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84 of 90 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Elephants in the Garden, August 17, 2009
Just Foods is an important book in the continuing (and continually escalating) debate over how we should grow our food and what we should eat. Environmental historian and reformed locavore James McWilliams, invites us to think logically and dispassionately about some of the most important food issues of our time--and of the future. Having read two of McWilliams' previous books, I expected a controversial, detailed, and well-documented discussion. I wasn't disappointed.
In summary, McWilliams argues
1) that global food production is more fuel-efficient and more economically necessary (for developing countries that need export markets) than is local food production/consumption ("locovorism");
2) that organic farming is no more healthy for people and for the land than is "wisely practiced" conventional agriculture;
3) that genetically-modified crops, in the right hands, are not to be feared and are in fact necessary to feed the ten billions of people who will live on this planet by 2050;
4) that we must drastically reduce our production and consumption of meat animals and non-farmed fish;
5) and that we must get rid of "perverse" subsidies that undercut fair trade.
Informed readers will likely find themselves in near-total agreement with McWilliams' last two points. Factory-farmed beef consumes 33 calories of fossil fuel for every single calorie of meat produced, as well as creating huge amounts of air, soil, and water pollution and--on the other end--causing serious health problems in those who over-consume. Other animals, including range-farmed animals, may be less damaging to the environment and to their consumers, but still require (by a 3-to-1 ratio) more energy to produce than they offer in return. Wild fish stocks have been harvested to the brink of extinction, and ecologically-sensitive fish-farming may be our only alternative, short of giving up fish altogether. Many readers may agree with McWilliams that "conscientious eaters must radically reduce current rates of consumption" of meat and wild fish if the world's ecosystems are to be saved. Many will also agree that an end must be put to wasteful government incentives such as corn subsidies.
But those same informed readers will find much to argue with in this book, for McWilliams overlooks several hugely important problems--elephants in the garden. As I see them, here they are.
The first elephant: fossil-fuel depletion. While I am sympathetic to McWilliams' arguments that we need to be sensible about "food miles" and make more effort to save energy in food selection and preparation, I feel that he has overlooked one of the most important argument against continuing and/or increasing our dependency on global food markets and conventional fossil-fueled agriculture: that over the next decade or two, oil will become so expensive that food will no longer be shipped halfway around the world. Conventional farming, with its reliance on fossil-fueled equipment, fertilizers, and insecticide, is not viable in the long term. Even the conservative International Energy Agency (IEA) now says that "peak oil" is likely to arrive by 2020 and bring with it skyrocketing fuel costs. Whether we like it or not, when the price of a gallon of gasoline hits double-digits, shortening the food miles from farm to fork may be a necessity. Indeed, many of us may be eating out of our front-yard gardens, raising chickens in the back, and purchasing shares in a neighborhood milk goat. Don't laugh. It's possible.
A second elephant. I would like to accept McWilliams' argument that we must make a kind of peace with biotechnology, and that genetically-modified crops may be important when it comes to feeding fast-growing human populations across the globe--populations that (he says) are on track to exceed the carrying-capacity of the planet. We need the promise of higher yields, drought tolerance, and pest-resistance. But McWilliams brushes aside too easily the huge issues of gene contamination; the failure of GM crops to reduce (as promised) pesticide use; and their failure to produce the promised higher yields. And since GM crops are conventionally-farmed, the challenge of energy depletion must be faced here, too.
Still, it is not the flawed promise of GM crops that will most concern readers. It is the question of private ownership of the world's seeds. McWilliams himself acknowledges that the only place for biotechnology is "the public domain," and that as long as the genes of the world's most important foods are owned and controlled by a "handful of corporations intent on monopolizing patents in the interest of profit," none of its benefits will be achieved.
But that is the elephant. These technologies do not belong to the commons. They are held by monopolistic private corporations. And short of a revolution, corporations will continue to hold them. And as long as this is true, biotechnology is a much greater threat than a promise to the food security of peoples around the world.
A third elephant. Any book that presumes to point definitive directions for global agriculture absolutely must take into account the enormous cloud that looms on all horizons: global warming and climate change. McWilliams addresses this far too briefly. Under changing climate conditions, what kinds of foods will we be able to produce and where? How are these changes likely to affect pests and crop-destroying viruses? Global warming, fossil-fuel depletion, and privately owned crops are the huge elephants in the garden. That these issues are not front-and-center in this book is a substantial disappointment.
As always, I am grateful to James McWilliams for requiring me to read carefully and think about his arguments. While I read, I scribbled in the margin, made notes on the flyleaf, and ticked off the sources I intend to investigate. Just Food engaged me fully and completely--not always comfortably, but always productively.
The bottom line. Just read Just Food. Give yourself time to read (this is not skim-reading stuff) and equip yourself with pencil and paper or your laptop. Bring your own arguments to the table, and measure them against the author's, point by point. And do plan to spend more than a few hours reading and thinking and arguing with this book. You will find that it is time well spent.
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42 of 48 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
The Cynic's Dilemma, September 12, 2009
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.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Frustrating, October 31, 2009
I had such high hopes for this book. I was initially drawn to it because something about the locavore movement seemed not quite right...... many fall root vegetables are difficult to prepare in an appetizing way, and as an East Coast resident I don't wish to eat canned potatoes and pickled onions all winter. Unfortunately, James McWilliams' book extends beyond addressing the locavores, to declare that consumers who try to be ecologically conscientious by purchasing organic produce and grass-fed beef are also wrong. He presents well-researched arguments for considering GM crop technology and the benefits of aquaculture. Clearly he wants to induce a change of heart in the reader about these technologies, but unless the reader is the CEO of Monsanto who then decides to give such technologies to third world countries for free, the end result of the discussion will be nothing.
Admittedly, there are problems associated with a Michael Pollan type diet: beef is still resource intensive and costly to produce, organic farming methods still use harmful but naturally occurring pesticides, but McWilliams often conveniently disregards the fact that as individual consumers, these buying decisions are the only means we have to make a difference (albeit a very small one.) In a section that apparently slipped by the proofreader, McWilliams states that "Ultimately, however, these solutions are left for others to design and implement. We can only stand by and encourage these plans (which is admittedly, all we can do when it comes to many of the thorniest agricultural issues.)"
The audience for a book such as this is the same Michael Pollan crowd that McWilliams feels is not doing enough, even though they now have chickens in their backyards and have joined the local CSA farm. So what's his problem with his audience? "As I hope is clear by now, scaling down food production and eating local fare is not in and of itself going to feed the impending 10 billion in a sustainable way." This is oversimplifying the problems that a growing global population presents. Even if all of western society converted to a diet of vegetables and farm-raised trout so that we could grow extra food for poor countries, how is the food going to get there? Once everyone is full, how are they going to support themselves? How will they get potable water? How will they dispose of their waste in a sanitary way? A true environmentalist should thinking bigger than McWilliams asks us to think.
As a consumer who tries to be thoughtful, this book left me frustrated. Other than not eating meat and "supporting" aquaculture and GM crops and opposing farm subsidies (things that the by the author's own admission are little more than thought experiments for the average consumer), Just Food comes across as chastising of those who try to do right with no concrete ideas for how to do better.
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