Locavore, Shmocavore

Most Popular

I love locavores. I loved them when they were Neanderthals and nomads and gatherers eating off the land. I loved them when everybody for the last 20,000 years ate food grown within a mile of their hut. I loved them when the Israelites ate manna while wandering in the desert for forty years. I loved them when they grew Victory Gardens during World War II. I loved them when Alice Waters four decades ago insisted food grown locally is usually better than shipped in from China. And I love Michelle Obama for puttering around in the White House vegetable garden.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below


According to Jennifer Maiser, editor of the Eat Local Challenge Web site, ways to become a locavore include: visiting a farmers market; lobbying your supermarket; choosing five foods in your house that you can buy locally; preserving a local food for the winter; finding out what restaurants in your area support local farmers; buying from local vendors; and visiting a farm. ("Be sure to take the kids along on this journey! Children need to know where their food is coming from in order to feel a sense of connection to their dinner." Because you know how kids love meeting a lamb that will be their dinner later in the week.)

Most Popular

These are all fine enough ideas, but we've been hearing them for centuries. My shelves are crammed with books on the subject that date back to the days of the counterculture movement, including classics like Stewart Brand's Whole Earth Catalog (begun in 1968), Frances Moore Lappe's Diet for a Small Planet (1971), David Stienman's Diet for a Poisoned Planet (1990), and Nancy Harmon Jenkins's The Mediterranean Diet Cookbook (1994).

Reiteration, even hitting people over the head with the same common-sense advice, is worthwhile in teaching a religion but hardly revolutionary. Locavorism has, however, gone beyond its Kumbaya moment and become a media tool, a way to hype a young chef or new restaurant, just as were labels like "la nouvelle cuisine," "New American cuisine," "molecular cuisine," and the less Latinate "farm-to-table cuisine." Not a press release about a new chef or restaurant comes across my desk these days that does not use the locavore or farm-to-table boast, even when largely specious. Take just about any menu from any restaurant in the U.S. and within five seconds you'll find ingredients that, by necessity, had to be flown in from somewhere else, especially seasonal ones like softshell crabs, crayfish, and white asparagus.

I don't think any tomato from anywhere is worth eating before late August, yet every restaurant has them year-round. The same with crappy out-of-season vegetables. And if a chef doesn't have a chicken farm or a hog farm within fifty miles of his kitchen, does he not serve those items?

One who tries very hard to be very strict about locavorism is chef Sean Brock (and chef de cuisine Travis Grimes) of Husk, a wonderful new restaurant in Charleston, South Carolina, whose mission is to interpret "the bounty of the surrounding area, exploring an ingredient-driven cuisine that begins in the rediscovery of heirloom products and redefines what it means to cook and eat in Charleston." Brock crafts menus throughout the day, responding to what local purveyors are supplying the kitchen with at any given moment, insisting, "If it doesn't come from the South, it's not coming through the door." He disdains using olive oil and he even makes his own salt on the roof of the restaurant.

That may sound a tad manic but the results, in dishes like his butcher's plate with ale mustard and house-made pickles; catfish with local bacon, herb mayo and potatoes; and shrimp and grits with braised peppers, onions, peas, and sausage, are persuasive.

Locavorism also begs this question: Well, what if the locally-grown food isn't nearly as good as the stuff brought in from California or Wisconsin or the Mediterranean? Is there a real rationale for a wildly popular place like Torrisi Italian Specialties in New York to insist on using American prosciutto and parmesan cheese rather than the best imported Prosciutto di Parma and Parmigiano-Reggiano? And if you don't happen to live in a state that makes wine, are you going to eschew bottlings from the Napa Valley or Washington state?

Of course, the rest of the world finds locavorism nothing more than the first precept of good cooking: Buy the best ingredients you can from the region you are in. But if other, better ingredients have to be brought in by modern transport, including FedEx and DHL, then so be it. The great master chefs of France do not make their own foie gras and the great master chefs of Italy do not grow their own white truffles. Chinese chefs pay top dollar for luxuries like bird's nest and shark's fin, while the finest tuna in the best sushi bars in Tokyo might have been shipped in from American waters. And Kobe beef comes from Kobe.

And for anyone crazy enough to try to live exclusively off food produced on one's own land, I highly recommend the hilarious but heartbreaking book My Empire of Dirt: How One Man Turned His Big-City Backyard into a Farm, A Cautionary Tale by Manny Howard, who spent a year leaning very hard, expensive lessons in order to raise a few shriveled potatoes and some ornery rabbits, almost destroying his marriage and losing his sanity along the way. "I still don't know if I believe urban agricultural sustainability is the right course," he wrote after a backbreaking year in his Brooklyn backyard, "not in any productive way (and not at half the price I paid both in life and treasure). My interest in 'greening' the urban landscape was still minimal. Community gardens still smacked of the grimmest joinerism."

So, when I hear an individual is a locavore, I have nothing to say in either assent or dissent. Locavores have good ideas, relevant ideas, but they are no more new ideas than exhortations to get a good night's sleep and try to exercise. But from the mouths of most chefs, those ideas are either mere hype or a weird notion that they were the first to cook food from the nearby garden, which will come as a big surprise to cooks in Provence, Sicily, and Shanghai.

Let's remember that Christopher Columbus didn't sail west to a new world to discover gold; he did so to bring back spices from the Orient, but instead launched the so-called Columbian Exchange, which changed the world with the transport of foods that for hundreds of thousands of years had stayed put in the Americas and Europe. Before Columbus, no Thai cook ever used a chili pepper, no Italian a tomato, and no Irishman a potato. I'm glad Columbus sailed west. The world is a lot better fed for it, and a much more savory place to live.


More from Esquire: