Pierre Desrochers claims as much in his new book, The Locavore’s Dilemma: In Praise of the 10,000-mile diet. Emily Badger considers the thesis:
He is essentially arguing that local food is fundamentally incompatible with urbanism. Urbanization isn’t possible without imported food. And urbanization is what makes it possible to raise standards of living everywhere.
In a recent interview, Desrochers documents the number of local food movements that have failed in the past:
There was a local food movement in the British empire in the 1920s. And it turns out that even the British empire was not big enough to have a successful local food movement. The first world war cut Germany off from the rest of the world, so they had to revert to local food. And of course people starved there, and they had a few bad crops, and all the problems that long-distance trade had solved came back with a vengeance.
His strongest argument lies in the environmental implications of food miles, or the miles that produce needs to travel:
In the United States, the long distance transportation of foodstuffs is approximately one twentieth as significant in terms of environmental impact as food production itself (from planting the seeds to drying the crops). In this context, producing food in the most suitable locations and delivering it over long distances, especially by highly energy-efficient container ships, is much greener than growing vegetables or manufacturing dairy products near final consumers when these operations require energy-guzzling heated greenhouses instead of natural heat, massive amounts of irrigation water rather than abundant rainfall, and large volumes of animal feed to make up for less productive pastureland.
Brian Anthony Hernandez explains the above video:
Three brothers from Kansas recently took LMFAO’s "Sexy and I Know It," rewrote the lyrics and created a fun music video to showcase their farming lifestyle. Now, the Peterson brothers are the latest rural sensations on the web, attracting 2.8 million YouTube views in a week for their "I’m Farming and I Grow It" parody.
Update from a reader:
Thank you for the farmers' video!! I come from a long line of farmers, but none in this generation. So great to see these boys proud of their hard work! And it makes me miss our farm. Poppy sold the land to a guy who put many local farms together, which is the only way to compete now, it's sad.
The Dish 