This book was a disappointment. Knowing of the author's keen intellect and captivating style, I was eagerly anticipating a set of challenging arguments to engage with. Like McWilliams, I have myself been a participant in the new food movement, but, also like him, I am aware that there are many complex factors that complicate simple rules of thumbs such as "eat local" and "organic is always better."
Unfortunately, there are too many inconsistencies, retailing of old canards as if they were surprising new facts, and an embarrassing lack of critical analysis of technoscientific hype.
For inconsistency, let me just detail one especially glaring contradiction. The general theme of the book is supposed to be that we have to find a "golden mean"--that is, to make sustainable eating more practical and acceptable to the world at large, we need to steer between the extremes of the local, organic purists and the conventional food system. Yet in the middle of the book we learn that by far the most important thing people can do to eat more sustainably is to give up eating meat. Now, in principle I tend to agree with McWilliams on this point, though I am a bit more positive about the grassfed and free-range meat alternatives than he is. But how in the world can you pass this off as advocating a moderate or "golden mean" position? In fact, McWilliams is something of an extremist on the meat issue--and for good reason, though, as I've said, he could afford to rethink his dismissal of the arguments in favor of grazing animals. (At one point, he glibly dismisses the objection that some land is only suitable for animal grazing by strangely contending that the land could grow plant crops if only it weren't so degraded by the hooves of cattle. For an environmental historian, this position seems willfully ignorant of the actual environmental history of places like the Great Plains.)
I do agree it seems justifiable to take a fairly extreme position on the meat issue, especially meat that is raised conventionally, if estimates of its contribution to climate change, water usage, etc., are any indication. But anyone who believes that it will represent some sort of moderate, practical, "golden mean" approach to convince Americans, and other folks in developed countries--not to mention developing-country aspirants to this lifestyle--to give up meat is kidding himself. This would be a major tectonic cultural shift not all that different, and probably even more unlikely, than the conversion to local, organic eating that McWilliams derides as unrealistic for the global masses. We may in practice achieve global reductions in meat consumption because of rising costs of production due to energy shortages, but (as one previous reviewer has pointed out), this is itself ironically a huge blind spot in McWilliams's analysis and one that significantly undercuts many of the other points he makes in the book regarding such things as global food trade and fertilizer inputs.
Next, McWilliams may have previously immersed himself in the Austin new food movement so much that he didn't notice, but many of the claims he makes--that organic food cannot feed the world, that genetic engineering is not significantly different from the long history of human plant and animal breeding, that genetically modified crops will save the world from starvation and pesticide use, etc.--have been bouncing around as conventional boilerplate for decades. I've been reading the debates and commentaries for many years now, and what has impressed me is how shaky these assumptions have become (or have always been). Yet they seem uncomfortably central to McWilliams's arguments. True, there are some valid and less worn-out points in the book too, but they are regrettably mixed in with too many of these shaky generalizations. Related to this, McWilliams seems mesmerized in many places by the pronouncements of molecular biologists, technology promoters, and the like. He does not dig deep enough and scrutinize them critically enough. He is too good a historian to ignore the long history of technoscientific hype and the promises that have not come to fruition.
As I've hinted, there are some good points in this book. Transportation from producer to consumer--the popular concept of "food miles," which McWilliams repeatedly derides--is indeed proving to be only one small component of the environmental footprint of the food system. Life-cycle assessment (LCA) is certainly a valuable and often enlightening corrective to our initial assumptions. Yet even in discussing this issue, McWilliams falls prey to weak argumentation. It may well be true that local food *could* be less sustainable, for example when it uses fossil-fueled greenhouses, or when farmers markets are considerably further away from consumers than supermarkets, or when local production practices are less ideal than more distant ones. But does McWilliams have any evidence that this *is* the case, on average?
Sure, there are well-documented examples of long-distance food being arguably more sustainable than local, such as when produce is shipped by train from warmer to colder climates in the off season, or when Britons dine on shipped New Zealand grazed meat instead of grain-fed local meat. On the whole, however, my suspicion is just the opposite of McWilliams: I suspect that local producers more often tend to use more sustainable practices. (Would local farmers even consider using air freight to get their products to market?) As farmers markets reclaim town centers, I also suspect that customers may often be driving less to get there--maybe even walking or bicycling?--than if they were traveling to big pedestrian-unfriendly supermarkets on the edge of town. These observations are definitely true where I live. But we have no systematic data on this point--we have only my hunch and anecdotal experience against McWilliams's. The problem we have here is that McWilliams has jumped from the existence of exceptions to the conventional wisdom ("buy local") to rejecting the conventional wisdom. But sometimes exceptions are just that: exceptions. No one who is advocating a "golden mean" and practical solutions for the masses has any business rejecting rules of thumb that make sense for lots of food consumers, on such a slender base of evidence.
The same is true of his discussion of the problems of organic production. At first, he informs us that critiquing the scaling up, or "industrialization," of organics is a "red herring" (p. 55). Then a few pages later we find him excoriating organic farming's heavy use of allowable external inputs brought in from far away that may be as bad or worse than synthetic inputs forbidden by organic regulations. Yet, in my experience and reading of studies on this subject, the "big organic" producers are often the leading users of such inputs, while the small organic farmers near where I live use them far less frequently. Indeed, many small, local producers are rejecting the organic label--co-opted by "big organic" to focus solely on allowable vs. non-allowable inputs--and instead choosing to follow a more thorough and holistic set of agro-ecological production practices. I suppose McWilliams would probably deride these folks as impractical "purists," but then it seems ironic that he is using the sins of their less pure competitors to cast doubt on the whole movement. Here again, we need to study this issue more fully before someone like McWilliams can so confidently minimize the sustainability of organics.
On the whole, I think the sloppiness and lack of systematic analysis undermine this book. There are many thoughtful nuggets, such as the need for full life-cycle analysis of the food system and the overriding importance of meat consumption. If nothing else, these nuggets of wisdom may spur some dedicated sustainable food advocates to elevate these issues to greater prominence. But they tend to remain just that: nuggets, rather than a carefully constructed and constructive critique of the assumptions of the new food movement. (On a related note, I was also disappointed that the wonderful double entendre in the title was not followed up more thoroughly with a critical analysis of the injustices in the larger social and economic system, which is what the title led me to expect. He gets to that towards the end, but it seems too little and too late.) Unfortunately the valuable nuggets are needlessly obscured by the author's relentless, cynical posturing and inconsistent argumentation. In the end, the book reads as one person's chronicle of how he started to have doubts about his enthusiasm for eating local, organic food. A more disciplined analysis with greater gestation time might have produced a more consistent and balanced (and less strident) book.
