Local, action: Buying Whole Foods' local claims

In Kevin Carson's book chapter, "Decentralized Production Technology", he has this to say about my comment about Viking appliances and planned obsolescence:

Here I take issue, at least in part, with Husman's analysis. First of all, it's hard for me to understand why the average lifetime of an appliance, as determined by the durability of its components, should as a matter of strict definition be excluded as a matter of design choice. After all, Husman himself mentions Viking refrigerators as an example of a product specifically designed for longevity. Second, he seems to be defining "planned obsolescence" far too narrowly. Planned obsolescence refers not just to how soon or how frequently an appliance breaks down as a result of problems with individual parts, but also to how amenable it is to repair. Planned obsolescence, in this latter sense, includes 1) a deliberate choice among design alternatives in favor of a design that makes repair more costly, difficult, or complicated, and 2) the use of such expedients as patents to control the availability and pricing of replacement parts.

First, as I pointed out, the Viking appliances are expensive, on the order of $6,000 for a refrigerator. And the same is going to be true of many such things: a Mercedes or Lexus is going to last longer, all things being equal, than any economy car. So I'm not opposed to including longevity as a design criteria, but rather pointing out that the longest lasting items are going to utilize the latest and most expensive elements and techniques. On the other hand, a Toyota lasts longer than its similarly priced competitors and people desire that feature. Second, I'm going to definitely concede that Kevin has a good point about repair difficulty/ease being part of the equation. The original Model T was made to be easy for farmers to repair, and they loved it. The current generation of cars is ridiculously difficult for the shade-tree mechanic to do anything but change a tire.

But that's beside the point I'm after in this post. What I'm mostly after is the fact that moving to an economy that we might prefer is going to look expensive. I introduced this with the appliance debate, but I'm going to flog the "controversy" between Michael Pollan and John Mackey for the rest of the material.

I first happened to hear about Michael Pollan during this interview on Fresh Air; I have his book Omnivore's Dilemma on my get-around-to-reading list, but this interview will have to suffice for now. It supported most of the things I have come to believe about our diet, corn, and related issues. Note especially his comments after 29:00, in which he says,

To eat in a way that is healthy for you and healthy for the environment and doesn't use a lot of energy is more expensive. That's an issue we have to grapple with. A lot of this food is elitist food, and can be called elitist food, and often is -- usually by proponents of the industrial food system. Any situation where McDonalds is claiming the high moral ground, I'm a little dubious of and this is one of them. But I think we have to confront this.

There's several different ways to look at it. One is cheap food is not as cheap as it looks. The real cost of that $0.99 burger in terms of ... is charged to public health, is charged to the environment, is charged to your health. Even though it's cheap at the register, that is not the real cost of that food. That is an irresponsible price. I don't know that people want to buy irresponsibly.

Now some people don't have a choice. There are a percentage of people in this country who probably can't afford to eat organic or even to eat more sustainably 'cause organic is not the only answer. Let's not oppose organic to everything else; there are many more alternatives out there. Grass fed beef is not organic but it's better, I think, than organic.

If you go to the supermarket, it is true that -- and you're a rational actor, and you don't have a lot of money -- if you're basically buying energy for you're family -- that's to say calories -- the rational thing for you to do under the system we have is to patronize the center of the store, all the processed food. Because a dollar will get you 2500 calories of cookies, of snacks, of potato chips and if you go to the produce aisle, it will only get you 250 calories of carrots

So, y'know, we're programmed by evolution to seek the most energy with the least effort possible and the supermarket has created an environment where that forces people essentially to buy the least healthy calories. But that's not a function of the free market, that's not a function of nature, either. That is a function of policy. There's a reason that the least healthy calories in the supermarket are the cheapest, and that is essentially "policy": we subsidize the cheap calories. We subsidize ... those calories are calories that come from corn and all those calories -- all that high fructose corn syrup -- is subsidized by our taxpayer dollars, the carrots are not.

So it seems to me that for the people who are shopping this way, the challenge is to change the set of incentives and figure out a way to make the healthy food cheaper and to make the unhealthy food a little bit more expensive.

[transcript acquired the with old-fashioned method: listen and type. I hope it's accurate.]

From the interview, Pollan's point seems to be that we should be more careful about what we eat. For example, avoiding anything with HFCS is a good shorthand for not confusing "food products" with "food". He also differentiates between good and bad organic, where bad organic is the type where free range hens never actually get outside (apparently, they haven't checked their contracts). I believe that the use of petroleum as the major input to our food is a problem since one of petroleum's alternative uses is transportation and that means that the cost of food to our poor people is rapidly becoming impacted by the transportation choices of increasingly wealthier people in China and India.

