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.
As we’ve written before, it is a curious fact of modern life that one person’s labor is another’s leisure. Every day there are millions of people who cook and sew and farm for a living — and there are millions more who cook (probably in nicer kitchens) and sew (or knit or crochet) and farm (or garden) because they love to do so. Is this sensible? If people are satisfying their preferences, who cares if it costs them $20 to produce a single cherry tomato (or $12 for a few scoops of ice cream)?
This is the question that came to mind the other day when we received an e-mail from a reader named Amy Kormendy:
I emailed Michael Pollan recently to ask him this question, and nice guy that he is, he promptly answered “Good question, I don’t really know” and suggested I pose it to you good folks:
Wouldn’t it be more resource-intensive for us all to raise our own food, than if we paid an expert to raise lots of food that s/he could sell to us? Couldn’t it therefore be more sustainable to purchase food from large professional producers?
We’re taught that the invention of division of labor gives us a more efficient way to use resources on a societal scale. I love gardening, but it takes me more time and overall investment to get inferior produce to what I could buy from a professional farmer nearby. Similarly, a friend once attempted to sew a skirt for herself. Adding up the time and energy to visit the store, select and buy the fabric & pattern, go home and measure, cut, and stitch, she says the skirt cost her $200, resulted in lots of wasted fabric, and she stitched the hem crooked. “I could have bought a better skirt for $50 at Nordstrom,” she said — her experiment in self-sufficiency was a bigger overall resource hog than the conventional supply chain to her local retailer. So, some of Professor Pollan’s advice seems to be that we would be better off as a society if we did more for ourselves (especially growing our own food). But I can’t help but think that the economies of scale and division of labor inherent in modern industrial agriculture would still render the greatest efficiencies in resource investment. The extra benefit of growing your own food only works out if you count the unquantifiables such as the sense of accomplishment, learning, exercise, suntan, etc.
I very much understand the locavore instinct. To eat locally grown food or, even better, food that you’ve grown yourself, seems as if it should be 1) more delicious; 2) more nutritious; 3) cheaper; and 4) better for the environment. But is it?
1) “Deliciousness” is subjective. But one obvious point is that no one person can grow or produce all the things she would like to eat. As a kid who grew up on a small farm, I can tell you that after I had my fill of corn and asparagus and raspberries, all I really wanted was a Big Mac.
2) There’s a lot to be said for the nutritional value of home-grown food. But again, since one person can grow only so much variety, there are bound to be big nutritional gaps in her diet that will need to be filled in.
3) Is it cheaper to grow your own food? It’s not impossible but, as my little ice cream story above illustrates, there are huge inefficiencies at work here. Pretend that instead of just me making ice cream last weekend, it was all 100 people who live in my building. Now we’ve collectively spent $1,200 to each have a few scoops of ice cream. Let’s say you decide to plant a big vegetable garden this year to save money. Now factor in everything you need to buy to make it happen — the seeds, fertilizer, sprout cups, twine, tools, etc. — along with the transportation costs and the opportunity cost. Are you sure you really saved money by growing your own zucchini and corn? And what if 1,000 of your neighbors did the same? Or here’s another, non-food example: building your own home from scratch versus buying a prefab home. With a site-built home, you need to invest in all the tools, material, labor, and transportation costs to make it happen, and the myriad inefficiencies of having dozens of workmen’s pickup trucks retrace the same route hundreds of times all for the sake of erecting one family’s home — whereas factory-built homes like these create the opportunity for huge efficiencies by bundling labor, materials, transportation, etc.
4) But growing your own food has to be good for the environment, right? Well, keeping in mind the transportation inefficiencies mentioned above, consider the “food miles” argument and a recent article in Environmental Science and Technology by Christopher L. Weber and H. Scott Matthews of Carnegie-Mellon:
We find that although food is transported long distances in general (1640 km delivery and 6760 km life-cycle supply chain on average) the GHG emissions associated with food are dominated by the production phase, contributing 83% of the average U.S. household’s 8.1 t CO2e/yr footprint for food consumption. Transportation as a whole represents only 11% of life-cycle GHG emissions, and final delivery from producer to retail contributes only 4%. Different food groups exhibit a large range in GHG-intensity; on average, red meat is around 150% more GHG-intensive than chicken or fish. Thus, we suggest that dietary shift can be a more effective means of lowering an average household’s food-related climate footprint than “buying local.” Shifting less than one day per week’s worth of calories from red meat and dairy products to chicken, fish, eggs, or a vegetable-based diet achieves more GHG reduction than buying all locally sourced food.
This is a pretty strong argument against the perceived environmental and economic benefits of locavore behavior — mostly because Weber and Matthews identify the fact that is nearly always overlooked in such arguments: specialization (which Michael Pollan mostly dislikes, and which has been around for a long, long time) is ruthlessly efficient. Which means less transportation, lower prices — and, in most cases, far more variety, which in my book means more deliciousness and more nutrition. The same store where I blew $12 on ice cream ingredients will happily sell me ice cream in many flavors, dietetic options, and price points.
