The Dallas Morning News has an interview up that Rod Dreher conducted with Texas State University’s James McWilliams, a self-identified “agrarian” who’s already made a name for himself (see here for an especially angry (and especially profanity-laden) response) as a critic of the excesses of the “locavore” movement. The interview touches on a range of different topics aside from the problems with “food miles”, and is quite informative and well worth reading in its entirety; for example, I’m not sure whether I’d fully understood this before:
… grass-fed cows require up to 10 acres of land per cow. And the cows emit four times the methane of conventional cows. It’s not sustainable. Methane is 21 times more powerful than carbon as greenhouse gas. In the end, it’s hard, if not impossible, to be a meat-eating environmentalist. It is for that reason that the most effective thing a socially conscious eater can do is reduce, if not eliminate, meat consumption altogether. Not a very popular thing to say in Texas, but there you have it.
In my home, we’re solidly on the “reduce” side; especially with growing children and a perpetually pregnant and/or breastfeeding mom, going off meat altogether just isn’t an option for us. But we usually go heavy on the vegetables and grains and then restrict ourselves to much smaller portions when it comes to meat: hence a third of a pound of ground beef, say, is usually enough for all three of us. I hadn’t, however, understood that grass-fed cows actually emit more methane than, er, “conventional” ones – though as McWilliams says, the environmental (and ethical) disaster that is factory farming is clearly not a better alternative.
Here’s the concluding bit from the interview, where McWilliams speculates on what the future of food ought to look like:
There’s an instinctive and quite understandable tendency to look at the problems of industrialized food and seek solutions in the agricultural past. The assumption, however, that our forebears hold all the answers is a bit romantic. We have to keep in mind that the world’s population has more than quadrupled since 1900, so the pre-industrial food systems that we often mythologize were nowhere near as burdened to achieve high yields. Beyond that, I’ve never been terribly convinced that pre-industrial food was so safe or ecologically correct.
The future of food production must achieve a balance between high yields and high sustainability. The only way I see this happening is if we stop polarizing our discussions of food into big industrial and small organic, and start seeking common ground over compromises that split differences. We’ll have to eat much less meat, many more whole grains, fruits, vegetables and legumes; tolerate the judicious use of chemicals in the production of our food; keep an open mind to the potential benefits of biotechnology; and worry less about the distance our food traveled than the overall energy it took to produce it.
As an aside, let me just say that it’s really this sort of compromising spirit that I was so frustrated to see missing from that NRO piece on Alice Waters. In any case, do read the whole thing.
Elsewhere: McWilliams’s forthcoming, provocatively-titled book.
Filed under: agriculture, environment, food
I’d prefer to have local than shipped or factory produced. I’m not a farmer, apart from my own yard, but I found the suggestion that organic is an anachronistic throw back insulting. That’s not to say I’m strict 100 miler. I have no intention of curtailing my coffee or chocolate habits. Buying local food is about community and growing a foundation for a population. It’s more than dollars and cents. To the extent that micro farming needs to improve, they need the demand pressure to achieve it. The quality of organic food has improved drastically over the past decade. There’s no reason to think it won’t continue to do so without the help of Monsanto.
I agree with this, and I think it’s fair to criticize McWilliams for giving short shrift to such considerations. Then again, the food miles concept is usually put forward as having more to do with carbon emissions, etc. than anything else; I think that’s an overly narrow way to motivate it, but if those are the sorts of considerations that drive you then some of McWilliams’s criticisms are pretty forceful, I think.
It’s also worth acknowledging that buying things across a distance need by no means be the end of community; it’s a different kind of community than the one that marks, say, me and the guy at the farmers’ market, but it can involve genuine human relationships nevertheless.
Yes, energy efficiency is important and the way many people think of localvorism. For me it also involves fighting monoculture and encouraging regional sustainability, a cross between Green Peace and Pat Buchanan.
“It’s also worth acknowledging that buying things across a distance need by no means be the end of community”
I’m just bumbed that when you move back to the East Coast and out of Southern Cascadia, I’ll have to stop reading you ;)
[...] 26, 2009 by Lee Via John Schwenkler, Rod Dreher interviews James McWilliams, who Dreher calls a “contrarian agrarian.” He [...]
Yes, reduction in the amount of meat consumed is a desirable goal. Of course, returning to the “romantic” farming methods that Prof. McWilliams opposes would have exactly that effect. Grass-fed ground beef costs something like $10 a pound, and that’s not even factoring in the extra costs if you want to raise it organically and/or locally. Meat consumption would be dramatically reduced, because the average consumer couldn’t afford to maintain his current eating habits. Or at least that seems to be one of the obvious results.
We pay about $7.99, I think, for grass-fed chuck; obviously it’s a bit more than that for steaks and other choice cuts, but on the whole the cost is about 20% higher than the reasonably high-quality, corn-fed stuff that’s also available at our butcher. I don’t, however, think that going organic or – especially – local is a significant factor in the increased cost; factory farming is hugely efficient and makes for much cheaper meat than putting cows out to pasture ever can.
On the whole, though, this comment is right on – but note that if we were concerned only with methane, then according to McWilliams’s numbers grass-fed beef would have to come at twenty times the cost of the “conventional” stuff just to break even. Of course we’re not concerned only with methane, however: CAFOs are energy intensive, create huge amounts of waste, and are extraordinarily cruel to boot …
It ranges between about $8.99 and 9.99 in the market around here. Perhaps a result of a greater supply in the San Francisco area?
But yes, I admit that this sort of approach won’t entirely produce reductions on the scale that would be ideal. I just don’t think it’s nearly as bad as McWilliams does. I also think that, between the reduced energy costs on the farm itself, and the reduced amount of fuel needed for shipping the meat, the reduction in CO2 emissions would at least partially defray the additional methane.
I’d be very curious to hear why grass-fed cattle produce so much more methane. I didn’t see much by way of explanation of this assertion (or did I miss it?). Is it that grass causes the cows to be gassier, or that there are methods of methane capture used in factory farming which cannot be implemented in an free-range situation?
I am also just generally suspicious of the notion that we don’t have to radically alter our economic structures, since we can just tech and/or micromanage our way out of all our problems.
[...] of animals, and sustainable livestock habits. (Doing both at once isn’t as easy as it sounds: see here, and be sure to read the [...]