Jesse Bogan

Jesse Bogan

8/31/2009 @ 5:00PM

The Problem With 'Eat Local'

With the world population headed toward 9 billion by 2050, Texas author James McWilliams wants more genetically modified organisms and more subsidies to feed people, not cattle.

His new book, Just Food: Where Locavores Get it Wrong and How We Can Truly Eat Responsibly, is sure to irritate organic food fundamentalists. He recently talked to Forbes.

Forbes: What is wrong and right about locavores striving to fill their diet with local sources of food?

James McWilliams: There are a lot of things right with this. Encouraging us to ask where our food comes from and how it’s produced; turning the farmers market into a civic space to bring the community together; trying to preserve agricultural space around cities.

At the same time, in the 21st century, we face a genuine agricultural dilemma, and that is to produce more healthy food on less land with fewer resources. I see the locavore response just as one response, and in the grand scheme of things it’s a fairly small response. When we look at how a crop is grown or how a certain food is produced, transportation is really a small amount of energy used to produce that particular food. It’s about 10%, according to several studies. What that means is the energy sink is elsewhere, how that particular crop is produced.

What’s your case against meat?

Start with corn. You need massive amounts of synthetic fertilizer, which is produced by a tremendous amount of natural gas. When you actually get to the feedlot, you have a massive water requirement, you have enormous problems with disease, so there are growth hormones that are fed to the animals, and vaccines.

And of course, cattle produce incredible amounts of manure that are kept in lagoons that give off greenhouse gases in the form of methane. Then the slaughter–60% of the carcass has to be incinerated or recycled, and those processes are also energy intensive.

So how do you pitch giving up meat?

Research concludes that if the average American meat eater gives up eating meat once a week, that would be the equivalent of eating all of your food locally.

You’ve said that the future of food production needs to balance high yields and high sustainability. Where is the middle ground?

I am not so sure that any companies have figured it out, but the middle ground is the tolerance for large farms. What I would like to see are the big massive grain fields in the Midwest turned over to large farms producing peppers, eggplant, tomatoes and a wide variety of crops that are grown in relative proximity to each other. That would lead to lower needs for pesticides, potentially healthier soil. The fertilizer applications would be minimized as well.

Do large producers tell you they’d like to produce more diverse crops, such as the way you are proposing, but can’t make a profit doing it?

They are in a tough spot. A lot of conventional farmers that I talk to very much want to be good environmental citizens, but there have to be incentives for them to do good. One of the biggest things farmers would like to have access to are something called moisture sensors, another expensive technology, but a farm can dramatically decrease the amount of water that it uses by incorporating moisture censors or really high-level drip irrigation systems.

But all of these things are cost prohibitive, and there are very few supports for farmers to make investments in these technologies, which could have a concrete environmental impact. We have to politically find incentives for agribusiness to profit from being green.

What do you think when you drive across North Texas and the Cotton Belt?

I try to avoid that as much as possible (laugh). I think there are a lot of aquifers having a lot of pumps drilled into them in order to provide water for that cotton. It’s not the place we should be producing cotton, and it’s another example that we have subsidies undermining comparative advantage.

What’s your take on Monsanto and its investments in genetically modified seeds?

They often miss opportunities to bring more positive attention to genetic modification. They use it to make genetically modified corn, soy and cotton, and they do this to support monocultural production, which is environmentally unsustainable in the long run.

I sometimes wonder why a company like Monsanto or Syngenta doesn’t engineer a genetically engineered cassava that can be drought resistant and make that available at a fair price to farmers in Africa. Or a genetically modified blight-resistant rice for Southeast Asian farmers to ensure stability of their local food supply.

Why isn’t that happening?

There is just no profit in it. So what happens is a company like Monsanto develops a reputation of just being coldly profit driven, and, as result, a lot of consumers who quite frankly may not be all that informed about genetically modified organisms end up dismissing the technology itself as being somehow inherently evil, when, in fact, it has the potential to achieve real environmental benefits if it were applied in different ways.

Are you industrial agriculture’s poster child dressed as an environmentalist, or how do you define, rather, defend yourself?

Unfortunately, I think the nature of our culinary debates is so shallow that if one is even remotely critical of the locavore movement or organic agriculture, then you are automatically branded a shill for agribusiness. There is lots of gray area that we need to explore, and that’s where I am most comfortable.

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