The Locavore's Dilemma (34 page)

12
See, among others, Laura Miller. 2002. “Duck Power and a Tale of Success: From Six Acres to an Ecosystem.”
Leopold Letter
(Spring). Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture.
http://www.leopold.iastate.edu/news/leopold-letter/2002/spring/duck-power-and-tale-success-six-acres-ecosystem
.

13
For a more detailed introduction to the topic, see the FAO webpages devoted to the topic at
http://www.fao.org/sard/en/sard/754/946/index.html
.

14
FAO. 2002. “Spotlight: Agricultural Heritage System.”
FAO Magazine
(November)
http://www.fao.org/ag/magazine/0211sp1.htm
.

15
Peter Garnsey. 1988.
Famine and Food Supply in the Graeco-Roman World: Responses to Risk and Crisis
. Cambridge University Press, p. 49.

16
Paul Roberts. 2009. “Spoiled: Organic and Local Is so 2008: Our Industrial Food System Is Rotten to the Core. Heirloom Arugula Won't Save Us. Here's What Will.”
Mother Jones
(March/April)
http://motherjones.com/environment/2009/02/spoiled-organic-and-local-so-2008
.

17
Idem.

18
Barbara Kingsolver (with Steven L. Hopp and Camille Kingsolver). 2007.
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Local Food.
HarperCollins, p. 3.

19
Blake McKelvey. 1940. “The Flower City: Center of Nurseries and Fruit Orchards
.
”
The Rochester Historical Society Publications
18: 121–169. Nonpaginated version available at
http://www.history.rochester.edu/flowercity/frontier.htm
.

20
George Richardson Porter. 1838.
The Progress of the Nation, in Its Various Social and Economical Relations from the Beginning of the Nineteenth Century to the Present Time: Sections III and IV: Interchange, and Revenue and Expenditure.
Charles Knight & Co., pp. 82-83
http://books.google.ca/books?id=908KAQAAMAAJ&source=gbs_navlinks_s
.

21
Idem, p. 83.

22
John Page. 1880. “The Sources of Supply of the Manchester Fruit and Vegetable Markets
.” Journal of the Royal Agricultural Society of England
16 (2nd series), pp. 477-480
http://books.google.ca/books?id=epoEAAAAYAAJ&source=gbs_navlinks_s
.

23
See, among others, G. Ronald White. 1932. “Live-Stock By-Products and By-Product Industries.”
Journal of the Royal Statistical Society
95 (3): 455–497, p. 466.

24
Barry Estabrook. 2011. “The Santa Barbara Syndrome: Evidence of a Broken Food System.”
The Atlantic
(February 14)
http://www.theatlantic.com/life/archive/2011/02/the-santa-barbara-syndrome-evidence-of-a-broken-food-system/71244/
.

25
David A. Cleveland, Corie N. Radka, Nora M. Müller, Tyler D. Watson, Nicole J. Rekstein, Hannah Van M. Wright, and Sydney E. Hollingshead. 2011. “Effect of Localizing Fruit and Vegetable Consumption on Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Nutrition, Santa Barbara County.”
Environmental Science & Technology
(45): 4555–4562.

26
The meat-packing industry got its name from the practice of early settlers of curing, smoking and packing pork domestically, a practice that was later commercialized. Other past cases of external economies of scale are discussed in Pierre Desrochers and Samuli Leppälä. 2010. “Industrial Symbiosis: Old Wine in Recycled Bottles? Some Perspective from the History of Economic and Geographical Thought.”
International Regional Science Review
33 (3): 338–361.

27
As we further discuss in chapter 6, criticisms of the sanitary character of American meatpacking operations predated by at least three decades the
publication of Sinclair's fictional work. Besides, in his novel Sinclair also described (or rather indicted) the government inspectors who were already working on the premises at the turn of the twentieth century.

28
George Powell Perry. 1908.
Wealth from Waste, or Gathering Up the Fragments.
Fleming H. Revell Company, pp. 74–75.

29
There were also a number of “long drives,” some of which came to be immortalized in famous Western movies, but many of these took place after the conclusion of the Civil War and ended up at a railroad terminal. Apart from its economic benefit, shipping cattle by rail also add the advantage of avoiding damages to farmland located between the pastureland and the slaughterhouses.

30
In business jargon, “forward integration” refers to a business strategy whereby activities are expanded to include control of the direct distribution of a firm's own products while “backward integration” involves the purchase of suppliers in order to reduce dependency.

