But if there's one thing that annoys me more than over-hyped locavore experiments, it's cute fucking anecdotes like this one from freakonomist Stephen Dubner:
We made some ice cream at home last weekend. Someone had given one of the kids an ice cream maker a while ago and we finally got around to using it. We decided to make orange sherbet. It took a pretty long time and it didn't taste very good but the worst part was how expensive it was. We spent about $12 on heavy cream, half-and-half, orange juice, and food coloring--the only ingredient we already had was sugar--to make a quart of ice cream. For the same price, we could have
bought at least a gallon (four times the amount) of much better orange sherbet. In the end, we wound up throwing away about three-quarters of what we made. Which means we spent $12, not counting labor or electricity or capital costs (somebody bought the machine, even if we didn't) for roughly three scoops of lousy ice cream.
Economists love using gratingly hyperrational language to totally miss the point. (I'm lookin at you, Krugman.) Dubner goes on to conclude that--surprise!--trying to do shit yourself is inefficient. We don't need, he says, "a billion locavores."
But here's the thing that Dubner, along with William Alexander of The $64 Tomato, fail to grasp: they suck at making ice cream and growing tomatoes.
Hate to brag over here, but my lascivious tomatoes cost much less than their counterparts at any farmer's market or grocery store. I might be able to get anemic cardboard tomatoes for less, but then what's life for? I've done the math on my inputs of seed, soil mix, pricey organic fertilizer, water, labor. It's worth it. Monetarily.
These homegrowns represented a substantial savings, bitch.
Homespun skills get no respect. Agriculture is hard. When the $64 Tomato types try it once and fail, they throw up their hands and declare the notion of self-sufficiency absurd. It's not absurd if you know what you're doing. Learning is an upfront investment, a cost that should be amortized over a lifetime of practicing a skill.
Locavore guru Michael Pollan of course gets name-checked in the Freakonomics post. The Clebster has moved from past fanatical worship of him toward semi-disdain. Maybe he's just my version of the band you were into before they were famous and now you're bitter about your uncredited prescience and their selling out.
But I do think Pollan (who has the audacity to use my last name and spell it more sensibly) has come down a few pegs on the intellectual integrity board since the Second Nature salad days.
He irritates people by implicitly suggesting that we should ALL havegardenseatlocalforagemushrooms. Those are things he likes (and I like) to do, but they're not for everyone. As a twenty-year veteran of vegetarianism, I
recognize the importance of not seeming proselytizey about one's personal eating rules. It only invites backlash.
Still, those of us who do like to grow vegetables or shop at farmer's markets should be allowed to do so without whiny skeptics nipping at our heels.
"Locavore" sounds like it means eating something crazy. (Mi sandwicha loca.) But the movement the term represents is undeniably awesome. I doubt one shitty batch of ice cream will kill it.
Homespun skills get no respect. Agriculture is hard. When the $64 Tomato types try it once and fail, they throw up their hands and declare the notion of self-sufficiency absurd. It's not absurd if you know what you're doing. Learning is an upfront investment, a cost that should be amortized over a lifetime of practicing a skill.
Locavore guru Michael Pollan of course gets name-checked in the Freakonomics post. The Clebster has moved from past fanatical worship of him toward semi-disdain. Maybe he's just my version of the band you were into before they were famous and now you're bitter about your uncredited prescience and their selling out.
But I do think Pollan (who has the audacity to use my last name and spell it more sensibly) has come down a few pegs on the intellectual integrity board since the Second Nature salad days.
He irritates people by implicitly suggesting that we should ALL havegardenseatlocalforagemushrooms. Those are things he likes (and I like) to do, but they're not for everyone. As a twenty-year veteran of vegetarianism, I
recognize the importance of not seeming proselytizey about one's personal eating rules. It only invites backlash.
Still, those of us who do like to grow vegetables or shop at farmer's markets should be allowed to do so without whiny skeptics nipping at our heels.
"Locavore" sounds like it means eating something crazy. (Mi sandwicha loca.) But the movement the term represents is undeniably awesome. I doubt one shitty batch of ice cream will kill it.
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