Lessons from a 'local food' scam artist | Hacker News Reader

Lessons from a 'local food' scam artist

narrative.ly

39 pointsgumby36 comments

"“I wait every year for the real Jersey tomatoes. You can't get that country flavor in the city!” They couldn't get it here, either: These were New Mexican beefsteaks."

I used to work on a tomato farm (Florida) and I live in New Mexico. I've been all over the state. They grow lots of chilies here. And some corn, onions melons. They don't grow tomatoes on any scale that I've ever seen in New Mexico.

It was an entertaining article but I think some "artistic license" was taken.

Good to know, thanks. I was tempted to look up why they would be growing tomatoes in the desert.

People need to keep in mind that buying local food isn't necessarily better for the environment. Sometimes local produce production produces far more greenhouse gases than imported produce: http://www.salon.com/2008/06/24/food_miles/

That's quite true. To me the important thing to note is that while people in SF or Portland can feel smug about sourcing locally --I mean, it's great, it's nice to have fresh fruit and vegetables, I enjoy them myself living in this fecund area, the implicit bias or even superiority, is that they are better for having natural resources nearby than are people who live in metropolises which are far from the fruit of the earth.

It's at time a kind of virulent elitist bias in that they feel that they are naturally better --they are better for the fate of the planet than are people who rely on long distance transportation for their foodstuffs. to be clear, it's not many people who feel that way, but you can feel the vibe in the way they talk about it. It's very latent, but the feeling is there.

Afterall, few people can be like René Redzepi and source locally in areas not known for a cornucopia of harvests.

[edited out 'a kind of racism' for virulent elitist bias, at another poster's suggestion --I still think it's racism just not based on 'race']

Instead of "racism," how about "prejudice," "bias," or "elitism," or "bigotry?" Human races are already a cultural construct, no point in misusing a term by applying it to something that doesn't even have anything to do with ancestry.

I've edited the word 'race' out --but want to make the point that race is not based on ancestry. Its meaning can shift quite a bit. Recall the English thought German immigrants were an 'inferior race'. But as conceptualized in today's English, white Germans and white English are today considered the same 'race'. In vernacular speech 'racism' is equivalent to bigotry and also intolerance.

In your example, the English had a problem with Germans and people of German descent, that is, their ancestry. Nobody calls San Franciscans, Californians, "coastal people" (vs. Middle Americans), or "city folk" (vs. "country folk"), a race.

Understanding vernacular English is how I knew what you meant, that doesn't mean it's a good idea to poorly use a word that has a more specific meaning when there are plenty of more general words to convey your point.

I also have a problem with prejudice against muslims being called "racist" so using it to refer to San Franciscan localvore attitudes about the rest of the country didn't stand a chance.

I understand what you are trying to say, but classifying it as a type of racism is just incorrect.

fresh/freSH/ adjective

   1. not previously known or used; new or different.
   2. recently created or experienced and not faded or impaired.

What exactly makes these local foods qualify as "fresh" yet something imported and then purchased from a supermarket somehow does not qualify as "fresh?" Isn't "fresh" a subjective term that really only has a place in marketing circles to imply that it is somehow superior to other goods that may not be considered "fresh" by arbitrary means?

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Hmmmm, the definition of what is racism has changed over time. it might be a stretch here, but not by much. There are people who actually feel superior by virtue of living in SF and being able to claim their food comes from within a 50-mile radius.

I'm not familiar enough with all the arguments and the studies the author cites as to come up with a careful rebuttal of "isn't necessarily better for the environment." I acknowledge the fact that local food consumption cannot scale as it is (or rather as it is in wealthy countries) to the point where it replaces the current system. The reasons are not simply farmers not investing fuel efficiency, or "[not having] the infrastructure in place like the big guys do." There are cultural aspects arising from the current food supply system that need to be overcome. I'm in a country (Panama) where most of the population resides in warm (24-32 C all year) areas. Still, except for grains and fruits, the food consumed by the not so rural population primarily comes from the temperate mountains. Sweet potatoes (widely consumed a couple generations ago) can be easily grown anywhere, they are instead mostly imported and not remotely as common as potatoes. The original article does a good job of emphasizing the cultural aspects of local food consumption. That culture still has to develop to the point where consumers expectations are not constrained by the dominant system. As long as local food has to adapt to those expectations, it will be to a considerable extent just an imitation, and indeed an inefficient one.

