1. When I think of the 'aesthetics' of local food, I think of two things.
2. The aesthetics of the food itself. A move towards authenticity and idiosyncrasy and away from the soulless homogeneity and (often the) vapidity of mass-market food.
3. The aesthetics of placemaking –– contributing to a local sense of place.
4. This can be local style. One of the things that made Tucson a great place to live was that half the restaurants were some sort of Southwestern venture. This is how WE eat here. We have traditions.
5. But Tucson cuisine was only marginally about local ingredients because Tucson isn't a great place for agriculture.
6. Portland, OR on the other hand has access to all sorts of great and bountiful agriculture. Varied enough to support a local cuisine that's all about local ingredients and products and less about a local style.
7. There is definitely a local vibe –– especially around craftsmanship. But Portland food is just New American with more salmon and mushrooms. Yes, we have great produce, local cheese, meats and seafood, vineyards and orchards.
8. But the soul of Portland cuisine is in craft processing. We invented the microbrew. The Pacific Northwest gave birth to craft coffee (heads up, we don't grow our own coffee beans, but our roasters have relationships with coffee farms and do small batches around bean terroir).
9. We're serious about beer, wine, cheese, and charcuterie. But also about farm to table restaurants and farmer's markets. Our gigantic Saturday market is a major pillar of PDX culture.
10. Local food in Portland is like the Red Sox in Boston.
11. But we have comparative advantage for so many food products. Local food in Portland makes sense without any religious appeals. We are eating local products that we also export.
12. What does it mean to be a locavore in a place without strong culinary traditions like Tucson or New Orleans or access to agricultural comparative advantage like Portland or Berkeley?
13. This is where it breaks down a bit into a forced religion (like a white college kid converting to Hari Krishna for the spirituality) rather than organic culture.
And that's where it starts to have to Save the World™ in order to justify itself.
And that's where it starts to have to Save the World™ in order to justify itself.
14. When it's such an extra effort, when it requires paying more for lower quality goods in the name of localism, when you are fighting comparative advantage rather than leveraging it ––
15. –– you need a much bigger project to justify your quest for authenticity and rejection of homogenous, soulless food culture.
16. So we get an unempirical oral tradition about how local, low productivity systems are actually better for the planet than the highly efficient systems they are in competition with.
17. We suddenly need to re-regionalize production systems in preparation for climate change when that would make them move vulnerable to climate change and it will be much easier to shift our distribution systems around as production realities change than –––
18. ––– than to shift to expensive, inefficient, lower productivity systems for decades in anticipation of changes that are hard to predict.
19. We get claims that systems that the research literature tells us have BIGGER ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT will save the planet based on intuitions flowing from aesthetic affinities.
20. That's where I think locavorism goes off the rails into religion instead of a material approach to better quality of life – for those that value that kind of relationship with their food.
21. It makes sense in SOME BUT NOT ALL places for local and regional institutions to invest in local food systems (that is, food production primarily meant for local consumption).
22. But those places have comparative advantage in production, so there isn't much in the way of trade-offs between environmental impacts and regional economic development and placemaking.
23. I also think it's OK for places without comparative advantage to have some CSA/Farm to Table farms that produce food that is more land and resource-intensive. (Local strawberries with 1/3rd the yields of Watsonville strawberries for instance)
24. But that’s because those kinds of farms are a rounding error of a rounding error in the larger scheme of things. They are an environmental indulgence that is an acceptable trade-off against making the world a little bit nicer, a little bit more beautiful.
25. Not because they are going to save the planet.
