Tired of the Alice Waters Backlash - Are You?

[slkinsey]

And Sam, maybe I missed something earlier in this thread, and I am not all that familiar with the data about carbon footprints and food miles, but since the greater carbon footprint for local food is "not a matter of opinions. It's a matter of fact."  Could you please point me in the direction of where to read about this?  I imagine it has to do with inefficiency in distribution of locally grown food,which again would likely improve with further increased demand of these goods.

I think these things are a lot more complicated than we suppose. For example:

. . . I recently sat in on a panel at the IACP conference in Denver that Dave Scantland ("Dave the Cook") was moderating. McWilliams was on the panel and utterly dismantled the local-is-better argument. This is just one of many examples McWilliams cites in his work:

Incorporating these measurements into their assessments, scientists reached surprising conclusions. Most notably, they found that lamb raised on New Zealand’s clover-choked pastures and shipped 11,000 miles by boat to Britain produced 1,520 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions per ton while British lamb produced 6,280 pounds of carbon dioxide per ton, in part because poorer British pastures force farmers to use feed. In other words, it is four times more energy-efficient for Londoners to buy lamb imported from the other side of the world than to buy it from a producer in their backyard. Similar figures were found for dairy products and fruit.

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Here is a case where a difference in environmental factors creates a huge difference (more than 400%!) in CO2 production, even though New Zealand lamb has to be shipped half-way around the world to reach the UK. Again, I think there are plenty of good reasons to support the local lamb farmers if you live in the UK. But food miles and carbon footprint are not among them.

[docsconz]

the more people that support quality, artisanal farms and farming the cheaper their products will become as these farms then get to benefit from what is good about scale. The more people that are able to sell their heritage breeds, the greater the market will be to sell to them.

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Were this true, it would change the playing field here. It might even justify some of the hectoring we hear from Team Waters. But it's only true in a very limited sense. Again:

it is impossible for most of the world to feed itself a diverse and healthy diet through exclusively local food production — food will always have to travel

That same statement (from McWilliams, who has been attacked ad hominem but not refuted, because most of what he says is irrefutable) has several related variants, e.g., we can't feed the world with heritage breeds, etc. -- not unless we implement authoritarian structures and force people to be mostly vegetarian.

It's true that industrial agriculture has some unfair advantages in terms of subsidies and ability to externalize some costs. But when it comes down to it, no matter how much heritage-breed product we buy, it's mathematically impossible for it to compete seriously on price with the industrial product. Quite simply, if an animal takes twice as long to reach maturity, it's going to cost more. Even if other cost savings occur (like perhaps the heritage breed is more disease resistant, or has better mothering skills) they're not going to offset that.

A good example would be Murray's. I think Murray's has achieved just about all the benefits of scale that a conscientious local farming operation can achieve. It's a fairly big operation, yet raises Certified Humane chicken without antibiotics etc. You see a whole lot of Murray's chicken around the New York area. I like Murray's and support Murray's. I think Murray's chicken tastes better. But Murray's chicken costs very nearly twice as much as the industrial chicken next to it on the rack. Maybe with an increase in scale and a change in agricultural policy we could get the differential down from 100% to, what? 80? 75 percent? Whatever the exact numbers, industrial mass agriculture is going to produce cheaper food.

In addition, can operations like Murray's be extrapolated to provide all our food of every kind? What those of us who think Alice Waters is wrong (to be clear, some find her annoying, some find her wrong, some find her both) are saying is: no. The argument "the more people that support quality, artisanal farms and farming the cheaper their products will become" only works up to a point, because at some point without the efficiency of industrial agriculture we'd run out of space, resources, etc., or we'd need to become a mostly vegetarian society, not to mention a vegetarian society where 45% of the population works on farms.

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steven, your arguments are certainly true for the near term, but what Ms. Waters and others argue is that there are many hidden costs in industrial agriculture that are rarely accounted for but should be, such as the cost of pollution produced and land ruined for future use. I am as much a carnivore as anyone, but large scale industrial agriculture or even Ms. Waters preferred agricultural approach is not likely to be sustainable without major paradigm shifts or population adjustments. The former is likely to destroy the earth in the process of trying to feed the masses, while the latter is unlikely to sustain the masses for the reasons that you mention.

[Fat Guy]

The thing is, that same prediction (with variants on the actual language) has been made since Malthus argued in 1798 that the world couldn't support a growing population. And it never seems to work out quite that way.