"Society should also consider the economic and social costs of local food systems, which could hold back the growth of developing nations." That's a statement I find particularly puzzling, and that shows the article's tendency to base its argument on effects that are not analyzed well enough within the system. The globalized food supply system, has since the Green Revolution, made poor countries become net importers of food. The "successes" have come at great social and environmental costs (ever heard of "Banana Republics").

This is a good article but that modal popup for the newsletter has to go.

I surf the internet with Firefox's NoScript plugin. I haven't seen a modal popup in years.

You are almost certainly seeing increasing numbers of CSS flyover, pop-up, modal, and other tricks, however.

I've been tweaking my default CSS to kill those, though with considerable collateral damage.

Hint to Web designers: do not use any of those names for elements you actually want people to see. And don't hide stuff under legit-sounding elements either.

People wouldn't use 'em if they didn't work. I bet it would work better if I had a chance to actually view the content first -- who signs up for a newsletter when they don't know what sort of stuff is in it?

Javascript disabled by default on Chrome and I have no such problems.

Absolutely. I refuse to read pages with this crap.

In which the author learns that some real douchey people can occasionally be found in New York and New Jersey...

You can see this anywhere. My mom discovered I like expensive third-wave coffee...and shelled out for a box of Starbucks Via instant for Christmas (thanks, Mom). It all tastes the same to her. Meanwhile I'm sure someone is scoffing at my plebian mainstream Blue Bottle preferences... and the farmer who grew the beans has never had coffee at all but is happy to grow it and sell it to the weird foreigners...

I believe authenticity, like confidence, winds up being something you have rather than attain. My Chinese-from-China family and I will happily eat Panda Express orange chicken...because it tastes good.

In the end, if people are happy, why not let them be? They're only being douches if you believe authenticity itself has any value.

> Meanwhile I'm sure someone is scoffing at my plebian mainstream Blue Bottle preferences...

Haha. That person would be me. Gotta roast your own bro :) (Plus, $5 a cup??)

Hopefully this is a rare occurrence.

This is kind of the lesson for any kind of connoisseur. A lot of it is pretense and the rest is just learned behavior --finessing it and narrowing preferences ever more for mostly narcissistic reasons. We know that for the most part all tastes are acquired tastes. Even for spoiled wines, or the ones with the most natural adjectives. Their chemistry and effect on the body are quite similar.

So yeah, most of it is in people's minds -- which is why even professionals fail blind taste tests of characteristics the have been amassing expertise for over years....

It's such a self-scam. It's not even other people scamming us. We willingly participate in an elaborate social scam of a game.

If you want to know what tastes good or bad, ask a two or three year old -- before they learn the socially imposed preferences.

[edit] There was a time when people used to exalt at the freshness of the fish at their local sushi (sashimi) bar. "It tastes like they just fished it from the ocean." The received preference now to love 'tasty' sashimi --it takes fish a few days[1] in the fridge or freezer to acquire a more mature taste, whereas fish out of the water have almost no taste.

[1]https://tasteoftravelroge.wordpress.com/2012/11/07/fish-to-a...

The only reason to buy local is for a lower price, otherwise what's the point? Everything is local to somewhere.

Very nice article though!

As I understand it, produce varieties have been bred to survive longer distance shipping, making them tougher and possibly less flavorful. Of course YMMV on that score, since it's surely a matter of taste.

I grew up in southeast Michigan, where there was a fairly robust market for local produce in the summer. Things that you could get such as local tomatoes were a cut above anything that I've been able to find in my present locale.

Unfortunately, I now live in a state that doesn't have as much of a produce crop, and it's harder to find farm stands that haven't discovered the "upscale farmers market" phenomenon, where prices are often 2x what you can pay for similar quality in the supermarket.

My present practice is to buy whatever is nice, local or otherwise, which depends on the season.

> produce varieties have been bred to survive longer distance shipping

No, shipping takes very little time. They are bred to survive long storage.

