Good Housekeeping Dinner for a Dollar: 50 Family-Friendly Recipes Under $1 Book

It's a six-year-old book, but still one that goes into a lot of science that many folks don't want to believe, even when the science is pretty clear. But there's good news, which the author of Just Food writes about in Even the Critics Are Coming Around on GMOs . And the article he links to, about a tour of Monsanto, Inside the Country's Most Controversial Company , is informative even aside from the surprise that a GM-hating reporter from Mother Jones would even deign to visit Monsanto.

While I'm here, I'll also point to an interesting interview with a Monsanto scientist by the Mother Jones-affiliated science podcast Inquiring Minds: Inside the Mind of a Monsanto Scientist .

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Late 2010 update: Want to read the micro-version of this book? Check out the editorial, Math Lessons for Locavores in the New York Times, August 19, 2010. It doesn't get into the complexities that McWilliams does, but it encapsulates the first chapter of this book quite nicely.

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In Just Food, James McWilliams goes all heretical on his former fellow-travelers in the food-reform-movement cabal. He looks a bit deeper into the global political realities that are so easy to ignore when arguing for a 100-mile food production horizon, and doesn't particularly like what he sees.

As Lena points out in her excellent review, his subtitle is misleading. The first half, "Where locavores get it wrong" really only applies to the first chapter here, although it is a note McWilliams returns to several times as a former fervent locavore himself. But the real story is the second half of the subtitle: "How we can truly eat responsibly" - and he will argue that much of the received wisdom in the reform movement isn't fundamentally responsible.

The faithful might well be very discomfited by his lessons, although those so ideologically committed to their current trajectory probably wouldn't read this anyway, since it might threaten their trajectory. Those willing to examine his arguments will find many of them very plausible, especially the ones that cast as villains those we are accustomed to putting in those roles. Agribusiness as a recipient of government largess comes in for a spanking, as does the American legislative machine that rewards agribusiness and distorts so many markets.

But quite a bit of McWilliams' story will still be hard to swallow, although my perception is that in his research he has examined the evidence more carefully than most readers or writers could: he is probably correct on all counts to a great extent.

The first chapter, as mentioned, covers the locavore movement. By this point, many of us will have heard the counterarguments: production efficiencies in some parts of the globe are so much higher than in others that it is still better for the planet that some food is produced far from where it is consumed. I'm lucky: I live in San Francisco, and within one hundred miles almost everything I might want to eat could potentially be grown. Bananas and mangoes, no: but that list is pretty short. Unfortunately, much of the world isn't so fortunate and would find an intolerably dull and perhaps even unhealthy diet. Countering these climatic and geographic limitations can be done with hothouses, for example, but for most of the year it is actually much more resource efficient to produce green beans in Kenya and ship them to England than to grow them locally. The truth is that transportation of the final product is a small portion of the amount of energy that goes in. Other energy costs are often overlooked, such as the cost of irrigating deserts, or of shipping feed for livestock. McWilliams returns to this point in the final chapter as he discusses how "perverse subsidies" make this worse - creating incentives for ranchers to raise cattle on subsidized grazing land and then ship subsidized corn (or soya) (raised with subsidized fertilizer) to fatten 'em up. The message Mcwilliams' seems to understand is that while local production is excellent when it makes sense, there are more circumstances where it is irrelevant and quite a few where it is counterproductive.

His second chapter is more reminiscent of the story Pollan tells in Omnivore's Dilemma: it's really, really hard to solve the food problem with organics. First, going organic introduces problems. Pesticides and fungicides can prevent food from decaying after it is harvested, but organic producers often have to use energy-intensive refrigeration instead. When herbicides can't be used, other techniques to keep weeds from destroying yields have to substitute, and some of those, like deep tilling, have nasty environmental consequences of their own. But one aspect that I hadn't been aware of is that today's "poisons" are much more targeted and less toxic than they had been decades ago, and we consumers often don't pay attention to that distinction. One study that he cites noted that "the natural chemicals that are known rodent carcinogens in a single cup of coffee are about equal in weight to a year's worth of ingested synthetic pesticide residues that are rodent carcinogens" (p. 64). The author of that study concluded that, effectively, "pesticides lower the cancer rate" by increasing the supply of cancer-fighting fruits and vegetables. It bears remembering that plants have been evolving their own pesticides, herbicides and fungicides for billions of years and we ingest many of those without blinking an eye. Caffeine, anyone? Capsaicin? Allicin? Diallyl disulfide? Maybe some bioflavonoids? We might be guilty of enforcing a distinction between "natural" and "synthetic" toxins that has less than we think to do with our health or the health of the planet. The third chapter is similar, but deals with genetic modification instead of chemical applications. A gene that creates a highly targeted pesticide within a plant generally means much less of an equivalent pesticide would need to be applied externally ' where it will also be sprayed on soil, into the air, and on non-targeted insects and other creatures (and recall, once again, that plants have long been fighting this battle on their own as well). For example, a pesticide created within the plant's tissues will only be directly consumed by the insects that attack the plant, not the many other insects ' some of them beneficial, such as bees ' that happen to be in the vicinity.