No doubt there are things about industrial agriculture that are harmful. Those things should be corrected if possible. But any way you slice it industrial agriculture is the future. It may have to be a modified form of industrial agriculture that's more "sustainable" but the future isn't likely to be one of heritage breeds and locavorism. Those will remain niche pursuits for well-to-do people (like many of us) who have never had to worry for one second about the necessities of life so are able to pursue the next level of choice. And you know what? I sure do wish everybody in the world could have that luxury. But if you tell me, "Not everybody in the world has that luxury," it's not a meaningful response for me to say, "But I wish everybody did!" Because everybody doesn't, and that's the reality we need to be sensitive to. And if I'm going to lecture about how I have a plan to change that reality, it should at least be a plan with a chance of working. Buying local -- that's not a plan that has a chance of working. Not even close.

[cinghiale]

it is impossible for most of the world to feed itself a diverse and healthy diet through exclusively local food production — food will always have to travel

That same statement (from McWilliams, who has been attacked ad hominem but not refuted, because most of what he says is irrefutable)

Blanket assertion with no proof. I'm not about to read McWilliams, since I don't find him to be credible. Still, what part of the world is "most"? If it works in the non-most part, can it be adapted for the most part? IF not, why? What is "exclusively"? Sure, I can't grow my own coffee and chocolate beans. Is that what is meant?

This is the second time you have asserted that McWilliams has been criticized ad hominem, and that assertion is unwarranted. The criticism of Waters has been much more in that vein, if you ask me.

[Fat Guy]

Blanket assertion with no proof.  I'm not about to read McWilliams, since I don't find him to be credible. 

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That makes it kind of hard to have a conversation. I've provided the links, both to McWilliams and to peer-reviewed material, I've explained the assumptions at an appropriate level of detail given this format, and your response is that it's a blanket assertion with no proof. Moreover, you refuse to read the material because of your feelings about one author among many who's writing in support of that position. This is known as arguing ad hominem.

The criticisms of Alice Waters have sometimes been personal, but not logically false in the manner of an ad hominem argument. I and several others are arguing that, yes, Waters is annoying, but she's also wrong. We are considering and addressing her arguments, which you're refusing to do with the arguments on the other side.

[rancho_gordo]

Just quickly want to add that many, many of the food items at the farmers markets in San Francisco and Napa (the 2 I'm most familiar with) are comparable in price to supermarket vegetables. As docsconz says, the prices are coming down as the farmers get better and their markets grow. On quality there is no comparison.

I think this thread proves Waters to be a polarizing figure and maybe not the best face for the cause.

I'd also suggest the lack of challenges on certain points shouldn't be interpreted as conceding the point but exhaustion. Some of these same issues we've been arguing about for years and I'm too tired (or the premise is too ridiculous) to bother responding.

[Fat Guy]

Just quickly want to add that many, many of the food items at the farmers markets in San Francisco and Napa (the 2 I'm most familiar with) are comparable in price to supermarket vegetables.

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I imagine this is true in season, whatever the season is for a given vegetable. I've seen that in New York City as well: in-season vegetables at the Greenmarket can be quite cheap.

[daisy17]

I'd also suggest the lack of challenges on certain points shouldn't be interpreted as conceding the point but exhaustion. Some of these same issues we've been arguing about for years and I'm too tired (or the premise is too ridiculous) to bother responding.

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word.

[jmolinari]

Just quickly want to add that many, many of the food items at the farmers markets in San Francisco and Napa (the 2 I'm most familiar with) are comparable in price to supermarket vegetables.

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I imagine this is true in season, whatever the season is for a given vegetable. I've seen that in New York City as well: in-season vegetables at the Greenmarket can be quite cheap.

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This is definitely NOT the case in Atlanta.

[Tim Dolan]

I had never heard of Alice Waters until this thread. I didn't think that the 60 Minutes interview was all that bad. Her thing works perfectly in the bubbles that she creates. She created her restaurant, her edible garden, and her one school project. Would that work across the board? Absolutely not. Not even close. But there's no harm in her setting up her bubbles where she can.

I think this is where the problem lies. If she is trying to be all things to all people, well, we all know how that will work out. There is nothing wrong with her pushing her idea. But don't act like that idea will work for everyone.

