A Balance Between the Factory and the Local Farm NYT

A Balance Between the Factory and the Local Farm NYT

Three books by Michael Pollan criticizing the system of giant corporate farms and food factories have topped the best-seller lists. A graphic documentary, “Food, Inc.,” based in part on his books, has been nominated for an Academy Award.

In Washington, Michelle Obama grew vegetables on the White House lawn as an example of self-sufficiency. And across America, more farmers’ markets and restaurants have popped up that sell vegetables and meat produced on small farms.

Diners now scan the menus at their local restaurants for provenances like “Cattail Creek Ranch lamb” or “Hudson Valley rabbit.” And home cooks now await boxes of fresh produce delivered weekly from local growers.

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.

First, how practical is local food sourcing in a nation that enjoys a diversity of food? From a practical standpoint, there isn’t much that can be grown in winter in most parts of the country.

“You can dig parsnips out of the ground,” said the chef Payton Curry, referring to his native state of Minnesota. “It’s 10 below there.” Mr. Curry features locally sourced food at his Caffe Boa restaurants in Tempe and Mesa, Ariz.

The problem isn’t confined to the snow belt. Recently, I asked a neighbor who was bringing in her weekly box of locally grown produce what she got this time. “Kale,” she said. “A lot of kale.” And this is in Northern California.

Then there are the inconsistencies in locavore behavior. People who eagerly order microgreens — tenderly cut with scissors by a farmer that morning — would be scandalized if a Chilean grape was served next to them.

But their wine and water? Those tend to be shipped in from far-flung places. Rarely, for example, do you hear a New York restaurant bragging of its Long Island wine. Even at Chez Panisse, the Berkeley, Calif., restaurant where Alice Waters got the whole local-ingredients trend started, two out of three wines on a recent evening — the wine list changes daily — did not come from the acclaimed wine regions that begin only 25 miles away.

A friend of Mr. Curry’s, Pavle Milic, has gone to the extreme of serving only Arizona-made wines at FnB, his small restaurant in Scottsdale, Ariz. The concept may surprise some customers, but he says that some of the same people who sneer at a Pillsbury Casa Blanca Pinot Gris from Cochise County will declare in blind taste tests that they thought it came from a famous wine-growing region.

“I develop a thick skin here with what I do,” he said. And he acknowledges that “I risk losing a guest who doesn’t want to drink an Arizona wine.”

Granted, wine doesn’t have to be fresh to be good. And freshness is the compelling reason driving the locavore movement. Unlike organic food, which can taste no different from food grown with chemicals, fresh food does taste better.

But what started as an effort to source fresher ingredients from nearby family farms is now as much about reducing the carbon footprint and the “food miles” of food. Ordering water from the South Pacific island of Fiji or wine from New Zealand when the local stuff is quaffable seems to run counter to those ideals.

PEOPLE who grow vegetables in empty lots and schoolyards have a nice, wholesome hobby — but one that can make little sense economically. A few years ago, William Alexander wrote a delightful book chronicling his gardening travails, “The $64 Tomato.” He revealed a truth about do-it-yourself gardening: It is more efficient to buy a fresh tomato in the farmer’s market for $1.50 a pound.

(In San Francisco, where I live, that means going to a market patronized largely by immigrants, not the foodie-dominated ones with inflated prices that put fresh food out of the reach of the poor. )

As a sustainable trend, localism bears at least some resemblance to Mao Tse-tung’s Great Leap Forward. In the late 1950s, Mao decreed that steel production be localized in backyard steel furnaces. Villagers began melting down pots and pans and creating their own steel, which amounted to low-quality and largely useless pig iron.

It was a bad idea that dragged down the nation’s productivity and played a role in widespread famine.

Localism is difficult to scale up enough to feed a whole country in any season. But on the other extreme are the mammoth food factories in the United States. Here, frequent E. coli and salmonella bacteria outbreaks are the food industry’s version of Toyota’s sudden-acceleration and braking problems. It may be a case of a manufacturing system that has grown too fast or too large to be managed well.

Somewhere, there is a happy medium.