July 5, 2012 |
Photo Credit: Baloncici/ Shutterstock.com
A physicist, a chemist and an economist are stranded on an island, with
nothing to eat. A can of soup washes ashore. The physicist says, “Let's
smash the can open with a rock.” The chemist says, “Let's build a fire
and heat the can first.” The economist says, “Let's assume that we have a
can-opener...”
Economists all know this joke, which “
comes from the stereotype
that many economic models require unrealistic or absurd assumptions in
order to obtain results.” And yet, how many heed its warning?
A new book,
The Locavore's Dilemma: In Praise of the 10,000 Mile Diet by
Pierre Desroches and Hiroku Shimizu, uses arguments from neoliberal
economics to explain why those who advocate eating local food are wrong.
Often, their arguments require assumptions as silly as the one in the
joke. For example, in making the case that the world moved from a diet
of local food to a global food system for a good reason (and therefore
we should not return to eating local), they assume that modern locavores
will face the same technological limitations as our ancestors, who were
also locavores. But aside from the numerous strawman arguments found
throughout the book, there are several points where economics are
properly applied to food and agriculture and – the authors charge –
prove that local food is a bad idea.
But perhaps the opposite is true instead; that the models used in
neoliberal economics do not accurately apply here. Here are six economic
principles that do not fit when it comes to food and agriculture:
1. Assume the Players are Rational:
In economics, one
assumes all of the players are rational. When it comes to food, we are
far from it. For example, frozen dinners had been introduced to
supermarkets unsuccessfully before the TV dinner came along. The TV
dinner succeeded because Americans were excited about TVs. When the
Pepsi Challenge showed that Americans prefer the flavor of Pepsi to
Coke, Coca-Cola took the bait and introduced New Coke, which tested
better than Coke
and Pepsi in taste tests. Turned out,
consumers don't drink Coke because of the flavor. They drink it because
it's “American” and “fun.” Coke learned its lesson, and its slogans have
reflected it ever since (“Open happiness”).
2. Standardization of Food:
Much of economic theory
rests on the assumption that the goods in question are commodities. Our
food is standardized so that it can be treated as a commodity. One
Granny Smith apple is the same as any other Granny Smith apple, no
matter where it’s from or how it was produced. But many foods are not so
interchangeable, and indeed, when they are standardized, they often
become standardly bad.
Take the strawberry. There’s nothing like the flavor of a fresh-picked,
juicy strawberry. But if you pay $3.99 a pint for strawberries in your
supermarket in January, the berries you buy will hardly even give a hint
of flavor. They’ll be big and red, but who cares if the berry is
perfectly red if it doesn’t deliver on strawberry flavor?
The market can deliver on the idea of year-round strawberries, but it
cannot deliver on the delectable flavor one associates with those
berries. Truly ripe strawberries are highly perishable, so they can’t be
too ripe when picked. And strawberry flavor deteriorates when the berry
goes in the fridge, but there’s no way to transport perishable berries
across the country without refrigeration. Even in California, where
nature provides fresh, local berries for about half the year, the flavor
changes throughout the season. Early season berries aren’t very sweet
or flavorful, unfortunately. It takes until May or June to get perfect,
sweet, juicy strawberries. That goodness is fleeting and ephemeral, and
it only comes once a year.
In addition to flavor, foods are not identical in terms of nutrition.
It’s likely that supermarket eggs are standardized, all with roughly the
same nutrition content. They were all produced in nearly identical
conditions from genetically identical birds who were fed exactly the
same feed. But when chickens can roam freely, eating grass and bugs in
addition to chicken feed, their eggs become
more nutritious.
It would be extremely difficult to produce eggs this way on a large
scale and do so profitably. But it’s easy and fun to do for homeowners
with small backyard flocks.
Another factor is genetics. It’s certainly convenient to produce
genetically identical food for the market, especially if you find the
perfect combination of genetics to give you a high yield and great taste
with disease and pest resistance. But what happens when Mother Nature
throws a curveball at you and a disease comes along that your crop has
no resistance to? You need new genes. Sure, scientists can keep a supply
of biodiversity in a seed vault and that might provide the new genes
you’re looking for. But for genes that really keep up with the current
challenges of nature, you need genetic diversity grown in nature, under
conditions that change over time.
When governments signed NAFTA, they assumed that corn is corn is corn,
and the U.S. produces corn cheaper than Mexican peasants are able to
produce it. But those Mexican peasants are the guardians of the world’s
most valuable supply of corn genetics. And in that sense, they can
hardly be compared to an Iowa corn farmer who buys seeds each year from
DuPont or Monsanto.
3. Creative Destruction:
Economist Joseph Schumpeter
spoke of creative destruction, explaining how new inventions will
disrupt old, established businesses. When automobiles were introduced,
carmakers and their employees succeeded as horse-drawn buggy makers went
out of business and their employees lost their jobs. Therefore, under
this line of thinking, it makes perfect sense for Florida to grow
oranges until the global market some day decides to source oranges from
Brazil instead. There's no need for Florida to diversify its crops, not
while Florida oranges are in demand. They can worry about switching to a
more profitable crop (or perhaps, switch from farming to tourism) when
the time comes, just like cassette tape makers in the 1980s did not stop
making cassette tapes because some day CDs would become popular and put
them out of business.