[LindaK]

You see, on this topic Alice  Waters has won, hands down, and I hope she grins tomorrow when she dons her beret.

She's stirred up controversy and smart thinking about her issues and mission. I am in no way an Alice acolyte. But however I might want to take the messenger to Chipotle for lunch and force her to eat the pretty damn good Ontario hydroponic tomato I had in my salad tonight, and try to explain the ways I can't hold to her message... I won't kill the Messenger.

This topic has expanded debate and understanding about the issues she stands for. I'll never sign up for the Alice Brigade, but her influence is undeniable and mostly sensible and positive.

Edited to add: There is no way I'd ever spend 10 bucks in a restaurant for a plum, no matter how great the plum and how high-minded its place on the menu.

A very clear and thoughtful synthesis of this thread, thank you.

Now that spring has arrived and I can admire the pea shoots coming up in my community garden plot...now that my friends without plots are counting the days until their first CSA delivery...now that my favorite area farmer tells me that after only two years their foray into raising meat has been successful beyond their wildest dreams...now that the city of Boston is planning a year-round farmers market...all this in a dense urban area, easily accessible by walking, bike, or public transit...now that all this is at my fingertips, I compare the local food scene to the void it was when I moved here 10 years ago, and I say WOW, thank you Alice and Michael and everyone else. Just please don't make me feel guilty about my choices in January, when spring is far away and the nearest local vegetable is even further, or if I lose my job in the next round of layoffs that I know is coming.

[Dave the Cook]

Isn't McWilliams the same dude telling us we should all be eating factory farmed pork because it's "safer" than pork products from pigs that are humanely raised and sustainably farmed?

Here.

Bloggers and others were quick to note:

Guess who paid for the study? The National Pork Board, of course.

Five days after publication of McWilliams's piece, the Times appended this editors note:

An Op-Ed last Friday, about pork, neglected to disclose the source of the financing for a study finding that free-range pigs were more likely than confined pigs to test positive for exposure to certain pathogens. The study was financed by the National Pork Board.

McWilliams responded, admitting he "may have erred" on the seropathogen issue, on The Atlantic. IMO, he lacks the credentials to discuss with any authority the matters cited upthread. To bring this back OT, how can anyone who claims with the straightest of faces that "locavores are endangering the future of food" be taken seriously?

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It was nice of you to include the link to McWilliams' response, since your characterization of it lacks the context necessary to understand it. I suggest that anyone truly interested in sustainability read the whole thing, but here are a few high points:

I chose not to cite the Pork Board, but the journal in which the Gebreyes study was published. Foodborne Pathogens and Disease is a prestigious peer reviewed journal. The scientists who undertook the study are well respected researchers in veterinary medicine working at top universities.

. . . .

Would a handful of credentialed scientists, the board of a respected journal, and a host of outside peer reviewers engage in a grand conspiracy to twist the results of a major study that only indirectly made CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding operations) look like a preferred option?

Peer review exists to illuminate and eliminate bias, including that which might be introduced by funding influences.

You can test positive for the antibodies of a disease and still not have it. It's very unlikely, but possible. Faced with the choice of spending a couple of paragraphs qualifying this distinction for lay readers, I looked to see how other reports of the study dealt with the matter. At this point I was thinking not like a scientist but a writer. I wanted to keep the piece flowing without getting bogged down in the distracting minutiae of seroprevalence.

McWilliams then goes on to link to summaries by Ohio State University, which expresses the problem is a way that is almost identical to how McWilliams put it, and New Scientist, which distinguished between the presence of antibodies and seropositivity, but also pointed out that antibodies are "telltale signs of infection."

I chose to write that the pigs had these diseases. While this decision, made in the interest of readability, hardly makes me an apologist for CAFOs, I can fully understand why readers might have preferred a more technically accurate description--even if it does not alter the underlying point of my argument.

To date, no one has refuted the findings of the report, which -- it should be pointed out -- McWilliams simply brought to a wider audience. He didn't write the report; he used it as evidence to point out that agriculture is a human invention that is flawed by definition.

Dismissing McWilliams because he's a history professor (and New York Times columnist who knows no one in the pork industry) overlooks the important idea that the history of the world can be written as a tale of agriculture. Just to take the US as an example, Columbus was looking for spices; the prime directive of the Jamestown colony was to send food back home; once the New England colonies were established, they set about exporting crops. The slave triangle relied on sugar, molasses and tobacco for the New-to-Old World leg. More recently, as Steven alluded to earlier, we (though perhaps we didn't know it then) decided in the 1930s that California would produce most of the nation's fruits and vegetables by diverting water from hundreds of miles away -- a continuing ecological rape that locavores conveniently ignore.