31
David Ames Well. 1889.
Recent Economic Changes and their Effect on the Production and Distribution of Wealth and the Well-Being of Society
. D. Appleton and Company, p. 98
http://books.google.ca/books?id=LG2oz49UcykC&dq=Recent+Economic+Changes&source=gbs_navlinks_s
An independent restatement of this position several decades later can be found in John Ise. 1950.
Economics
, revised edition. Harper & Brothers, p. 111.

32
Rudolf A. Clemen. 1927.
By-Products in the Packing Industry
. University of Chicago Press, pp. 2-3, 27
http://chla.library.cornell.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=chla;idno=3081287
.

33
William Cronon. 1991.
Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West
. W. W. Norton, p. 242.

34
See, among others, Janet Blackman. 1963. “The Food Supply of an Industrial Town: A Study of Sheffield's Public Markets, 1780–1900.
Business History
5: 83–97, p. 89; Robert Scola. 1992.
Feeding the Victorian City.
Manchester University Press, Chapter IV: Dairy Products.

35
Donald Boudreaux and Thomas J. DiLorenzo. 1993. ‘The Protectionist Roots of Antitrust,'
Review of Austrian Economics
6(2): 81–96.

36
Fred A. Shannon. 1963.
The Economic History of the United States, Volume V: The Farmer's Last Frontier. Agriculture, 1860-1897.
Holt, Rinehart and Winston, p. 235.

37
For a concise overview of the validity of American agricultural producers' complaints against packers and railroad operators, see James Stewart. 2008. “The Economics of American Farm Unrest, 1865-1900”. In Robert Whaples (ed.)
EH.Net Encyclopedia
http://eh.net/encyclopedia/article/stewart.farmers
.

38
The Editors. 2010. “Making it Easier to Eat Local Food.”
New York Times
(April 19)
http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/19/making-it-easier-to-eat-local-food/
.

39
Katie Zezima. 2010. “Push to Eat Local Food is Hampered by Shortage.”
New York Times
(March 27)
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/28/us/28slaughter.html?pagewanted=1&ref=style
.

40
Michael Pollan. 2008. “Farmer in Chief.”
New York Times Magazine
(October 9)
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/12/magazine/12policy-t.html
.

41
Steve Landsburg. 2010. “Loco-Vores.”
The Big Questions
(August 23)
http://www.thebigquestions.com/2010/08/23/loco-vores/
; See also Steve Landsburg. 2011. “D'Oh—Second in a Series.”
The Big Questions
(May 2)
http://www.thebigquestions.com/2011/05/02/doh-second-in-a-series/
.

42
American Farmland Trust.
Growing Local: Sustaining Farms and Farmland for the Future
http://www.farmland.org/programs/localfood/planningforagriculture/Sustaining-Farms-Farmland-Future.asp
.

43
For a more detailed presentation of his own work, see Despommiers's website at
http://www.verticalfarm.com/
and Dickson Despommiers. 2011. “Vertical Farming.” In Cutler J. Cleveland (editor).
Encyclopedia of the Earth
http://www.eoearth.org/article/Vertical_farming
.

44
D.V Marino, Tilak Ram Mahato, John W. Druitt, Linda Leigh, Guanghui Lin, Robert M. Russell and Francesco N. Tubiello. 1999. “The Agricultural Biome of Biosphere 2: Structure, Composition and Function.”
Ecological Engineering
13: 199-234. To be fair, the designers of such schemes are more nuanced on this issue than their supporters. For instance, in his encyclopedia entry on vertical farming (ff209), Despommier writes that his scheme promises to “eliminate external natural processes as confounding elements in the production of food,” but he only claims that his proposal “reduces the risk of infection from agents transmitted at the agricultural interface,” not that it would be pesticide-free. In other words, his proposal would deliver no additional benefits over conventional greenhouses.

45
For a concise description of the project, see Marc Lostracco. 2007. “Grow Up.”
Torontoist.com
(June 15)
http://torontoist.com/2007/06/is_toronto_a_fu.php
.

46
Dennis Avery. 2010. “City Farming—Pigs in the Sky”
Center for Global Food Issues
(October 19)
http://www.cgfi.org/2010/10/city-farming%e2%80%94pigs-in-the-sky-by-dennis-t-avery/
.