And we thought we freed ourselves of such considerations when we shucked the gold standard.

So Pollan finally ends up endorsing something like the 100 mile diet described by Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon in their book of the same name. He believes that eating local means that farmers will use better inputs (no pesticides or petroleum) and that local farming will inhibit sprawl. And since localism is the point of this post, I swear I will return to it after dealing with two asides.

First, I believe he could have selected better examples. For example, by having all of our farming concentrated in Iowa, they may have eliminated birds there, but we increase the potential for green space around our cities everywhere else. He is basically proposing that we replace the native species of plants around our cities with food stuffs, which only shifts the problems around a little, but does not eliminate them. Indeed, this is the argument of Nobel Peace Prize winner Norman Borlaug, the so-called father of the green revolution. In an article in The Economist, he argues

Thanks to synthetic fertilisers, Mr Borlaug points out, global cereal production tripled between 1950 and 2000, but the amount of land used increased by only 10%. Using traditional techniques such as crop rotation, compost and manure to supply the soil with nitrogen and other minerals would have required a tripling of the area under cultivation. The more intensively you farm, Mr Borlaug contends, the more room you have left for rainforest.

Granted, Borlaug and I are offering a false dilemma here*, but the point is that Pollan doesn't seem to have thought this far through the problem (perhaps he has and it didn't come out in the interview; I haven't read the book).

Second, Tyler Cowen's critique at Slate left me flat. Tyler points out that Pollan's approach neglects to value our time and other market signals. Tyler makes a good point when he says that we may respond to higher fuel prices by driving less or buying smaller cars, but that we probably won't start growing grapes in the back yard. However, I'm surprised that Tyler doesn't more strongly endorse Pollan's descriptions of the problems of subsidization. Neither does Tyler recognize a benefit in which I expect him to be most interested, which is the improvement in food quality that might arise from a more local, fresher supply of ingredients.

While Tyler mentions the problem with the corruption of the term "organic", and agrees with Pollan that shopping at Whole Foods is an insufficient response to the three problems in the industrial food system (our health, our environment, the treatment of animals), Whole Foods founder John Mackey responded much more vigorously in a series of blog posts and public forums. As a result, each has moved a little in the direction of the other, Pollan agreeing that the Whole Foods approach is not as bad as he thought and getting better, while Mackey conceded that some of their practices needed review and changing.**

Mackey's summary of his arguments can be found in this presentation. In slides 39-41, he mentions something that has bothered me for some time now. While writing about the theme of self-sufficiency in Kirkpatrick Sale's Human Scale, I told a story about driving out to a local chile farm to acquire the green ambrosia. Even in my high efficiency automobile (46-50 mpg), it probably required a quart or two of fuel to make the round trip. Most other vehicles would require more, and most of the city lives further away from Lujan Farms than I do. The fuel required per pound of a truckload of chile would probably be much lower when delivering to a market in the center of town, but people still have to get to the market. This is an optimization problem, so the least-energy solution will not necessarily be "don't shop at Wal-Mart". Given existing social circumstances, the optimal solution will probably depend on where you live and what you drive; "shop at Wal-Mart" may actually be the solution for many people.

That is only part of the issue. When you account for all of the inputs (soil, sun, water, etc.), the fact that some geographic regions are blessed with some of these in abundance while others are not, and that economies of scale can be realized when using railroads and ships, local may not be the answer for everything. Mackey's summary of this part was, "If you live in Berkeley, you will use less fossil fuel and produce less carbon dioxide by buying rice from Bangladesh than from California." I'm inclined to think that even if that particular claim is not correct, it will be true that some foods will be less energy intensive when grown and shipped from afar rather than locally.

But is Mackey sincere when he claims that Whole Foods' supply chain is not as bad as Pollan claims and getting better? I was originally going to post about an article in Forbes that I bookmarked some time ago (To Fight Rivals, Whole Foods Buys Local). Unfortunately, Forbes can no longer find the article on their own site. Fortunately, Google can find it elsewhere, so I excerpt it here without linking:

Dairy general manager Matt Lucas began bringing the glass bottles himself from the Morning Fresh farm in Bellevue, Colo., 60 miles north of Denver. Until then, Morning Fresh had long made its name on home deliveries.
Since his Whole Foods deliveries began in 2004, Lucas estimated, his dairy's sales have increased 20 percent. Morning Fresh now sells at least 1,000 gallons a week to supply a Whole Foods distribution center serving 10 stores.
"It's a breath of fresh air to get involved with a group like that. They were so excited to get our product in their stores," Lucas said.
By strengthening -- or, as some farmers say, returning to -- their commitment to local products, Austin, Texas-based Whole Foods and Boulder-based Wild Oats Markets Inc. are fending off big chains like Wal-Mart Stores Inc., Kroger Co. and Safeway Inc., which have expanded their own organic offerings and put pressure on the smaller "natural" grocers. "With Wal-Mart barging into the lower-end organic sales, this is a way these other retailers can differentiate from what Wal-Mart is doing," said Dan Hobbs, a cooperative development specialist with the Rocky Mountain Farmers Union.
...

Small local growers often cannot offer lower prices than large-scale operations that benefit from economies of scale and cheaper labor. But fuel costs for shipping food are less for shorter trips, which in turn often require less packaging to preserve food. Buying local also shortens the time it takes produce to get to market, preserving nutrients and freshness, ....
...
Whole Foods defines a local product as having traveled less than seven hours to get to the store.
It sells more than 200 produce and floral items from more than 60 local growers in the region covering Colorado, New Mexico, Kansas and Missouri. Overall, it does business with more than 2,400 independent farms.

Apparently, Whole Foods is looking at local foods (in the article, consumer interest in local food is credited in part to Pollan's book) as a competitive advantage over purveyors of "bad organic" such as Wal-Mart. If true, it means that Whole Foods' conscience and self-interest are aligned with those of their customers, suppliers, and (if you believe John Mackey's New Agey Manifesto) employees and stock holders. If true, that's pretty cool.

A few things can be pulled out of this.

• I think the struggle between Whole Foods and Wal-Mart leaves us all better off than Pollan does. I can't tell which paradigm will win, but I am certain that having them square off with two different formulas -- and having the local farmers market and small grocery stores as well -- means that my food supply is simultaneously more secure, less expensive, and of higher quality than if someone was to start mandating that their favorite approach should be the victor. Also, Wal-Mart is a big boy, so perhaps the merger of Whole Foods and Wild Oats creates a stronger competition between the two.
• Still, as Pollan points out, it is policy that the corn industry should be as large as it is. Frito-Lay and Coke need to occupy all that premium shelf space because they have products that need to be sold to keep the machine running. In that sense, Wal-Mart is a creation of both Sams: Uncle and Walton.
• Mass producers have genuine advantages over craft production. For one, their cash prices are lower. Amana is cheaper than Viking, Kraft is cheaper than the dairy farm down the road, Wal-Mart is cheaper than Whole Foods. If I'm on a limited budget, that's going to be important.
  
• However, there are hidden costs. Note that above I said, "moving to an economy that we might prefer is going to look expensive", not "be expensive". All things considered, and on average, cheaper appliances and vehicles are typically not as long lasting or efficient, cheaper food products are not as tasty or nutritious as organic and artisan foods, and mass production relies on a massively subsidized infrastructure. We taxpayers pay for agriculture subsidies and transportation subsidies, while we as people pay for the externalities (farm runoff, smog and soot).***
  
• The cost of transportation is a factor in whether local or mass produced is less expensive. The railroad ushered in the first age of mass production and broke down state and regional barriers and built a nation while the container and container ship ushered in the age of globalization. If we are entering an era of permanently higher fuel costs, those trends may reverse. That's not all bad.
  

I am interested in understanding how to reverse some of the policy decisions of the past 150 or so years without reverting socioeconomically to what existed then (grinding poverty, extreme inequality -- contra to what populist demagogues would have you believe about today being the worst of times in those regards). Employing lean production can build a local manufacturing base that produces high quality goods at low costs with little waste, benefiting both workers and consumers. Removing taxpayer supports shifts the advantage from ADM and Cargill toward local farmers. And local governance moves power out of distant capitals and bureaucracies into our hands.

In an upcoming post, I want to say something about local energy production.

-----------------------------------------------------

* You could combine localism and organic methods.

** Other takes on the Pollan/Mackey "smackdown turned lovefest":

• An Open Cupboard suggests that Whole Foods should be more diligent about teaching people to shop on a low income. Easy: vegetarian.
• Whole Foods blog: Points out that Whole Foods stock took a $2 billion dive after Pollan's book came out, but also notes that may be attributable to other problems.

*** Yes, it is literally true that the corresponding costs of obesity cost us money through Medicare/Medicaid. However, that also is a matter of policy and I am not going to start using that as a pretext for dictating other people's behavior and food choices.