[Dave the Cook]

The thing is, that same prediction (with variants on the actual language) has been made since Malthus argued in 1798 that the world couldn't support a growing population. And it never seems to work out quite that way.

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What's made it possible is the advance of technology, through hybridization and, in some cases, the revival of heirloom species that have advantageous localized traits. Technology also plays a role in our ability to outsource carrying capacity (the maximum population of a particular organism that a given environment can support without detrimental effects [American Heritage Science Dictionary]). For example, air freight has allowed Kenya to become England's (and much of Europe, for that matter) California. Europe is at its carrying capacity -- it has neither the land nor the water to grow the food it needs to support its own population.

So unless you're willing to institute drastic population control measures, the local model is not only unsustainable, it's a non-starter. You don't have to be a fan of CAFOs, or not be a fan of local in-season produce to recognize that facts are facts.

[MikeHartnett]

The thing is, that same prediction (with variants on the actual language) has been made since Malthus argued in 1798 that the world couldn't support a growing population. And it never seems to work out quite that way.

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What's made it possible is the advance of technology, through hybridization and, in some cases, the revival of heirloom species that have advantageous localized traits. Technology also plays a role in our ability to outsource carrying capacity (the maximum population of a particular organism that a given environment can support without detrimental effects [American Heritage Science Dictionary]). For example, air freight has allowed Kenya to become England's (and much of Europe, for that matter) California. Europe is at its carrying capacity -- it has neither the land nor the water to grow the food it needs to support its own population.

So unless you're willing to institute drastic population control measures, the local model is not only unsustainable, it's a non-starter. You don't have to be a fan of CAFOs, or not be a fan of local in-season produce to recognize that facts are facts.

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This.

I was going to respond similarly, but Dave's done it quite well.

[Fat Guy]

You see, on this topic Alice  Waters has won

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A good example of "winning" would be what happened on my recent trip to Ayrshire Farm in Virginia. While I still don't buy into much of what Sandy Lerner, the farm's owner, is advocating, she did manage to convert me -- using a very soft sell and showing more than telling -- on one of her issues: humane treatment of animals. As a personal choice, I'm now spending a little more most of the time to get humanely raised meat. Sandy Lerner "won."

An example of "losing" would be when a messenger is so irritating to so many people that they simply reject the message. Or when someone's argument doesn't survive basic factual scrutiny. I have to say, I personally think less of Alice Waters and her positions now than I did before this topic started. If I'd never seen her on 60 Minutes, if I'd never been exposed to the full range of what she says, I'd have considered her harmless and ignored her as I have most of my life. Now I firmly believe she's not only condescending but also wrong, and so I am more likely to reject her beliefs across the board.

I put "winning" and "losing" in quotes because I'm not sure the concepts are relevant here. But if there is a loser, for me, it's Alice Waters. I'm someone who listens to arguments and can be converted by compelling ones, and I can be converted by people's inspiring personal examples. In a million years, though, I can't imagine being converted by Alice Waters.

[docsconz]

Isn't McWilliams the same dude telling us we should all be eating factory farmed pork because it's "safer" than pork products from pigs that are humanely raised and sustainably farmed?

Here.

Bloggers and others were quick to note:

Guess who paid for the study? The National Pork Board, of course.

Five days after publication of McWilliams's piece, the Times appended this editors note:

An Op-Ed last Friday, about pork, neglected to disclose the source of the financing for a study finding that free-range pigs were more likely than confined pigs to test positive for exposure to certain pathogens. The study was financed by the National Pork Board.

McWilliams responded, admitting he "may have erred" on the seropathogen issue, on The Atlantic. IMO, he lacks the credentials to discuss with any authority the matters cited upthread. To bring this back OT, how can anyone who claims with the straightest of faces that "locavores are endangering the future of food" be taken seriously?

←

It was nice of you to include the link to McWilliams' response, since your characterization of it lacks the context necessary to understand it. I suggest that anyone truly interested in sustainability read the whole thing, but here are a few high points:

I chose not to cite the Pork Board, but the journal in which the Gebreyes study was published. Foodborne Pathogens and Disease is a prestigious peer reviewed journal. The scientists who undertook the study are well respected researchers in veterinary medicine working at top universities.

