Fresh and Direct From the Garden an Ocean Away
By JOHN TIERNEY
International Herald Tribune

Charles C. Mann has faced up to the locavore's dilemma. At his home in
the Berkshires, he likes to eat food that has traveled directly from his
own garden: heirloom tomatoes, eggplant, bell peppers, kale, chard,
lettuce and other foods for his table. He and his family belong to a
farm-share program in which they advance money each year to a farmer a
few miles away in return for the farm's crops. He loves local food, but
he knows too much about it to be a truly devout locavore.

Mr. Mann realizes that none of the foods in his garden or at the local
farm originated within 1,000 miles of his home. They grow today in the
Berkshires only because of farmers and plant breeders and traders
throughout the world. While today's locavores worry about the
sustainability of the globalized modern system of agriculture, Mr. Mann
sees today's food system as nothing new.

The foods we consider local are results of a globalization process that
has been in full swing for more than five centuries, ever since Columbus
landed in the New World. Suddenly all the continents were linked, mixing
plants and animals that had evolved separately since the breakup of the
ancient supercontinent Pangaea.

What resulted, Mr. Mann argues in his fascinating new book, "1493:
Uncovering the New World Columbus Created," was a new epoch in human
life, the Homogenocene. This age of homogeneity was brought on by the
creation of a world-spanning economic system as crops, worms, parasites
and people traveled among Europe, the Americas, Africa and Asia -- the
Columbian Exchange, as it was dubbed by the geographer Alfred W. Crosby.

"The Columbian Exchange," Mr. Mann writes, "is the reason there are
tomatoes in Italy, oranges in the United States, chocolates in
Switzerland and chili peppers in Thailand. To ecologists, the Columbian
Exchange is arguably the most important event since the death of the
dinosaurs."

The consequences were devastating for many ecosystems and people
conquered by Europeans. Before the exchange, Beijing was the world's
largest city, and nearly all the other large ones were in warm regions
outside Europe. Columbus was seeking a new route to Asia because of the
technologically advanced economies that were thriving there.

After the Columbian Exchange, the cities of Europe became the planet's
boom towns, and it wasn't just because of the Europeans' culture and
guns. Europeans prevailed by changing ecosystems, often in inadvertent
ways that have only recently been measured by scientists.

The earthworms that traveled with the English settlers to Jamestown
played havoc with the forests and the crops of the Indians. The island
of Hispaniola was overrun by fire ants after the Spanish arrived.
Throughout the Americas, the settlers introduced organisms that spread
horrific epidemics of malaria, yellow fever, smallpox and other
diseases.

Meanwhile, people in Europe were reaping nutritional benefits from the
Columbian Exchange. Europeans' diets improved radically from the
introduction of potatoes and what Mr. Mann calls the first green
revolution: the widespread use of fertilizer, made possible by the
importing of guano from Peru.

As always, there were trade-offs. In China, the introduction of maize
and sweet potatoes to the highlands provided vital sustenance -- and
erosion that flooded rice paddies. A ship carrying guano fertilizer to
Europe was probably also the source of the organism that blighted the
potato crops in Europe and led to the great famine in Ireland in the
1840s.

Mr. Mann has come to sympathize with both sides in the debate over
globalization. The opponents of globalization correctly realize that
trade produces unpredictable and destructive consequences for the
environment and for society, he says, but globalization also leads to
more and better food, better health, longer life and other benefits that
affluent Western locavores take for granted.

"There are these huge catastrophes that constantly threaten the gains,
but I think they only threaten the gains," he said in an interview. "The
lesson of history is that the costs are high -- and higher than the
advocates of free trade often admit -- but the gains are higher still."

That lesson, though, has always run counter to the intuition of people
all over the world. Like today's locavores, monarchs in Spain and China
during the 16th century were deeply suspicious of becoming dependent on
foreign food (although the rulers kept failing in their attempts to
restrain trade). The monarchs also resented parting with their own
crops, a feeling that persists today.

"People in Brazil still talk bitterly about the Brits stealing their
rubber seeds and planting them in Asia," Mr. Mann said. "Brazilians will
denounce this horrible 'bio-piracy' while they're standing in front of
fields of bananas and coffee -- plants that originated in Africa." Two
other leading crops in Brazil, soybeans and sugar, he noted, are from
Asia.

Of course, the 19th-century rubber barons of Brazil had good personal
reasons to resent losing their monopoly. But those seeds transplanted to
Asian plantations increased the world's supply of a product essential
for the belts and gaskets in machines.

"There's no way the Industrial Revolution could have so occurred so
quickly and so widely if the world had depended solely on Brazilians
tapping rubber trees," Mr. Mann said. Indeed, the Asian plantations
proved crucial when Brazilian trees were struck by blight.

"On the whole, there are lots more winners than losers from the
Columbian Exchange," Mr. Mann said. "I don't want to tell Italians they
can't have tomatoes, or people in Sichuan they can't have peppers.
People have a way of taking things and making them their own. I know
nothing in my garden is native, but I still have this idiotic feeling
that it's my home."

How does he reconcile this feeling with this book? What's a locavore to
do? Mr. Mann doesn't presume to dictate anyone's food preferences, but
he does offer one piece of advice for locavores: go easy on the
preaching.

"I'm willing to pay more to get fresh vegetables grown by nice people
farming nearby," he said. "It's incredible to eat lettuce an hour after
it was picked.

"But if your concern is to produce the maximum amount of food possible
for the lowest cost, which is a serious concern around the world for
people who aren't middle-class foodies like me, this seems like a crazy
luxury. It doesn't make sense for my aesthetic preference to be elevated
to a moral imperative."

On Aug 30, 1:58*pm, (Victor Sack) wrote:

I agree. I prefer to get as much 'local' food as possible, but I
like the luxury of having stuff that is out of season here but can be
brought in to the grocery stoes.

Mann's attitude seems very reasonable to me.

On Tue, 30 Aug 2011 22:58:39 +0200, (Victor Sack)
wrote:

> Fresh and Direct From the Garden an Ocean Away
> By JOHN TIERNEY
> International Herald Tribune


Good read. Thanks for posting.

Lou