If anything that makes local worse - you have to store the produce to be able to have it for more than a few weeks in a year.

Better to ship it from each area as it grows in season, then you don't have to store it.

I've found that produce picked yesterday at the farm up the street tends to last longer than produce that's been trucked from the other side of the US, not to mention the difference in the amount of energy it took to get it to me.

The produce up the street may have taken less energy, but the produce grown on a small farm 50 miles from you probably required more energy to reach your door than green grapes from the local supermarket shipped in from Chile. Do not discount the efficiency of the modern transportation network.

(1) variety across regions; (2) variety across seasons; (3) harder to scale up, and therefore less likely to be refined/processed/unnatural; (4) forces people to be creative about food, which adds to the culture.

Of course, those might not be true, but they are plausible enough to be attractive reasons.

One might argue that, technically, importing strictly increases options, and therefore makes it easier for an individual to eat a wide variety. But it also makes it easier for someone to get a little too comfortable eating exactly the same things for too long without thinking.

In practice importing diminishes options, both for the locations that find their market flooded with the standard supermarket-optimized foods, and the for the poor countries that are compelled to make their land produce the "best" for the sake of profits. In the last century 75% of crop diversity was lost, and in the decades after the Green Revolution poor countries became net importers of food. Simplistic logic that looks at effects completely abstracted from the system, would make such outcome look impossible.

Because maybe you want your money to pay for the food and not the global transportation networks that brought you the food?

Do you really believe the only reason to buy one thing over another is the price?

> Because maybe you want your money to pay for the food and not the global transportation networks that brought you the food?

Sure, okay, but...why? Better for the environment? Doesn't seem to be the case. Tighter-nit community? Idealogical opposition to roads? Protectionism?

Serious question. Why?

Local produce usually costs more in transport, not less. Which is why it's more expensive: To pay for that.

If I find local that's actually cheaper then I know it traveled less.

I think this whole "local" stuff smells a bit like bullshit, and a lot like old time bigoted xenophobia. Farmers from my country are better and more deserving than farmers in other countries (while at the same time pushing US-made GMO seeds on other countries by any means).

We see the same reasoning in manufacturing, with an objective collusion between the left ("cool, it's made by tattooed hipsters in tight pants") and the right ("cool, it's made by god protected Americans, who are, frankly, the pick-up driving, gun-toting angels of this world") against "overseas" and for "re-shoring".

I think food's different. The idea is that transporting food is a waste of energy and thus that local food will be more environmentally friendly. Doesn't seem to hold up, generally, but naïvely, it's a reasonable heuristic. It's usually not a nationalistic thing, but a distance thing.

With manufacturing, however, it is usually nationalistic. There's also a strong protectionalism behind "made in America" movements. To me, those seem to essentially be equivalent to snitching in the prisoner's dilemma: we're better of iff we favor our own products and foreigners don't favor their own.

But nationalism aside, it could definitely be that due to the idea that American-made (or first-world-made) products are better, the target audience is people who value quality over price, and thus quality will be chosen for in manufacturing and the business can still thriv. If you manufacture in newly-industrialized nations, you're doing it to cut price as much as possible, often sacrificing skill/experience=quality.

I should also add a third consideration: a lot of chocolate is produced by slave labor. A lot of t-shirts are made in abusive conditions. A lot of toys are made in emission-unrestricted factories. Choosing an industrialized country means choosing relatively stringent and enforced workers' rights and environmental protections.

This may even hold true with food, despite the way we treat migrant farm workers in the US. Avocados producers in Mexico are often under the thumb of by drug cartels. Those produced in California--probably not so much.

I've always assumed it's more beneficial to buy the cheapest and donate the money you saved to an effective charity. But how many people calculate and apportion out their savings that way? Sounds nice, but if it's not feasible to get people to do it, the rational decision is to advocate for an achievable alternative. Maybe local is that, at least with some goods.

Regarding your first paragraph, that is as likely to be a justification, as people's concern for nutrition and the environment in food exporting countries. Poor countries' net food consumption has been losing its locality since the Green Revolution. It is not hard to imagine that farmers in such countries would benefit from a (local) move towards eating local.

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