Deck the hall with boughs of holly (unless holly doesn't grow where you live)

Today Forbes.com published a piece I wrote with Henry Miller, who is a fellow at the the Hoover Institute at Stanford University.  The piece is on local foods, and now (in the winter, at Christmas) is perhaps one of the best times to think through the logic of locavorism.  

Here are a few snippets from the beginning:

The Christmas season brings visions of candy canes, cider and sugar plums dancing in the head.  Unless, that is, you’re a committed locavore who has scorned peppermint, sugar beets and apples, because they’re not found in your neck of the woods in the summertime, much less the dead of winter.

The desire to help out a neighbor or even a local farmer can be a noble one, especially in this gift-giving season, but sentiment shouldn’t keep us from thinking critically about the consequences of forcing municipal hospitals, schools and other institutions to source an arbitrary percentage of their food locally.

and the end:

If we are to live by the locavore’s mantra that we will consume only what can be made locally, we had better board up our chimneys on Christmas Eve.  No matter how magical are his reindeer or how benevolent his elves, we daren’t accept Santa’s wares because, well, the vast majority of them are made far away.  No self-respecting locavore would be caught dead sucking on a candy cane made at the North Pole.

Yet, St. Nick is a good guy and deserves our respect and patronage as much anyone else.  The same goes for our local farmers.  If we trust our local farmer to give us what we want and you do the same, then surely we can trust your local farmer too.  And your local farmer is probably better at growing some things than ours.  So as we send holiday greetings to dear friends far and wide, let’s not demonize those who want to do the same with food

Local Food = Rich People Food

I previously mentioned  some work showing that the local food phenomena was primarily an urban preoccupation.  Now, Feedstuffs reports on the following findings:

An Indiana University study that looked at consumers who buy locally grown and produced foods through farmers markets and community-supported agriculture (CSA) programs found that the venues largely attract a "privileged" class of shoppers.

The study authors interpret their findings to imply:

a need for broadening local food opportunities beyond the privileged, higher-income consumer through alternative payment plans and strategic efforts that make fresh foods accessible to a diversity of people.

I don't quite understand this logic.  If I did a study on the market for automobiles, I'd no doubt find that consumers who buy BMWs and Mercedes represent a "privileged class of shoppers."  But, would this then imply that we need to broad support for buying (i.e., use taxpayer money to subsidize purchases of)  BMWs and Mercedes beyond privileged  higher-income consumers?  

I think it's great that richer people can find opportunities to express their demand for foods with unique characteristics.  But, I don't know why we should expect this to be the norm for everyone.   If your goal is to find inexpensive, healthy food without spending a lot of time shopping and coordinating with others, local foods is unlikely to be an attractive option.  

If you want to expand demand for local food, the answer isn't "alternative payment plans" or "strategic efforts" but rather to make poor people richer so that they want (and can afford) the things local foods provide.  Of course, no one quite knows how to make poor people richer but this is the fundamental issue at stake - not whether we should try to force certain foods on people who have other, more pressing worries in life.  

Why the Cities are Not Likely the Farms of the Future

This piece in the Wall Street Journal​ argues:

The seeds of an agricultural revolution are taking root in cities around the world—a movement that boosters say will change the way that urbanites get their produce and solve some of the world's biggest environmental problems along the way.

​There some problems with this line of reasoning.  Here are just a few:

• As pointed out by Harvard professor Ed Glaeser last year, some of the biggest environmental problems comes from commuters driving into the city.  Diverting potential living space to crop-growing space keeps some people out in the suburbs who would otherwise live in town.  The environmental costs of their commutes is likely much higher than any environmental benefits from local food.
• More generally, there are very high opportunity costs to land in the city.  In non-economic terms: land in the city is really valuable because there are many alternative uses for it.  ​While I have no issue if a city-based farm is sufficiently profitable  to out-compete all the other alternative uses for the land, it is much more difficult to argue that such activities are deserving of public praise or funding.  
• As we pointed out in a piece last year, ​transportation accounts for a relatively small portion of the environmental impacts of food production (and the overall cost of food for that matter).  The implication of this insight is that production costs (and emissions) are often lower if you produce food where it can be most efficiently grown and then ship it to where it is consumed.  
• Using greenhouses to grow produce (such as tomatoes) in northern climates (e.g., New York, Chicago, Boston) is likely to produce many more carbon emissions than ​growing produce in the naturally warm environments like Florida and shipping north (see this review).

Here is a nice review of the existing research on the topic.  The authors say:​

Thus, advocacy for ‘local’ food suggests that it is generally better overall to consume local food than food  produced ‘non-locally’. However, a priori reasoning would question the universality of such claims, as every location is local to someone, but all locations are non-local to most people. 

​and

We conclude that food miles are a poor indicator of the environmental and ethical impacts of food production. 

​

Is it Always Better to Use Local Ingredients?

Who Buys Local Foods?

Two of my colleagues at Oklahoma State, Brian Whitacre and Trey Malone, ​just released a report on local foods.  Here is their conclusion: 

The marketing of local food has been promoted and state-supported as an economic boon to rural places. But thus far, it appears that urban customers and economies are reaping most of the benefits.

Later they say:​

Overall, the maps suggest that support for local food systems is a strongly urban phenomenon. 

Local foods may have some positive attributes, but as I've argued here and in my forthcoming book, The Food Police, (see also The Locavore's Dilemma: In Praise of the 10,000-mile Diet by Desrochers and Shimizu) promoting local foods is unlikely to be a good rural development strategy.