, which has led to believing we are satisfied with expedient mediocrity, and in the balance as always it’s the children who suffer.

Meanwhile, with respect to making “little sense economically,” I’ve often pointed out that where I live in Johnson County, Iowa, there are about 50,000 households. If each of them redirected just $10 of their existing weekly food budget toward getting something locally–from a farmers market, a CSA, a local brewery, or eggs from the farmer down the road, it would keep $26 million in our economy every year. Now imagine same statistic in a major metro like Mr. Darlin’s native San Francisco.

We are not idiots and none of us expects to see the brick-by-brick dismantling of McDonald’s worldwide (well OK, some may wish it, but that’s different). But there is a massive amount of room for improvement and we want to see it. No health care system, no matter how it is reformed, can deal with the $157 billion we spend annually in the US alone on obesity-related illness. We live in a world with a billion people starving and another billion overweight and yet undernourished. Children born in the US have a one-in-three chance of developing diabetes before they are old enough to vote, and among minorities that ratio rises to one-in-two.

Clearly the industrial model, which may work just fine for Darlin’s primary field of computers, is not working for food. There must be a better way and we are out to find it. Trying to stick us with an elitist tag when we are trying to help farmers and raise healthy children simply won’t wash.

Thomas Keller is one the world’s most celebrated chefs with his fleet of restaurants in Yountville, Los Vegas, and New York. At the same time, he is a vocal “thorn in the side” of local food advocates, with his direct dismissals of the locavore movement.

His message was much the same this year when he spoke at the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Sustainable Foods Institute a few weeks ago.  Speaking on a panel called “The Future of Food: Scaling Down,” Chef Keller made the distinction between geographically local and temporally local food.

That is, he personally considers local food to be anything that he can get at his doorstep within one day of harvest – even if that means flying that product overnight from across the country.

Here are some excerpts from Keller’s comments on the panel:

When I started cooking, 32 years ago sustainability wasn’t something that was talked about. And, being a chef, the kind of chef that I wanted to be, was about quality number one: quality of product, quality of execution, quality of experience for the guest.

It all rested on the highest quality that I could produce. For me as I went through my career, I came to understand where our product came from and where the best products came from, the term local changed for me. So it wasn’t about a geographical location, it was about quality of the product.

If we could get great lobsters from Main everyday at my back door, then for me that was a local product. If I could get the best lamb available from Pennsylvania, then that to me was a local product.

Now certainly, in saying that, all of you are probably thinking “Well, this guy’s crazy “– because he’s talking about sustainability, local geographical products, not leaving a carbon footprint by shipping things across the US, and there are certainly many things to be said for that.  But there’s also something to be said for supporting some of our purveyors who have products that are coming across the continent for us, people like Keith Martin, who is my lamber in Pennsylvania.

His protocols, his holistic way of raising his animals is something that I want to continue to support, because I really believe in the way that he’s doing. And eventually he will have an impact on the entire industry, and raise the standard of the entire industry. So, I’m willing to leave a small carbon footprint by shipping his lamb from Pennsylvania to Yountville or to New York or to Las Vegas because we use his lamb in all of our restaurants to continue to support what he’s doing. So, I buy from people I have great respect for.

So, ultimately, Keller is justifying the greater environmental load that his purchasing produces by the possible long-term benefits that supporting quality farmers might create. Keller has also said, “Price isn’t important to me, I just want the very best available.” As such, he admits to having an elitist philosophy – which is partly why he has been so successful in the culinary world.

And I am the first to admit — in the sphere he inhabits, his views work.  Extremely well.  At the same time, I would strongly caution against implementing this “24-hour local” food rule for the rest of society.

There are several reasons for this:

1) Building a Diverse Community: If everyone bought their food like Thomas Keller, we might have good quality farms but at the same time we wouldn’t have the infrastructure to support them.  Our agricultural infrastructure is currently targeted toward the large players in the market. It is difficult, for example, for small meat producers to find a certified processing facility in their local area, or for small farmers to find distribution networks for their products.  The more we buy from our local foodshed, the more incentive there will be for these localized networks of infrastructure to be (re)created.  In the process, we will make it  easier for sustainable food producers to go about the business of growing good, healthy food.

