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JUST FOOD: Where Locavores Get It Wrong and How We Can Truly Eat Responsibly

By James E. McWilliams

258 pp. Little, Brown and Company $25.99

REVIEWED BY GARY PRESLEY

THE INTERNET REVIEW OF BOOKS

It might be an overstatement to call McWilliams' book revolutionary, but Just Food certainly serves up sentiments that could force many intelligent readers to recognize they treasure raw misconceptions about the food on their dinner plates.

In fact, Just Food offers evidence to support two seemingly radical ideas about how we feed ourselves, and it accomplishes this clearly and succinctly that reasonable people should comprehend them as objective truths:

• Agriculture by definition works to destroy the natural environment.
• No person should claim to be an environmental advocate if that person regularly consumes meat.

Al Gore may not like to hear that, but I won't cast stones even though I gave up meat a decade ago. After all, I am descended from folks who plowed up the buffalo grass on the Great Plains, a place where farmers are now seriously depleting levels of the Ogallala Aquifer to grow wheat and corn where wheat and corn should not be grown.

We have met the enemy, and he is hungry. And wasteful. And no eater is innocent, not even the fundamentalist locavore.

In fact, the author uses Just Food to pillory the misconceptions of locavores-people who eat only food grown or produced within a specific and limited number of miles, saving the planet one apple at a time. But McWilliams also takes on the Green Revolution and Norman Borlaug, its founder and Nobel Peace Prize awardee. The author decries the "environmental degradation and corporate consolidation that the revolution required to feed the masses a steady diet of rice and wheat."

That authorial declaration sounds much like an acquiescence to famine, but there is no utilitarian sentiment in Just Food. The author believes his ideas would provide more food for the world. McWilliams would have you understand that the world now relies on agricultural practices and food traditions that we will be required to leave behind for our own good. The heart of the dilemma? There are too many people on earth concentrated in too few places who cannot be sustained by any practice other than growing foodstuffs to be measured in tons rather than in bushels and pecks. McWilliams generally speaks to that audience, those of us packed together in the post-industrial world. It is us, in truth, who are causing the most damage.

And to us, to borrow from the aforementioned meat-eating or non-meat-eating Al Gore, McWilliams offers a plateful of "inconvenient truths." What's on that menu?

• Because of the "laws of comparative advantage," growing fruits and vegetables in suitable climates and trucking them to market is more environmentally sound than growing and consuming them locally. Do you like bananas? So do the people in South Dakota, but think of the cost, environmental and otherwise, of producing bananas for Dakotan locavores.
• Genetically modified crops can be more environmentally friendly because they can reduce the use of pesticides and also produce more per acre. Such crops are "part of the evolution of the human-driven process of making plants serve our needs ... one that pales next to the agricultural transformation once initiated by, say, the harvester or the tractor."
• Organic farming can be more detrimental to the ecosystem because, as in one example, it "demands more land to produce less food."

And so what to do? While acknowledging that it is not presently possible "for the world to eat an environmentally responsible diet," McWilliams proposes "The Golden Mean." The first step is to leave behind the "bumper sticker mantra" mindset. Solutions cannot be summed up in slogans, most of which are counterproductive.

Instead the author suggests we move beyond "food miles," beyond worshiping the organic, and strive to reduce tillage, reduce reliance on livestock for protein, and accept "judicious" usage of biotechnology and chemicals. In case you cannot temper your craving for flesh, McWilliams offers freshwater aquaculture as a protein source to replace beef and chicken. Catfish burger anyone? In fact, the author's chapter on aquaculture presents a fascinating, sophisticated, and fact-filled argument. Here is McWilliams' premise reduced to a television sound bite: land that can produce less than one hundred pounds of beef can instead produce more than fifteen tons of fish protein while simultaneously producing vegetables.

McWilliams argument suggests we can "hold tight to the local," but he also notes "we must see our eating choices as undeniably, inevitably global." No doubt, environmental activists might find that statement tough to swallow, and drive-through junkies will continue to be oblivious.

But if you care about the world you live in and the sustenance that appears on your plate, Just Food is a book to be read, shared, and discussed. That said, understanding its implications, comprehending how much blood and treasure it requires of Mother Earth to feed seven billion people, can be shockingly depressing.

The author is "an associate professor of history at Texas State University-San Marcos and a recent fellow in the Agrarian Studies Program at Yale University," and the man knows his foodstuff. Best of all, McWilliams writes from a scientific point of view without forcing lay readers to plow through graphs, charts, and esoteric references.

Just Food is a short book, but it is an important work, one that is eminently rational, deeply researched (there are twenty-three pages of notes and a comprehensive index), and both complex and simple in application; however, McWilliams' recommendations are revolutionary, so much so that a sophisticated reader, whether a meat-eater or a vegetarian, will complete it and understand that any movement away from factory farming, pesticides, and self-congratulatory organic trendiness likely will be slow to come and crisis-generated.

Gary Presley is the author of Seven Wheelchairs: A Life beyond Polio, a memoir published by the University of Iowa Press. Presley's essays have appeared in publications ranging from Salon.com to Notre Dame Magazine to The Ozark Mountaineer. He maintains the Internet Review of Books blog and also regularly posts material on writing, disability, and other issues on his own blog.

THE INTERNET REVIEW OF BOOKS