Giving Local Food the Raspberry  (Flickr / Wisconsin Department
of Natural Resources)  The sustainable-food movement has finally
been around long enough to face its first cold front. Pickled
okra, critics want the world to know, is not as desirable as
sales at the Prospect Park farmers market might indicate. The
most recent round of attacks has focused on local food and
locavorism: In April, Tyler Cowen took a few glancing blows at
local food in An Economist Gets Lunch, and last month, Pierre
Desrochers and Hiroko Shimizu—two Canadians trained as economic-
policy analysts—released The Locavore’s Dilemma, an all-out
assault on local food in which they seek to “slaughter as many
sacred cows in the food activists’ intellectual herd as [they]
could.” But by focusing on local food, they end up arguing
against problems that barely exist or that never will, while
ignoring the real environmental costs of our food systems.
Desrochers and Shimizu mention that they received support for
their work from Mercatus Center at