The Locavore's Dilemma (10 page)

Greater quality, convenience, affordability, and reduced waste are not the only tangible benefits of modern retail food practices. Through the development of brands for mass-produced commodities and products (brand-name reputations for luxury products go back at least to Antiquity), consumers were able to economize on the time that would have otherwise been required to establish the trustworthiness of multiple suppliers. Of course, marketers rarely refrained from simultaneously using both technological novelty and pastoral nostalgia or to stretch or bend the truth as much as possible in order to promote their products. For instance, the Quaker Oats man came to symbolize a firm with no connections to the Society of Friends, but whose founders liked the values associated with the group. Nonetheless, individuals who purchased Quaker Oats products could be assured of their quality, uniformity, and reliability. Large businesses that claimed too much for their products were always kept in check by trial lawyers and competitors on the lookout for deep pockets that strayed too far from truth-in-advertising. Some readers might remember the case of the
Papa John's
chain, which got into legal trouble in the late 1990s because of its slogan “Better Ingredients. Better Pizza!” something the firm obviously couldn't prove. Small firms and fly-by-night operations, on the other hand, rarely if ever face such constraints as they are not worth their competitors' and trial lawyers' time and resources.

Interestingly, 19th century food activists were forever denouncing the shady dealings of
local
businesspeople whom they accused of adulterating
food in various ways, be it by adding water to milk, wine and beer; roasted chicory roots, peas, beans, and other grains to coffee; poppy seed oil to olive oil; leaves of all kinds to tea; floor sweepings of pepper houses into pepper; alum, chalk, white clay, bone ashes, field beans, and copper sulphate (to mask its spoiled character) to flour; rice powder and arrow roots to cream; crushed olive stones in pepper; starch to sausages; spurred rye to bread; glucose, sorghum, corn, and boiled brown sugar to maple syrup; and of artificially inflating the weight of wheat by keeping it in humid conditions; feeding salt to cattle in order to get them to drink plenty of water and artificially increase their weight, and tampering with weighing devices, among others.
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A classic 1820 treatment of the issue is entitled
Treatise on the Adulteration of Foods, and Culinary Poisons, Exhibiting the Fraudulent Sophistications of Bread, Beer, Wine, Spirituous Liquors, Tea, Coffee, Cream, Confectionery, Vinegar, Mustard, Pepper, Cheese, Olive Oil, Pickles, and Other Articles Employed in Domestic Economy, and Methods of Detecting Them
.
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Not surprisingly, such accusations were always easier to direct at foreign than local producers. For instance, a French Inspector General at the Paris Customs, Jacques Savary des Brûlons, observed in the late 18th century that Irish producers had “no scruples about adding all matter of substances to increase the weight [of goods] such as… tallow in butter, pebbles in tallow and the horns and feet of cattle in barrels of salted meat.”
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Of course, it is probably worth keeping in mind that because of the inherently protectionist bent of the French administration at the time, Savary des Brûlons might have had a vested interest in denigrating foreign goods or keeping silent about the fact that French merchants might have been just as bad in this respect. Be that as it may, as the author of the 1911
Encyclopedia Britannica
entry on “adulteration” observed, the practice was “as old as commerce itself.”
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Lest we convey the mistaken impression that most agricultural producers, intermediaries, and merchants are inherently dishonest and have no interest in building repeat business, the fact remains that not
everyone who welcomes customers with broad smiles and open arms at farmers' market might be telling you the truth. Indeed, the determination of local food activists to purchase as much as possible “beyond the barcode” rather than from “brand bullies” greatly facilitates the shady or unprofessional dealings of unscrupulous and inefficient producers and retailers.

Farmers' markets—while often limited in terms of convenience (from out-of-the-way locations and poor parking conditions to restricted hours and a lack of protection from the elements) and typically offering slim pickings at the beginning and end of growing seasons—often provide enjoyable shopping experiences. If busy and tired farmers (as they often are when their produce is in season) can muster the energy to engage in long conversations with inquisitive customers, then so much the better.

One recurring problem at these markets, though, is that some merchants are actually resellers peddling nonlocal products under false pretenses.
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Sometimes, as we observed on a couple of occasions at a Mississauga, Ontario, farmers' market, the brand-named boxes in the back of their trucks will give them away. Of course, other dishonest sellers are regrettably cleverer in this respect, but some investigative actions can nonetheless expose them. For example, in 2010, an NBC News team in Los Angeles paid a visit to the farms where vendors claimed the food at their stalls had been grown. In some cases, the investigators found “fields full of weeds or dry, empty fields. The vendors were selling vegetables and fruits they had bought wholesale, and were selling it at premium prices at local farmer's markets, claiming it was locally grown and organic.” Several “organic” and “pesticide-free” items tested positive for chemicals at a level that could not be accounted for by pesticide “drift” from nearby farms. Commenting on such occurrences, a food activist who acknowledges that similar problems are “happening all over the country” makes the following recommendations:

Good advice, if you can spare the time and are really passionate about local agriculture and farmers . . . Yet, it can be problematic on a few levels. A food policy analyst acquaintance of ours was thus told by some farmers that they now send their worst produce to farmers' markets because customers think that imperfections and blemishes are an indicator of authenticity. According to Linda Crago, a Niagara peninsula organic producer, local farmers will not always give truthful answers to customers. Besides, even a local certified organic producer who knows what he is talking about might have resorted to using other technologies to address a recurring pest problem or simply to increase his yields and profits. This problem is made even worse by the fact that certified North American organic farms are never field-tested, let alone randomly tested. Ms. Crago personally witnessed her vegetables listed on the
menus of restaurants she had never sold to, even sometimes in May when the produce is a long way from being ripe. She had been invited “to appear at events in restaurants so there is the appearance of a close relationship with a chef. Sometimes there is no relationship . . . only for the event, but not before or after.”
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While alternative producer Joel Salatin is fond of saying that “you can't legislate integrity,”
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the fact remains that small operators have much less at stake than bigger ones in this regard as they have small pockets and are not worth suing. And unlike full-time buyers and food safety inspectors employed by large corporations, locavores can only ask superficial questions, rarely if ever spare the time to inspect agriculture operations and virtually none of them could recognize
Salmonella
under a microscope. Can the old-fashioned locavore's way ever deliver greater honesty than brand names and legal actions? If this were the case, there would have been no need to develop brand names in the first place.

Small local farmers, like large commercial ones, may also select the most lucrative path above the ethos of locavorism. The issue was given some prominence a few years ago at the renowned Santa Monica Farmers' Market in southern California when home cooks began to complain that purchasers employed by local high-end restaurants would show up at the crack of dawn and quickly whisk away the best of the most exotic produce. Soon after, produce companies did the local chefs one better by ordering items in advance and selling them to high-end restaurants and markets across the country.
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Even more problematic are community-supported agriculture (CSA) initiatives.
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In such schemes, farmers who grow food and a group of individuals who decide to support them agree on advanced purchases of items such as vegetables, fruits, meat, eggs, cheese, honey, and frozen produce off-season. Depending on the nature of the arrangement and prices paid, the participating farmer will offer a selection of seasonal items at regular intervals (typically once a week) and either deliver them to consumers' doors or arrange for pickup at a central location or at the farm (sometimes with additional work being done by the purchaser).

The key features of CSAs are that deliveries vary greatly from week to week depending on the available crops (leafy greens one week, blueberries another) and that participants “share the risk” with the farmer they support. In other words, if a farmer experiences a good growing season, the weekly haul may be larger than expected, but the reverse is also true. The main benefits touted by CSA promoters include getting to know the people who produce your food, cutting out intermediaries, the possibility of directly supporting socially conscious farmers who rely on organic methods and pay their workers a living wage, and fresher and healthier products. And yet, as promoters and supporters themselves have been forced to acknowledge, these schemes are full of difficulties.

According to Atlanta-based journalist, blogger, and former CSA member Patti Ghezzi, “inconvenient drop-off locations or contracts that require more time or money than you can afford” are a major hurdle. She also had to face a “sudden onslaught of produce” that required the acquisition of significant cooking skills and equipment along with a serious time commitment for food preparation. When time was in short supply, the outcome was the “composting [of] a lot of produce.” Production problems on the farm, be they weather, pest, or equipment-related, also forced her to buy produce at the grocery store that at the end of the season proved to be a “budget buster.” Turning random and little-known produce into edible meals was often too challenging. As she put it: “Some greens are tricky to prepare. I never could figure out what to do with parsnips and some of the funny-looking squash I received. And the pumpkin I got in November? It rotted on my porch.”
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Another freelance writer and blogger, Lynda Altman, complained that “shared risk” often “meant receiving produce with major insect damage. In particular, one delivery of apples was full of worms and could not be used. Other times, the produce was beautiful, but I expected that there would have been more.” She further found out that the delivery time was not as convenient as she had first expected in light of her own
hectic schedule. Planning each delivery according to family requirements was extremely challenging (for instance, what if the kids are gone for a few days or if you're hosting extra guests?) and resulted in much more waste than if the food had been purchased at the supermarket. Indeed, she learned that “wasted produce is the most common reason for people not to continue with a CSA program.”
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Even CSA proponents recognize that products will typically “vary in size and appearance and do not follow the rules of systematic grocery store perfection,” that “unfavorable weather and field conditions may occasionally cause crop shortages, resulting in less-than-perfect quality of one or more types of vegetable for a while, or even their complete absence,” that the “same vegetable or fruit may show up in your shares for several weeks in a row,” that participants “receive what the farmer gives [them and] cannot pick and choose [their] produce,” and that “other than items that can be stored, such as onions, potatoes or dried beans, [participants] receive produce that is in season.” For some participants who are expected to pick their share from the fields, it must be done “every week on a specific day during a specific time period,” and if they don't, it is donated to charity.
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Problems such as these could have been easily anticipated by individuals more familiar with the valuable role played by intermediaries in the food trade sector and are a useful reminder of why our modern food supply chain evolved as it did. Gathering, inspecting, sorting, packaging, and delivering food items where and when they are sought after is no mean feat. In our assessment, what CSA promoters are truly achieving by eliminating middlemen is to shift the risks inherent to food production from growers and intermediaries onto consumers. As the agricultural policy analyst Gary Blumenthal observes, the real importance of the “small, local, and organic” movement is that it has “enabled some farmers to avoid the cost and risk of innovation by instead extracting greater income from consumers by utilizing psychological manipulation.”
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Attempts to rebuild social capital through such one-sided relationships are not worth supporting.