Chapters four and five really hit hard at meat eating. Most grain is grown just to feed animals; reduce the amount of meat in the planet's diet and many problems would simply go away. This is, really, the key point the whole book is oriented around: we already eat too much meat, and the trend is just getting worse with the changing appetites in formerly vegetarian-intensive parts of the world like China. McWilliams makes a strong case for eating fish if one has to eat meat, because fish are a more means of converting energy into human food. Yeah, there are plenty of problems with global fisheries, but there are some really good potential paths through that thicket, especially with fresh-water aquaculture and herbivore fish such as tilapia and catfish, especially when these are integrated with horticulture. McWilliams' discussion of how well aquaculture and horticulture can be blended is more hearteningly optimistic than Pollan's examination of Polyface Farm.


But finally, it bears repeating that one of McWilliams' two central messages is expressed in the quote: "However close you can be to a vegan diet and further from the mean American diet, the better you are for the planet" (p. 153). Get your meat consumption down to less than a pound a month and you're probably going to do more for the planet (and your own health).

The other message is that if the burden of feeding ten billion people can ever be done with the least damage to the environment, then we have to look beyond some of the more simplistic prescriptions. Pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers, GMOs ' all of these will probably be necessary. Reform of how these are used will also be required, but eliminating any of them probably isn't in the cards.

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Susan Albert's review of McWilliams' book has some points that I kept an eye on while I was reading, and I want to touch on them.

Her first point is that the locavore movement is an important response to fossil-fuel depletion. McWilliams doesn't address this head-on, but I think he is still on-point in his attack on the simplistic version of "locavore". Industrial food production has huge energy inputs, and transportation typically isn't one of the bigger drains. If the oil is available, it will often make more sense to use it to transport food from where it is most efficiently grown, instead of using it to force production in unsuitable regions. The prospect of near-term fossil fuel exhaustion Susan is concerned about would be catastrophic in so many ways that, frankly, people will automatically become locavores as the global economy crashes around us. Worrying about whether lamb comes from New Zealand or fifty miles away won't be much of a concern at that point: it'll be a struggle to keep billions from simply starving.

Her second point is that the use of genetic modification is fraught with problems, including low yields, gene contamination, and amoral corporations.

One by one: yields will change as the technology matures. Gene sequencing is still in its infancy: the state of technology is analogous to electricity back when Franklin was playing with kites, so expectations really shouldn't be too high.

Gene contamination is more of a theoretical problem than a real one: in most cases, the genes we like are for our benefit, not the plants; if a gene adds beta-carotene to rice, that doesn't make the rice more evolutionarily fit in its natural environment. If that gene were to contaminate other organisms, it would be an irrelevancy or worse, since any plant that expended energy on create superfluous (to the plant) compounds would be out-competed and doomed. Pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, etc., would be a somewhat different matter, but recall that these are battles that plants have been fighting since before mammals arrived on the planet. We've been taking part in this battle since we started selective breeding of crops. GMOs are a new tool that should be regulated carefully, but the potential is there for a radical beneficial change as well. Consider the analog in cancer treatment: imagine using targeted anti-cancer viruses instead of cutting people open or dosing them with chemo or radiation. GMOs in agriculture could provide a more precise and much less toxic way of managing food production.

Amoral corporations are certainly a real fear in agribusiness ' together with the oil companies, its hard to imagine companies that have a worse reputation. But when we discuss those nasty oil corporations we talk about reform and regulation ' why aren't these seen as adequate solutions with agri-tech? Furthermore, a great deal of GM-research could be done in the public interest if we funded research universities properly. The research leading to the beta-carotene-enriched rice, for example, was done at the Institute of Plant Sciences at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and the University of Freiburg. What if the funding for that research had come from governments instead of corporations? But even with corporate funding, the corporations involved (including Syngenta and Monsanto) quickly granted completely free "Humanitarian Use Licenses" to impoverished farmers. Of course, corporations exist to make a profit, not to benefit greater humanity, and so always should be regulated appropriately.

Finally, Susan points out that McWilliams' book didn't deal with how global climate change is likely to affect food production. That is certainly true, and it would have been a welcome addition. But I suspect that single topic is too big and important to include in a book that hopes to change how we eat here and now. And, ultimately, it would require too much guesswork and hypothesizing. We barely understand how the global system is gradually changing, and knowing how agricultural practices will adapt would require far more detailed knowledge of changes on the regional and subregional level. For example, California is one of the most agriculturally productive regions in the world but depends through its long dry summer on the snowpack in the mountains that ring the central valley. To what extent that snowpack will be replaced by rain (replacing the snowpack with too much flooding in the spring) depends on too many factors that are still unpredictable. And California is probably one of the best studied of the world's agricultural regions. The information Susan asks is critical, but it is simply too early to know enough detail.
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