. . . .

Would a handful of credentialed scientists, the board of a respected journal, and a host of outside peer reviewers engage in a grand conspiracy to twist the results of a major study that only indirectly made CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding operations) look like a preferred option?

Peer review exists to illuminate and eliminate bias, including that which might be introduced by funding influences.

Peer review is certainly better than non-peer review, but that doesn't mean that it is infallible. Poor articles and studies make it past peer review all the time for many reasons. All journals tend to serve particular audiences and specific journals, prestigious or not, tend to follow the viewpoint of its editor. That particular journal likely is likely to focus on the issues of industrial agriculture with a bias towards that sector. That is how the scientists who are involved with a journal like that make their living. The article may or may not be valid, but its presence in a journal like that does not necessarily validate it just by being in the journal.

You can test positive for the antibodies of a disease and still not have it. It's very unlikely, but possible. Faced with the choice of spending a couple of paragraphs qualifying this distinction for lay readers, I looked to see how other reports of the study dealt with the matter. At this point I was thinking not like a scientist but a writer. I wanted to keep the piece flowing without getting bogged down in the distracting minutiae of seroprevalence.

McWilliams then goes on to link to summaries by Ohio State University, which expresses the problem is a way that is almost identical to how McWilliams put it, and New Scientist, which distinguished between the presence of antibodies and seropositivity, but also pointed out that antibodies are "telltale signs of infection."

Antibodies are a tell tale sign of exposure not of infection. Healthy animals, like healthy humans with well functioning immune systems likely carry many antigens without necessarily having had clinical infections. The presence of an antigen or a pathogen is more indicative of a clinical infection. I would expect healthy, foraging animals to have antibodies. The biggest concern aside from humaneness with factory farming has been the development of antibiotic resistance as well as acting as an incubator for epidemics like bird or swine flu.

I chose to write that the pigs had these diseases. While this decision, made in the interest of readability, hardly makes me an apologist for CAFOs, I can fully understand why readers might have preferred a more technically accurate description--even if it does not alter the underlying point of my argument.

To date, no one has refuted the findings of the report, which -- it should be pointed out -- McWilliams simply brought to a wider audience. He didn't write the report; he used it as evidence to point out that agriculture is a human invention that is flawed by definition.

Dismissing McWilliams because he's a history professor (and New York Times columnist who knows no one in the pork industry) overlooks the important idea that the history of the world can be written as a tale of agriculture. Just to take the US as an example, Columbus was looking for spices; the prime directive of the Jamestown colony was to send food back home; once the New England colonies were established, they set about exporting crops. The slave triangle relied on sugar, molasses and tobacco for the New-to-Old World leg. More recently, as Steven alluded to earlier, we (though perhaps we didn't know it then) decided in the 1930s that California would produce most of the nation's fruits and vegetables by diverting water from hundreds of miles away -- a continuing ecological rape that locavores conveniently ignore.

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Being a history professor affords some advantages, but a knowledge of science and scientific principles is not necessarily one of them. What a history professor should be able to offer is perspective. I'm not sure that he does.

[Alcuin]

Here's an example of an influential leader: Michelle Obama and the White House garden. This is what she says in the NYT piece on the garden:

“I wanted to be able to bring what I learned to a broader base of people. And what better way to do it than to plant a vegetable garden in the South Lawn of the White House?”

For urban dwellers who have no backyards, the country’s one million community gardens can also play an important role, Mrs. Obama said.

But the first lady emphasized that she did not want people to feel guilty if they did not have the time for a garden: there are still many changes they can make.

“You can begin in your own cupboard,” she said, “by eliminating processed food, trying to cook a meal a little more often, trying to incorporate more fruits and vegetables.”

She talks about leading by example and explicitly acknowledges the guilt people might have about not being able to follow it. She then suggests that there are lots of small steps one can take to improve this area of their lives. This is encouraging, whereas Alice Waters can seem discouraging when urging people to spend more money on food and give up things in order to do it. Michelle Obama is trying to meet people where they're at and this is the kind of figure we need to get people thinking about these issues.