Whereas I am now stuck with about 99% of the food coloring I bought, which will probably sit in the cupboard until I die (hopefully not soon).
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There’s also the issue that soil in most cities is much more polluted with heavy metals than soil on farms–lead paint chips, decades of leaded car exhuast, etc. Rural soil has been exposed to a lot less of that, and so usually has less heavy metals which get in your food.
Not only is transportation a small percentage of the environmental impact, but as you also noted, production is by far the largest effect. Large-scale production is much more efficient in terms of energy use, and growing foods without regard to their location to the consumer allows you to use appropriate environments (where should we grow tomatoes in winter: your local greenhouse or Chile?) that save energy.
I suspect that the end result is that “locavores” are increasing their energy usage from food. Of course there may be other reasons to do it, but none of them are environmental.
This is an “opportunity cost” issue.
Whether producing your own stuff (be it tomatoes or a sweater) is “worth it” or not depends on what activity it’s replacing.
If do-it-yourself replaces some form of recreation, it may be worthwhile. Spending an hour a week growing tomatoes is probably better for your personal finances than buying those tomatoes and watching TV an hour a week. This isn’t always true, as Dubner found out with his ice cream, but it often is.)
But if do-it-yourself is replacing *work*, it’s almost never worthwhile. If you’re growing tomatoes rather than promoting your latest book, you almost always come out behind.
And *that’s* why specialization is the best thing humans have invented since the wheel.
It’s crucial to draw the line between recreation and work: do-it-yourself hobbies are fun, but almost anyone who’s tried to make a serious business out of one has failed.
One way to look at do-it-yourself is as way to trick yourself into doing more labor. Consider someone who works a retail job 40 hours a week, then comes home and weeds the garden, sews some clothes, and repairs their own plumbing for another 40 hours. Are they better off financially than someone who only works one 40 hour/week job? Probably. Are they better off financially than someone who works *two* 40 hour/week jobs? Almost certainly not. Are they having more fun than the workaholic? Yeah, probably.
I think the extreme example you’re using is disingenuous.
Most “locally grown sustainable” foods are still grown by specialists and growers who’re professional farmers, ice cream makers, etc.
The idea is not “make it all yourself, screw everything imported” as much as “reduce the carbon footprint of your food, support local farms and local seasonal foods.”
Get the argument in the right frame, and you might not sound as foolish.
Isn’t the very existence of money evidence that large scale societies must use a context neutral currency to allow for the efficient exchange of goods and services?
What I am curious about is the definition of “local”. At what point, by what measure, is something no longer local. It would seem that the real underlying philosophy here is simply to consider all of the costs associated with the production, transportation, etc. of various products.
Local is not morally better, just economically so. And given that the market tends to become more efficient as it grows, one would assume that if a “local” model was truly the best, that our economies would tend to reflect that. Or is it perhaps that benefits (lower prices) transfer more efficiently over physical and economic space than do the associated costs, that economies act as diffusing agents for cost, lowering specfic point/time cost (aka price) and spreading the other costs across the system, creating what amounts to a tragedy of the commons.
As Shannon points out, it’s a little disingenuous to conflate “buying locally” with “growing your own.” Local farmers are specialists. Whether some large tomato-selling conglomerate is so much better at growing tomatoes than my local farmer that it justifies the increased resource cost of transportation… is an empirical question. (The relative insignificance of transportation in determining a food’s overall resource cost is a more compelling argument.)
My ice cream machine makes awesome ice cream, by the way. (I think it’s a Cuisinart, but I couldn’t swear to it.) Try basic vanilla before you give up.
Every year I grow sweet corn in my garden. I generally spend $5 for a half pound bag of seed corn from a seed store. I purchased a $450 tiller 14 years ago that I use four times a year. There is also the investment of about $40 worth of chicken wire to keep the rabbits out. For that and the time I put in I get around 20 dozen ears of corn as fresh as can be obtained. To get fresh sweet corn from a farmer it is costing around $6 a dozen. My corn is picked about a minute before I boil it. The farmer is a range between same day and several days. I can’t justify similar expense or benefit for other crops. Nor do I have room for much more or the time to cultivate a larger area. So for small high cost items with high reward such as fresh sweet corn it is both cost effective and emotionally satisfying. For other things I’ll trust the farmers and grocers.
I suppose it would be better if everybody had a diet of a hardcore mass-produced food.. like Ramen Noodles with vitamins added or something. Streamlining the whole thing would be easy, food prices would be driven down (well… prices of said super noodles).
However, we’d just be eating noodles… which is lame.
On the other hand, if we were to all grow our own food, we be pretty hard pressed for things like chocolate, and coffee maybe? But, hey, I suppose there would be a new market for advances in churn technology.