Free The Locavore's Dilemma by Pierre Desrochers

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

    Best-selling nonfiction books typically discuss the lives of interesting people, relationships, sex, soul searching, societal and environmental collapse, babies, cats, and food. While this book does address the last of these topics, we fell short in terms of providing memorable recipes, miracle weight loss cures, and shocking exposés of mad scientists playing God with our groceries. Even worse, we did our best to slaughter as many sacred cows in the food activists’ intellectual herd as we could. And, perhaps worst of all, we are reasonably optimistic about the future! Our first thanks must therefore go to our publisher, PublicAffairs, for taking a chance on two unknown authors during troubled economic times and for giving us the opportunity to work with a seasoned editor, Mindy Werner.
    As we explain in our preface, the chain of events that ultimately resulted in this book was somewhat fortuitous. Truth be told, we would have been more hesitant to write our first policy paper on the local food movement without the assurance that we would benefit from the advice and support of our good friend Andrew Reed, who worked for a few decades and in various capacities in the agri-business sector. Andrew once again read the whole manuscript of this book and provided much valuable feedback. Other individuals who shared their knowledge of agriculture with us include, most prominently, Dennis Avery, Gary Blumenthal, E. C. Pasour, and P.J. Hill. Thanks also to Blake Hurst for not only writing the foreword to our book, but for the chuckles he gave us
through his other writings. Of course, none of them should be held accountable for errors and omissions in our manuscript.
    Work on this project began at Duke University’s Center for the History of Political Economy where we were both hosted for a semester by Professor Bruce Caldwell. Feedback on various portions of our draft was then provided by some of Pierre’s colleagues in the department of geography at the University of Toronto Mississauga, namely Tom McIl-wraith, Joseph Leydon, Monika Havelka, and François Ndayizigiye. None of them should be held accountable for the fact that we did not always heed their advice. Pierre’s department is not only an intellectually diverse environment, but also one that truly lives up to the academic ideal, in no small part because of the man who was most influential in shaping it, the late Ferenc Csillag, to whom this book is dedicated.

FOREWORD

    Pierre Desrochers and Hiroko Shimizu should not have had to write this book. In a more rational world, their defense of what is so clearly true would not be needed. History, theory, common sense, and the most cursory observation and thought about the subject of food and how and where we grow and buy it would lead most of us to the conclusions drawn by the authors. However, our world is not rational, and most of what passes for thinking about food is as full of air as an elegant French pastry. Hence, the need for this valuable contribution.
    Desrochers and Shimizu take the idea of local food to the back of the barn and beat the holy livin’ 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 still 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.
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