Here's an example of people thinking about these issues: it's a pictorial beginning with the White House garden and continuing with peoples' own efforts to grow. At the bottom of the page it says:

And if you absolutely can't grow your own food, another great way to get connected to the food that you eat is through community-supported agriculture. You develop a relationship directly with a farm that grows your fresh fruit and vegetables (and sometimes eggs and dairy and flowers), and you pick it up once a week. Sounds delicious, right?

If that's not raising awareness, I don't know what is. Obama leads by example and meets people where they're at. This is the antitype of Alice Waters' public persona. Obama goes out of her way to make people feel comfortable with what they can do, encouraging them to do more. Waters, like it or not, can sound discouraging when talking about super expensive grapes or dishing out hearth cooked eggs. This is why she's annoying to some people, as opposed to Obama who clearly senses that this could be a touchy issue and treads lightly, actively trying not to be annoying.

edited to fix pronoun ambiguity

Edited April 28, 2009 by Alcuin (log)

[weinoo]

As a personal choice, I'm now spending a little more most of the time to get humanely raised meat. Sandy Lerner "won."

But if there is a loser, for me, it's Alice Waters. I'm someone who listens to arguments and can be converted by compelling ones, and I can be converted by people's inspiring personal examples. In a million years, though, I can't imagine being converted by Alice Waters.

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It might have been a little easier for Alice if she had founded Cisco Systems. And made a couple of hundred million dollars.

[CaliPoutine]

Just quickly want to add that many, many of the food items at the farmers markets in San Francisco and Napa (the 2 I'm most familiar with) are comparable in price to supermarket vegetables.

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I imagine this is true in season, whatever the season is for a given vegetable. I've seen that in New York City as well: in-season vegetables at the Greenmarket can be quite cheap.

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This is definitely NOT the case in Atlanta.

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Nor where I live in small town Ontario. In March, I was at both the SF Farmer's Market and the Marin market. The prices were double or triple what farmers market prices are here in the summer.

[Dave the Cook]

Antibodies are a tell tale sign of exposure not of infection. Healthy animals, like healthy humans with well functioning immune systems likely carry many antigens without necessarily having had clinical infections. The presence of an antigen or a pathogen is more indicative of a clinical infection. I would expect healthy, foraging animals to have antibodies. The biggest concern aside from humaneness with factory farming has been the development of antibiotic resistance as well as acting as an incubator for epidemics like bird or swine flu.

. . . and that's a good reason to ignore the findings of the study?

Being a history professor affords some advantages, but a knowledge of science and scientific principles is not necessarily one of them. What a history professor should be able to offer is perspective. I'm not sure that he does.

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Of course he does. The problem some people seem to have with his perspective is that it insists on critical thinking (eta: as in, say, the Scientific Method) about issues like sustainable farming (which he supports), free-range livestock (he doesn't eat meat) and food miles (which, if not completely bogus, are far more complicated than they first appear to be). A methodology, much less a movement, that can't be examined based on its own tenets won't likely have the strength to succeed.

Edited April 28, 2009 by Dave the Cook (log)

[slkinsey]

Being a history professor affords some advantages, but a knowledge of science and scientific principles is not necessarily one of them. What a history professor should be able to offer is perspective. I'm not sure that he does.

Just out of curiosity... If you had first been told that McWilliams was a fellow in the Yale University Program in Agrarian Studies and had a paper such as his Boll Weevils and Bureaucrats: Leland O. Howard and the Transition to Chemical Insecticides in the United States, 1894-1927, which isn't exactly pro-chemical insecticide, before you read his other work, I wonder if your opinion might be different.

Why do we give credence to what Jeffrey Steingarten (a lawyer) or Alice Waters (a restaurateur and activist) or Tony Bourdain (a cook) or whoever else has to say about these things when we agree with them, but when it goes against the things we want to believe, then "he's only a historian." Well, yes, I suppose he's "only a historian" -- but he's also a historian whose major field of specialty is the environmental history of the United States, which would certainly include plenty of background on just the things he covered in his article. And in doing this work he has written other things relating to food and agriculture that have been pretty well received among a pretty tough crowd.

So... I think it's fair to say that you don't agree with his conclusions or whatever. But it doesn't seem reasonable to attack the basis of everything he says or might say that has a grounding in science on the basis that he's a historian at TX State. Yes, a historian may not have a great knowledge of science and scientific principles. But he just might have. It depends on this historian. I think I have a pretty reasonable "knowledge of science and scientific principles," and I'm not a scientist. I'd say that you have a pretty reasonable "knowledge of science and scientific principles" as well, despite the fact that I'm not sure epidemiology and livestock management (etc.) are big parts of training in anesthesiology. The question, rather, is whether as soneone with a reasonable knowledge of science and scientific principles the conclusions he makes seem like they are reasonably and properly informed by the available evidence. Whether or not we agree with those conclusions is another matter.

