Just (Trade In) Food

While hardly a guide to food system development, James E. McWilliams does identify in Just Food a number of problems with the approach of “sustainable” food activists’ proposals. Locavores are the target in the subtitle (“Where Locavores Get It Wrong”), and Mc Williams has clearly hit a raw nerve. Even though he toned down his criticism of locavorism in a recent interview, a number of locavores and supporters have turned a deaf ear to McWilliams, which he might have predicted on the basis of his characterization of “going local” as becoming a “gated community.” Jill Richardson, of Lavida Locavore, suggests burying one’s head in “local” sand:

I've got a book recommendation for y'all. Only it's not a recommendation for a book to read. It's a book to NOT read: Just Food: Where Locavores Get It Wrong and How We Can Truly Eat Responsibly by James McWilliams. If the title of the book intrigues you and you think it might be worth a look, don't buy the book and instead just hit your head against the wall for about 10 minutes. You'll achieve the same result as you would by reading the book, but you'll save time and money.

This book doesn't provide any logical or factual arguments so far as I can tell, although it does have facts woven into it in misleading ways. The author is excellent and building up straw men and knocking them down (i.e. he tells you his version of "what locavores say" - a false argument for eating locally - and then proves that false argument wrong).

Parke Wilde of U.S. Food Policy, will begrudgingly at least read the book, since McWilliams changed it’s subtitle:

I will certainly read it, but, from the title, I'm not really looking forward to James McWilliams' new book, Just Food: Where Locavores Get It Wrong and How We Can Truly Eat Responsibly. In a recent radio interview, McWilliams really objected to a certain kind of strictly dogmatic 100-mile-circle type food discipline.
That seems like a true and fairly bland point. It would be good environmentalism if Americans ate food that has less processing, less meat, and comes from closer to home, on average, but that doesn't mean all food should come from right nearby.In the meanwhile, Kerry Trueman's review at Eating Liberally certainly was fun. The lead sentence describes the book as "the literary equivalent of a turd blossom, the Texan term for a flower that pops up out of a cow patty."

…

I'm just glad McWilliams relented on the originally planned subtitle for the book: "How Locavores Are Endangering The Future of Food." With that title, I would have felt free to skip the book altogether.

In concluding that “we must see our only eating choices as undeniably, inevitably global” (p. 222), and making repeated references to global food sufficiency as the weak pillar of “sustainable” food proposals, McWilliams’ only discussion of international trade is very poorly informed. He calls for an “international regulatory agency “before countries trade,” asserts that the WTO has discouraged “harmonizing regulations,” and refers to the Free Trade Area of the Americas as a “trade agreement” (pp. 206-207). Moreover, his discussion of trade distortions is largely limited to the role of agricultural subsidies (which he proposes to replace with “sustainable” food subsidies), and totally neglects non-tariff barriers such a sanitary and phytosanitary measures.

In summary, the weakness of McWilliams in this area follows from his characterization of trade as “essentially a matter of basic environmental justice” (p. 205), and his recognition of the weaknesses of locavorism, rather than any appreciation of the value of international trade in food.