47
We discuss the issue in more detail in chapter 4.

48
The issue is particularly significant in the Greater Toronto area because of a massive 1.8 million “Green Belt” initiative on prime farmland, an area larger than Prince Edward Island. The case for it and descriptions of local food initiatives to support local producers can be found on the Friends of the Greenbelt's
http://www.greenbelt.ca/
and the Ontario Greenbelt Alliance's
http://www.greenbelt
alliance.ca/
websites. The policy enjoyed much support from urban dwellers (who were not asked to pay for it) and environmentalist groups. The opposition was spearheaded by farmers whose property rights, most notably their ability to sell their land for development, were curtailed without fair and proper compensation. For a critical academic study of this particular policy, see B. James Deaton and Richard J. Vyn. 2010. “The Effect of Strict Land Zoning on Agricultural Land Values: The Case of Ontario's Green Belt.”
American Journal of Agricultural Economics
92 (4): 941–955.

49
Holly Hill. 2008.
Food Miles: Background and Marketing
. ATTRA—National Sustainable Agriculture Information Service, p. 9
http://attra.ncat.org/attra-pub/PDF/foodmiles.pdf
.

50
Michael Pollan. 2008. “Farmer in Chief.”
New York Times Magazine
(October 9)
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/12/magazine/12policy-t.html
.

51
Gove Hambidge. 1929. “This Age of Refrigeration.”
Ladies' Home Journal
(August): 103.

52
Mario Polèse. 2009.
The Wealth and Poverty of Nations. Why Cities Matter
. University of Chicago Press, p. 134.

53
Rob Lyons. 2010. “The Tarantino of Food Writing.”
Spiked
(September 3)
http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/9485/
.

54
Jacques Redway. 1907.
Commercial Geography. A Book for High Schools, Commercial Courses, and Business Colleges
. Charles Scribner's Sons, p. 5.
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/24884/24884-h/24884-h.htm
.

55
Bloomberg News. 2011. “China's Soybean Imports in 2011 May Decline, Shangai JC Says.”
Bloomberg.com
(November 24)
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-11-24/china-s-soybean-imports-in-2011-may-decline-shanghai-jc-says.html
In 2010, the USA, Brazil, Argentina and China produced respectively 35, 27, 19 and 6% of the world's total production (“World Statistics” at soy
stats.com
http://www.soystats.com/2011/Default-frames.htm
).

56
Quoted in Alan L. Olmstead and Paul W. Rhode. 2008.
Creating Abundance. Biological Innovation and American Agricultural Development.
Cambridge University Press, p. 381.

57
Adam Smith. 1776.
An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
, Vol. 1, Book I, chapter 8: On the Wages of Labour
http://oll.libertyfund.org/?option=com_staticxt&staticfile=show
. php%3Fti tle=220&chapter=217399 &layout=html&Itemid=27.

1
See, among others, Dennis E. Jelinski. 2005. “There is no Mother Nature—There is no Balance of Nature: Culture, Ecology and Conservation.”
Human Ecology
33 (2): 271–288.

2
The ancestors of today's large African animals who had co-evolved with them, on the other hand, had long learned to be more careful around these seemingly puny creatures. Animals such as cats, rats and pigs whose arrival was directly linked to that of humans also proved significant in the disappearance of bird species in island environments.

3
In Australia, this practice has been labeled “firestick farming.”

4
For a more elaborate discussions of these issues, see Michael Williams. 2003.
Deforesting the Earth. From Prehistory to Global Crisis.
University of Chicago Press. See also Erle C. Ellis. 2011. “Anthropogenic Transformation of the Terrestrial Biosphere.”
Proceedings of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Science
369 (1938): 1010–1035.

5
Knut Faegri. 1988. “Preface.” In Hilary H. Birks, H. J. Birks, Peter Emil Kaland and Dagfinn Moe (eds).
The Cultural Landscape. Past Present and Future
. Cambridge University Press, pp. 1–2.

6
For a popular treatment of the issue, see Charles C. Mann. 2002. “1491.”
The Atlantic
(March)
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2002/03/1491/2445/
and his book of the same title, Charles C. Mann. 2005.
1491
. Alfred A. Knopf
http://www.charlesmann.org/Book-index.htm
. For a relatively accessible survey of the academic literature, see Michael Heckenberger and Eduardo Góes Neves. 2009. “Amazonian Archeology.”
Annual Review of Anthropology
38 (October): 251-266
http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev-anthro-091908-164310?prevSearch=%28amazon%29+AND+[journal%3A+anthro]&searchHistoryKey
.