I don't

-"I Don't Feel Entitled, I Feel Guilty" is an interesting (bleak!) essay, but everything you need to know is right there in the title. If you can't point to any broad, structural reason why you're not making a zillion dollars a year doing something fabulous (and note that the author is employed, and not trying to make it as a hipster), it's on you. Whereas if there are structural reasons, it might just be you, but it might be something else. The timeless disadvantage to advantage.

-"I DON'T want to buy a food magazine with a model on the cover."

Thus an "Into The Gloss" commenter sums up the problem - well, one - with a new (and much-hyped) magazine "about women and food," called "Cherry Bombe." The concept appears to be, well, glossiness. Models pretending to eat. Fashion insiders (Garance Doré among them) and what they (ostensibly) eat. A "Spring's Best Cookbooks" section recommending Gwynnie's now-notorious tome in which she apparently reveals that she's allergic to foods that make you fat. Farm-to-table meets luminizer makeup accurately applied. 

And it all seems like a lot of good, decadent fun, until you get to the part where the magazine's founders are asking for donations. Not just subscriptions. Not investments. Donations, as if this were some kind of charitable or at least for-profit but scrappy enterprise. The word they themselves use on the Kickstarter page is "indie." The cover model - yes, cover model - is a woman you might know as a Victoria's Secret "Angel," which might beg the question, alternative to what? But, if it were in front of me, I'd read it.

-Speaking of reading material, commenter Moebius Stripper reminded me of a book denouncing locavorism, one whose co-author I'd heard interviewed by a skeptical Leonard Lopate. The Locavore's Dilemma: In Praise of the 10,000-mile Diet, by Pierre Desrochers and Hiroko Shimizu. And, I read it, but I confess to some skimming when it got very technical. The writing style, or maybe the subject matter, keeps reminding me of reading-comprehension exercises on standardized tests. I feel as though I'm going to need to fill out a scantron sheet about emissions and rice yields. But because I'm not entirely sure any book on this topic wouldn't make me feel that way, I'm prepared to declare the problem mine, not the authors'. (Those with what must be a stronger caffeine source than I have have provided a helpful point-by-point counterargument, which is in turn countered by one of the co-authors in the comments there.)

In any case, it's an important argument that will lose a lot of readers when it meanders from contrarian to conservative. If the point were simply that local food isn't necessarily any better for the environment or whichever social-justice concerns, then, fair enough. But there's a lot of economic liberalism, some climate-change agnosticism. If the point is that libertarian climate-change skeptics shouldn't be locavores, well, presumably they aren't to begin with.

The book was strongest when it made the point that projecting the aesthetic preferences of certain wealthy urbanites onto the global food system may not pan out. This might seem intuitive. Even in the prosperous West, even if one is prepared to overspend on groceries, even if one lives somewhere sufficiently coastal-elite, "local" ends up being, in effect, a garnish, not a lifestyle. I was at the local "farmers' market" recently - a room on the first floor of the public library. There were these small bunches of ramps - just the leaves, perhaps to conserve the bulbs - and they cost $3. That's not dinner. Same with foraging. From what I understand, it would be a time-intensive way to add some interesting herbs to a dish 99.99% of whose bulk and calories come from normal, store-bought ingredients. So policies that suggest bringing local eating to all - or retaining it where it's the subsistence norm despite what people might want - do raise the quesiton of where that food would come from.

Let me put it this way: I have never actually met a locavore. People who shop at farmers' markets and sign up for CSAs, sure, lots. But people who exclusively eat food from nearby, even just in summer? Not once.

The book was weakest when it failed to address, in language accessible to non-experts, why subsidies aren't currently shifting things away from local. Also when it claimed that farmers'-market food is not any better-quality, or possibly worse, than the supermarket variety. Even going as far as to claim that local strawberries taste no better than ones hauled in from California. It of course depends which market - not all are as regulated as the NYC Greenmarkets. But the real-deal local food, in peak season, is that much better. But even if it were not, fetishization of vegetables is one way to get people to eat vegetables. Thinking of them as a delicacy rather than a chore has its positives.

Meanwhile, there are such strong criticisms of the locavore movement that never make an appearance. The authors object to Japan being referred to as "parasitic" for its reliance on agricultural imports, and praise multiethnic cuisine options, but never mention that there's something sinister and xenophobic about some back-to-the-farm ideology. I'm not saying they needed to go all Liberal Fascism - it's for the best that they did not - but some acknowledgment of the racist undercurrents of agri-romanticism would have been interesting.

Less controversial, less debatable: they might have spent some time discussing the fact that the big proponents of local eating tend to be high-profile food writers who not only eat out all the time, but get to jet around and eat "seasonally" in whichever climate they feel like writing about that week. They're not subsisting on turnips all winter long. Or that ever since "local" became a marketing device, there's greenwashing with "local" flavor. They get at this a bit, with farmers'-market fraudulence, but it goes so much further. A "farm-to-table" restaurant is effectively one that, season-permitting, garnishes normal food with something grown on a rooftop nearby. And the thing where restaurants list which farm some ingredient came from - assuming it's even accurate, what percentage of a dish comes from a farm? Point being, even if locavorism is the way to go, consumers might be content with things that give the appearance of being local, but aren't. Which... might actually be fine by these authors, and thus might be a critique for another book.