The devil here is in the details. Desroches and Shimizu specifically
say that “profitable monocultures should be pursued as long as they
remain viable in a particular location.” So California should provide
all of the nation's almonds and strawberries, while the entire
midwestern United States is blanketed in corn and soybeans. But it is
nearly impossible to grow monocultures year after year in the same field
without running into pest and fertility problems.
Right now some experts predict
the downfall of the Cavendish banana,
the variety of banana sold in U.S. supermarkets, due to a fungal
disease. Enormous fields of genetically identical bananas make easy prey
for pests and diseases. Accepting large scale monoculture means
accepting lots of pesticide use. When one crunches the numbers, the
costs might add up because revenues outweigh the extra money spent on
pesticides, but the equation leaves out the impact those pesticides have
on farmworkers, eaters and the environment.
4. Comparative Advantage:
The idea expressed above
goes hand in hand with the principle of comparative advantage. The idea
is simple. If Idaho can produce potatoes cheaper than California can,
and California can produce strawberries cheaper than Idaho can, then
Idaho should grow all of the potatoes and California should grow all of
the strawberries, and they should trade. To some extent, this makes
sense. No one is suggesting that Mexico attempt to produce its own maple
syrup or that Vermont should try to grow its own pineapple. But relying
on large-scale monoculture as suggested by the notion that California
should supply the nation with strawberries runs into the need for toxic
agrochemicals.
Until recently, California was set to approve a potent carcinogen to
fumigate strawberry fields. This chemical, methyl iodide, was to replace
its predecessor, methyl bromide, which was phased out globally because
it harmed the ozone layer. Should Californians be exposed to a
carcinogen just so a few strawberry growers can get rich and the rest of
the country can eat cheap (but flavorless) strawberries year-round? Or
should midwesterners drink tapwater laced with the herbicide atrazine?
When confronted with this question, Desroches dismissed the idea that
agrochemicals are harmful, pointing to the increasing human lifespan in
recent times.
5. Legal System:
In a recent case
Nicaraguan farmworkers brought against Dole,
the workers sued over health problems caused by a pesticide called
Nemagon used on the Dole Plantations. Nemagon has been banned in the
U.S. since 1979. Initially, the farmworkers won their case, but it was
overturned in an appeal after Dole found 27 secret witnesses who
testified that the plaintiffs were fraudulent. After Dole's victory,
several of the secret witnesses came forward and recanted their
testimony, saying they testified because Dole offered them bribe money
-- and then never even paid them the bribe money.
Most recently,
Dole settled out of court with the farmworkers.
Economists might assume we can create a perfect legal system that
passes laws protecting workers' rights and enforces them as much as they
assume they have can-openers -- but it doesn't make either one true.
In our global food system, human rights abuses abound. Most are
invisible to us when we shop at the grocery store. A recent WTO ruling
challenged even the basic principle that we should be allowed to know
what country our beef comes from. Pesticide standards only require that
residue on food in our stores is limited, but nobody checks to find out
what farmworkers were exposed to. Did the company that grew your food
drive an indigenous community of their ancestral land with bulldozers,
or did they irrigate their crops so heavily that an entire river the
community relied on now runs dry? Did somebody’s property value plummet
after a factory farm moved in next door, forcing them to smell manure
night and day while simultaneously killing their chances to sell their
home and move? These are not made-up scenarios -- all of them have
happened. But in the grocery store, you don't know.
6. GDP Meets Human Health:
From the perspective of
maximizing GDP, our current food system cannot be beat. We have found
ways to make people eat more than ever (and more processed foods than
ever), and then they spend more money on diet books, weight loss
programs, gyms, and health care for diet-related illnesses. This boosts
the GDP much more than if people just ate the right amounts of a diverse
mix of whole foods and then skipped the weight loss programs and the
diabetes meds. But is it what we want?
For an economist, our current food system is highly efficient,
producing, distributing, and selling the maximum amount of cheap food. A
large amount of food is “value-added” (i.e. highly processed), which
means that more companies and employees will earn money from each food.
Instead of wheat or even wheat flour, a consumer buys a loaf of bread,
giving jobs to the bakery and requiring dough conditioners,
preservatives and a plastic bag that would not have been necessary if
they just baked a loaf of bread at home.
Unfortunately, economics only quantifies dollars, not human health.
According to those looking for GDP growth, it’s better if you buy a
bottle of Heinz ketchup than if you grow tomatoes from seed in your
garden, and it’s better if you buy a Snapple made with 10 percent juice
than if you eat a piece of fruit. Maybe we would be better off if
economists start assuming that we don’t have can-openers, so we have to
cook healthy whole foods from scratch.
Jill Richardson is the founder of the blog
La Vida Locavore and a member of the Organic Consumers Association policy advisory board. She is the author of
Recipe for America: Why Our Food System Is Broken and What We Can Do to Fix It..
