Victual Reality columnist/farmer Tom Philpott snaps the locavore’s Achilles tendon in a recent review of Paul Roberts’s The End of Food, on the eco-news site Grist.

[snip]
“Reading through the recent food-politics bookshelf, it’s too easy to take away an “industrial food bad, local food good” attitude. But how many modern-day locavores would readily embrace the life of, say, a 19th-century prairie farmer, tending to livestock, grain crops, and a vegetable patch without electricity or machine power? Shopping at farmers markets and joining CSAs — activities I wholeheartedly support — present a necessary challenge to a global food system gone mad, but are unlikely to prove sufficient for transforming it. To mount a real challenge, we’ll need a clear-eyed grounding in the history and economics of food production, in addition to locavore zeal.”

And, later, following a pithy overview of the last, oh, 500 years of global famines:

“In many ways, modern food production is an attractive response to centuries of chronic food insecurity. Who wants to spend nearly all of one’s income on food, and rely on sugared tea as a key source of calories, as did the 19th-century British working class? Who wants to spend hours a day preparing food as peasant women did, not by choice but for survival? By the dawn of the 20th century, people quite understandably longed for food security and freedom from drudgery. The modern food system — for all of the new problems it created — largely met those desires, at least in the United States and Europe. The locavore movement will eventually have to confront them head on.”

[/snip]

There’s a lot more but what I really like about this is how handily Philpott nails (what I see as) the basic problem with localism. To wit: The industrial food system was set up specifically to meet the needs of hungry cities,* home to millions of people at far remove from farms, and the world is not going to magically deindustrialize and deurbanize if we all start growing our own tomatoes.

Not to knock homegrown tomatoes, okay?** But in recent years much of what’s good about “local eating” has gotten obscured by such a cloud of romantic b.s. that it’s increasingly hard to suss out the actual benefits–and limits–of the practice. It’s one thing to throw down all personal-is-political, and I’ll happily support the idea that individual choice can and should be yoked to collective change. But for change to happen the whole discussion has to move beyond visions of a self-sufficient agrarian utopia full of polyculture farms and scrappy libertarian farmers.

The absence of any real provision for the hungry masses was my big problem with The Omnivore’s Dilemma, two years ago. Pollan’s an terrific, elegant storyteller and makes a persuasive case for small ventures like Joel Salatin’s Polyface Farms. But even 10,000 Salatins couldn’t feed the New York metro area. Other than Mark Winne’s book I’ve read little in the interim that addresses who, other than Monsanto, could. (And, no, I never got around to that copy of The End of Food that I lugged up here. I guess maybe I should.)

Seattle-based Philpott, fwiw, was just named one of ten movers and shakers to watch (or something like that) in Food and Wine’s 30th-anniversary issue. I’m new to his column but based on this review, and this other recent bit about milpas–the little garden plots that are Mexico’s models of commonsense “polyculture”–I’ll be coming back.

*And, yes, to make money for Big Agribusiness. But I’m not going to get into that here.

**Those tomatoes just damn taste better. The ones I got from Ingrid’s garden on Saturday, for example, are delish, and, yes, traveled about half a mile.