Edited April 28, 2009 by slkinsey (log)

[JAZ]

And let's not forget that one could describe Michael Pollan as "just" a professor of journalism, if one were so inclined.

[docsconz]

Being a history professor affords some advantages, but a knowledge of science and scientific principles is not necessarily one of them. What a history professor should be able to offer is perspective. I'm not sure that he does.

Just out of curiosity... If you had first been told that McWilliams was a fellow in the Yale University Program in Agrarian Studies and had a paper such as his Boll Weevils and Bureaucrats: Leland O. Howard and the Transition to Chemical Insecticides in the United States, 1894-1927, which isn't exactly pro-chemical insecticide, before you read his other work, I wonder if your opinion might be different.

Why do we give credence to what Jeffrey Steingarten (a lawyer) or Alice Waters (a restaurateur and activist) or Tony Bourdain (a cook) or whoever else has to say about these things when we agree with them, but when it goes against the things we want to believe, then "he's only a historian." Well, yes, I suppose he's "only a historian" -- but he's also a historian whose major field of specialty is the environmental history of the United States, which would certainly include plenty of background on just the things he covered in his article. And in doing this work he has written other things relating to food and agriculture that have been pretty well received among a pretty tough crowd.

So... I think it's fair to say that you don't agree with his conclusions or whatever. But it doesn't seem reasonable to attack the basis of everything he says or might say that has a grounding in science on the basis that he's a historian at TX State. Yes, a historian may not have a great knowledge of science and scientific principles. But he just might have. It depends on this historian. I think I have a pretty reasonable "knowledge of science and scientific principles," and I'm not a scientist. I'd say that you have a pretty reasonable "knowledge of science and scientific principles" as well, despite the fact that I'm not sure epidemiology and livestock management (etc.) are big parts of training in anesthesiology. The question, rather, is whether as soneone with a reasonable knowledge of science and scientific principles the conclusions he makes seem like they are reasonably and properly informed by the available evidence. Whether or not we agree with those conclusions is another matter.

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You are misrinterpreting what I said, Sam as did Dave. For Dave, who said that I ignored the study? I was simply clarifying something that needed to be clarified. Criticizing the methodology and the conclusions is hardly ignoring it. I also never said that a historian can not be versed in science. He may or may not be well versed in Science and the scientific method, but not because he is a historian. That is not typically part of the turf. It is reasonable to question his scientific credentials given the flaws in the study. There is a lot of methodology that is simply not clear, especially as relates to controlling for the "free-range" pigs. There is wide variation as to what that means and there was no apparent effort to explain or control for that.

One argument I do tend to agree with you on is the food miles one. I buy local when I can for a variety of reasons, including the quality of produce I can get by doing so as well as to help support my local economy. That doesn't mean that I don't by from afar. I think that it is important to support quality agriculture no matter where it happens to be located. All things being equal, however, I prefer to buy in my backyard, which unlike the Farmers markets in urban areas is truly local.

[docsconz]

I am surprised to read such vociferous defenses of industrial agriculture from people who I know love quality food. Alice Waters is a personality and person who people may like or not like based upon how she comes off just as is the case with any other person. What I don't understand is how people here can take that and support the mediocrity (at best) of industrial agriculture vs. expanding the availability and affordability of artisanal farming (I also believe that "organic" certification has become essentially devoid of meaning - it is more important to assess the methods used by a farmer than the certification). I understand that it can be difficult for people with low means to afford top quality produce, but I don't understand what seems to be an unwillingness to expand the availability of this food.

[Dave the Cook]

I've just gone through this topic (quickly, I admit), but the closest statement I can find to "vociferous defenses of industrial agriculture" is by Steven (post here):

It seems, based on the best of what has been written, that a full-on shift to local production would actually be a planetary catastrophe both environmentally and socially.

Saying that the local model can't be sustained isn't the same thing as saying that industrial production is wonderful, any more than admitting to "support(ing) quality agriculture no matter where it happens to be located" is a betrayal of principles that generally support local consumption.