'Eat Local' Hard To Digest

August 13th, 2008 at 06:26pm James E. McWilliams 1541

Eat local! Has a nice ring, doesn’t it? Indeed, for millions of environmentally concerned eaters the allure of this mantra has been irresistible. Due largely to the impassioned literary efforts of an exclusive cadre of savvy food writers, buying locally grown food—and all that it entails—has quickly evolved into nothing less than an expression of earnest environmental virtue. 

And why not? Cut the food miles, support local farmers, raise an angry fist to globalization, preserve open space, mingle with neighbors while admiring baby squash, scratch that itch for fresh microgreens . . . how could the committed environmentalist gainsay such pure culinary empowerment?

Well, there’s actually a veritable compost heap of reasons to question the benefits of eating local (and perhaps I’ll take up that matter in a future entry), but for now what’s really concerning me is not so much the fact that millions of locavores are swallowing their own rhetoric whole, but that corporate marketers are capitalizing on this unmitigated enthusiasm to promote products that counter the movement’s founding ethos.

Products like fast food.  The most publicized example of culinary-corporate greenwashing comes from the Denver-based chain Chipotle.  I feel sort of bad knocking this company. Chipotle, after all, has made genuine efforts to support local farmers.  Management requires that 25 percent of one vegetable on every store’s menu be locally sourced. I’m dubious that “fast food chain” and “sustainability” can ever peacefully co-exist—but still, tokensih as this 25 percent gesture is, qualified praise is in order. 

A few locally grown vegetables, however, are easy. It’s the meat that matters. And for all the wonderful press Chipotle has earned for its emphasis on fresh local food, Chipotle is, at its moral core, all about making money through meat. Specifically, stuffing pork, chicken and beef into a tortilla and selling it for about 6 bucks a pop.  The chain, after all, is owned by McDonalds.

Chipotle, which started to turn up the green heat in 2002, is well aware that it’s no easy task for a fast food joint to convince the public that its gone environmental. In light of this challenge, it has put its money where its mouth is by buying all naturally raised pork and chicken—locally sourced if possible. No antibiotics, no CAFO operations, open pasture, lowered food miles, vegetarian feed.  Happy pigs!  Happy chickens! Happy locavores!

To appreciate why the “naturally raised” distinction matters, recall that conventionally produced meat is an unmitigated environmental disaster. Take pork alone.  Factory farms slaughter over 100 million pigs every year in the United States.  Massive amounts of manure (one county in Oklahoma produces 15 million lbs. of shit a day!), agricultural chemicals (used to grow the feed), antibiotics (pigs are given 10 billion lbs of them a year), and global warming gas emissions foul the surrounding air, water, and soil. In 1995, a manure spill on a North Carolina pig farm killed over 10 million fish in surrounding lakes and rivers. Corporations pay for none of it. Chipotle, however, has nobly chosen not to endorse this manner of production.

But before we give the company an Al Gore Gold Stamp of Approval, it’s worth placing this “all natural” designation in perspective.  First, naturally raised pork is hardly as pristine as Chipotle’s “Food with Integrity” literature makes it out to sound. The company’s website proudly remarks that all its pork—5 million pounds a year—comes from pigs raised in an “ecologically sustainable way.” But it is right here—“ecologically sustainable”-- where rhetoric and reality get all blurry.
You might assume that “naturally raised” equals “ecologically sustainable.”  Mistake. “Natural” is certainly better than conventional—but that’s not saying much. The bottom line that we must take into account before we bestow laurels on Chipotle is a troubling one: the “naturally raised” label obscures the important fact that producing meat—even naturally—almost always means more inputs than outputs.

The term “natural,” after all, does not highlight such hidden costs as the environmental consequences of water usage to raise pigs and chickens, the land required to pasture the creatures, the energy expended to recycle the manure, disposal of sick or dead animals, the chemicals used to grow the grain to feed 5 million pigs, the fact that most nutrients go into animal bones rather than flesh, and the cost of transporting this meat to 700+ restaurants. A full life cycle assessment of a naturally produced, locally fattened, pig or chicken would certainly look a lot better than a conventionally produced pig or chicken. But, again, the improvement does not negate the point that producing meat is, by its nature, an inefficient application of resources.

Chipotle plans to serve over 50 million pounds of meat in 2008.  Most of that meat will be neither pork nor chicken, but beef. Even if the company achieves its goal of serving 50% of its beef from “natural” sources, the fact remains that even natural beef sucks up 3 calories of fossil fuel for every single food calorie it yields (the other 50% will be conventional beef, which spends 33 calories of fossil fuel for every calorie of food).  Seven hundred stores, 50 million pounds of meat, 200 million meals . . . the lost calories add up, so much so that it’s hard to see how Chipotle will save the world one meat filled burrito at a time.

However, Chipotle (which recently announced a partnership with the famous Polyface Farms), can rest easy. Nobody to my knowledge is counting the calories, looking beneath the rhetoric, and asking if indeed everything is as green as “Food with Integrity” would have us believe.  Instead, all the media has to hear is “locally sourced,” “sustainable,” and “all natural” and it veritably drools with admiration.  Chipotle, which is owned by McDonalds, certainly hasn’t missed the Pavlovian efficiency of this stunningly uncritical response.

Which brings me back to the mantra Eat Local. I can’t blame Chipotle for adopting environmental rhetoric that it cannot fulfill—they’re doing what any company is supposed to do: make a buck through slick marketing. But I can blame the locavores. 

The Eat Local movement has so brazenly branded the buzzwords of sustainability—“eat local,” “all natural,” “buy organic,” “locavore,” etc –that they’ve dangerously simplified the complexity of responsible agricultural production. In dumbing down the way we discuss food—in essence, reducing everything to a bumper sticker sized ecaration—they’ve inadvertently done the dirty work that corporations themselves normally have to spend big bucks to do:  brand their product. 
“Food with Integrity” came pre-branded for Chipotle by the Locavores. And now, flush with environmentally enhanced rhetorical fodder, corporate America—including WalMart in the U.S. and Tesco in the UK—are following suit with deeply suspicious green campaigns of their own.  I’m not ready to categorically reject these efforts, but I sure as hell am approaching them with the assumption that it’s a bunch of hogwash.

Entry Filed under: Food, Health, United Post