The idea that we should be “woke” is, of course, an excellent one. Who would prefer a society that did not consider the issues of justice, oppression, and how to make the world a better place after all? Yet this is not the same as deciding to swallow each and every contention that travels under this banner.
One example is the idea of consuming locally-grown food. Doing so consumes more precious and scarce natural resources than just buying the cheap stuff wherever it comes from. We even have a great big sign to aid us in working this out – things which consume more resources in their production do tend to be more expensive. That’s why they’re more expensive.
Sure, we can point to one or another input and say that local food uses fewer resources, perhaps in food miles or transport costs. Great – but transport isn’t the only input cost into the production of food, not at all. All of which makes this contention in the Washington Post more than a little odd:
Of course I recognize the value of eating locally and seasonally. Fresher is better. I want to support my neighbor-producers. And I appreciate that we leave smaller environmental footprints when our grapes don’t have to have a passport or take a cross-country ride to a local market.
“Woke” eating brings me a sense of virtuue.
Yes, woke does mean socially and environmentally conscious. But why should it mean eating food with a higher environmental footprint? This very subject of grapes was dealt with by Adam Smith back in 1776. And as we should all know, all economics since is either footnotes or wrong.
He points out that by using glasses (greenhouses to us), hotbeds, and hot walls it is possible to grow excellent grapes in Scotland, from which one can make very good wine. Yet it costs 30 times the price to do so, rather than just getting the wine from France, where the sun and climate do all that work of the glasses and hot bits.
Of course, it’s difficult to work through all of the various inputs into any specific process. But we’ve got a shorthand for it – price. All inputs do have to be paid for (and when they’re not, as with externalities, we should insert them) and anyone selling at below input cost rapidly goes bust. Thus the price of something out there is an excellent guide to the value of inputs that go into producing whatever it is. Higher prices mean higher inputs – a greater environmental footprint that is.
What this tells us about food decisions is therefore obvious. There are parts of the year, small portions of a season, when local food is cheaper than anything else. That’s when we get the three-week glut of tomatoes, rapidly followed by the tonnages of green beans from everyone’s’ garden, no one even being able to give their surplus away. Each such food has its time. Yet outside those times the very fact that industrially-grown food from far away is cheaper is telling us that the conventional, non-local food has a lower environmental footprint.
Sure, be woke, why not? But for goodness sake, be sensible about it. A low price means, by definition, a lower level of inputs into the production process. Thus eating cheap food is the route to a lower environmental footprint – the market system has already done all of those calculations for us.
Locally grown heritage tomatoes? Hey, whatever floats your boat. But don’t think you’re saving the planet by demanding high-cost foods – quite the opposite.
Tim Worstall (@worstall) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a senior fellow at the Adam Smith Institute.
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