… is from page xiv of Blake Hurst’s superb Foreword to Pierre Desrochers’s and Hiroko Shimizu’s 2012 book, The Locavore’s Dilemma: In Praise of the 10,000-Mile Diet:
Many, many more people will pledge allegiance to the local food movement than will actually pay a premium in price or inconvenience for local food. They’ll support politicians who pay fealty to the latest trends and complain about conventional food to pollsters. Consumers and voters are willing to show support for local food while letting others pay the bill for their good intentions. The notion that the past was better, local is important, technology should be feared, and trade is bad are powerful, and extremely dangerous.
I’m eager to read the whole of Desrochers’s and Shimizu’s book, about which Hurst, earlier in his Foreword, says the following:
Desrochers and Shimizu take the idea of local food to the back of the barn and beat the holy liven’ tar out of it. The idea of food miles will never again rear its ugly head in polite company, nor should we have to hear about how far farmers are from their consumers. Now, I’ve no doubt that food miles will continue to be mentioned, and farmers at farmers’ markets will have those little signs measuring how far their wares have traveled, but everybody will know it’s just horse manure, in the same way that we know we won’t get to take the prettiest girl home if we drink Bud Light. We Missouri farmers will still drink Bud Light, and I have no doubt that people will continue to patronize the Ferry Market in San Francisco, but one can hope those programmers and executives in Northern California will never again take local food marketing claims seriously. That’s how important this book is.