2) Diversity on our Local Farms: If we choose to buy our specialty foods from across the country, we are simultaneously decreasing the food-dollars that go to our local farmers — dollars they might invest in growing those very same products closer to home.  Farmers need an economic incentive to grow a variety of plants and animals.  This agricultural variety will directly increase the ecological / environmental health of our farm ecosystems, and at the same time encourage better health as we increase the number of foods in our diets.

3) Energy Use: Economist Jeff Rubin has a new book called Why Your World Is About to Get A Whole Lot Smaller which addresses these issues directly.  Rubin’s premise is that the current decline in oil prices is going to be short lived, and was caused in large part by our current recession.  Once the economic recession is over, oil will again be well over $100 / barrel – which will have a dramatic impact on how we grow and ship food.

Here’s an excerpt:

I like salmon — who doesn’t? Salmon consumption has risen about 23 percent each year for the last decade or so. There are a number of good reasons to eat more fish: we all want food high in omega-3s, we want to eat less saturated fat, we want healthy protein for our low-carb diets. But here’s the key reason for the amount of salmon on your dinner table: cheap oil has been subsidizing the cost of fish. Just like Wal-Mart and Tesco and big- box retailers around the world have been able to cut prices on almost everything by taking advantage of cheap shipping and cheap Asian labor, salmon went from being delicious local seafood to being another global commodity. Cheap oil gives us access to a pretty big world.

So, what happens when our globalized food system breaks down as oil prices rise?  We need to be ready with local options, which brings us back to points 1 and 2.  (Again, in Keller’s case, he is buying the best without regard to price.  But this doesn’t work for the rest of us.)

Finally, as a chef I have personally found great value in buying and serving local food.  First of all, it keeps me directly connected with the seasons – and more importantly, how those seasons change from year-to-year.

For example, the menus I create tell me to the week when the local strawberries are available, when the blood oranges are ripe, and when the heirloom tomatoes are fresh off the vine.  I could, if I wanted, get these products nearly year-round if I chose – but then I wouldn’t know that a heavy spring rain delayed the strawberry harvest by two weeks compared with last year.  And perhaps I wouldn’t realize it when unusually cool temperatures kept the heirlooms from fully ripening.  And it is these seasonal and yearly variations that keep me grounded in where I am.

Working with local farmers also teaches me to be nimble in the kitchen, especially if you commit to buying whatever they bring you.  They might say they have 20 lbs of baby bok choy, but then the harvest might not pan out and instead I receive 10 lbs of sugar peas and a case of garlic scapes instead.  Too bad that your menu is already printed – improvise improvise improvise.  This is how nature is in the real world, and it benefits me as a chef to accept and integrate that unpredictability.

Interestingly, Keller does have a small farm as part of The French Laundry.  But when he talks about his farm, he does so from a social view point, not an environmental one. Again, here are Keller’s comments from the Sustainable Food Institute panel:

We have our own garden and orchards in Yontville.  “Why do we have our own garden, our own orchards?”  We’re in California which has the most amazing product in our country. It’s not just that we like to grow our own so we can say so. It’s about the teaching process for our young cooks.

When I was a young cook, I would get on the phone every night and place my order and it would come in the back door, and I didn’t have a connection to where that food came from, and so my idea of waste wasn’t’ something that was really important to me.  So now, growing our own, and harvesting it, and washing it and serving it, you understand the level of respect you have for that food grows enormously. So the amount of waste has been reduced by a great deal.  So it’s really about responsibility and respect for the product.

“Responsibility and respect for the product” is a great goal — and I applaud Keller for investing time, energy, and money into his gardens.  But at the same time, his culinary skills have given him power as an international spokesman for what good food is.  His terminology and ideas around local food are confusing to the casual observer.  So while his food is delicious, I believe our country would be better off by not following the example he is creating.

Photo: inuyaki.com

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.