Transporting groceries from the store to households is a huge portion of food’s carbon footprint. Grocery stores make neighbourhoods feel like communities because they get people walking around and bumping into their neighbours. I’d say if you need to plan to pick-up groceries or get them delivered, then you don’t have food security – never mind how far the food took to get to the store.
500 metres is commonly used in urban planning because it’s the distance the average person walks in 5 minutes (I’ve previously used 400). For groceries, it’s the distance that old people can transport a few days worth of food on foot and young people are willing to “run out” to. Beyond 500 metres people start taking a car.
Alison recently asked me to comment on the viability of a permanent food market in Victoria. I say that’s putting the cart before the horse: many people in Victoria can’t even get to a regular grocery store! Council should figure out how to solve that key environmental, social and security issue before they start worrying about fancy markets.
Here are the 500-metre radii around full-service grocery stores in the municipality of Victoria:
There are food stores that are less than full service. They don’t have butchers, so carnivores who like fresh meat will have to shop somewhere else frequently. They have uneven produce quality and selection. I believe most people who live by these stores will regularly make a trip to a full-service grocery store. You can select the checkbox to display each store on the map:
Famously, creativity comes from constraints. I cook creatively and emphasizing local produce is one of the best inspirations I’ve found. In the winter, the minimal selection forces me to find new uses for mundane ingredients. For example, European recipies used parsnips until potatoes were introduced from Peru in the 1500s. In the summer, a brief flood of local delicacies creates a related problem: most innovations in human food are actually preservation techniques.
I want to know what can be grown locally in each season to be more in touch with my region. I think restaurants should favour local ingredients in order to establish regional cuisines (having close contact with your suppliers also raises quality). I’m not sure I believe in terroir for vegetables, but just in case…
By sometimes selecting specialty food, I am more mindful of where all my food comes from and how it is grown. Mindful consumerism is critical when consumption constructs your identity. (Contemporary class distinction is between those who consume mindfully and those who consume economically.) By consciously choosing when I buy factory food, I elevate all my purchasing.
Buying a restricted set of food symbolizes a willingness to make sacrifices. I will change my lifestyle to save the environment, whether it means eating specific food or doing something else. I do some things to make the world a better place, but not enough.
And just because I preach against our society’s cult of authenticity doesn’t mean I’m immune to it: hopefully the cute check-out girl will notice my 100-mile heritage biodynamic shade-grown fair-trade açaí berries.
Say you did want to correct the environmental and social problems of the agricultural industry. Rather than consuming for great justice, you might try some good old fashioned political action. But what exactly should you action for?
Waste
There is a lot of waste at every stage of the food chain from the farm to your house. Fixing this is a big campaign in Britain right now. Start an education campaign or get into some civil-disobedient dumpster diving.
Carbon
Buying local or organic is a lazy proxy for low carbon. European grocery stores have proper carbon labelling, which reveals the two biggest problems in agriculture: beef and air-freight. Nudge argues that mandatory labeling is a reasonable government intervention; mail your MP.
The last mile
Getting food from the grocery store to households is incredibly inefficient. Talk to your city council about zoning and property tax incentives to get a grocery store within 400 metres of every household. You can improve your own consumption by ordering online.
When I argue that local/organic food is inethical, I am arguing against the status quo. Most people say that consuming these foods is an ethical act and that people who consume them are more good than people who do not.
According to psychologists, humans have a moral credential system. When you do something good, it changes the way you think so that you’re less likely to do good in the future. There are two possible explanations:
you gain a bias in evaluating your own behaviour (“I do good things. I did x. Therefore x is good.”)
you have a mental moral account: if the account has a surplus, you’re going to make withdrawals
A study at UofT found that people who were forced to purchase green products then went on to share less, lie more and steal more than those forced to purchase non-green products. (Here’s the short paper, but you’re better off reading the Slate commentary.)
If you believe that buying local/organic food is good and you incorporate buying such food into your identity (and I believe it’s impossible not to), then you’re going to put less effort into doing other good works. By analogy, watch a grocery store parking lot as people load reusable bags into SUVs. Local/organic food is a positional good, so people fixate on consuming it to make themselves cool while ignoring all the less glamorous good things they could be doing.
The under-developed countries are currently in Copenhagen, begging the developed countries not to destroy the planet and retreat into domed cities. The under-developed countries are worried that their lot is going to get worse.
Not that long ago, the under-developed countries were most worried about agricultural subsidies. This was the chief topic of the World Trade Organization’s Doha Development Round that started in 2001. The hope was that a fair market for food would drag the under-developed world out of poverty. The under-developed world has the land and manpower to compete on agriculture; they don’t have the skills or capital to compete on anything else.
The Buy Local movement is another form of market failure just like agricultural subsidies. Every time you buy from a local farmer, you’re not buying from a farmer in an under-developed country.
Local farmers don’t need the money. Canada offers plenty of other careers. Many of the farms within 100 miles of my location aren’t even profitable enough to be a sole source of income: the gentlemen farmers dabble in argiculture in order to get property tax breaks on their estates (an agricultural subsidy). Only small organic farms are economically sustainable, which is another market failure.
The just thing to do is to buy from the poorest farmer. You might buy local because it gives you pleasure (never mind making you cool), but don’t pretend it’s a righteous thing to do.
This makes it clear that the underlying reason people consume niche food is to be cool. And that doing so harms other people.
The only touted advantage he doesn’t address is “food security”. I’ve always taken it to be a kind of joke to refer to growing vegetables at city hall by the same term that serious people use to refer to anti-starvation measures. But if it’s the only area open for debate I guess I need to take another look at it…
“Best of the decade” lists are dropping fast and thick these days, but the BBC is heralding the continuing wine auction at La Tour d’Argent as the wine auction of the century.
Over the last decade the restaurant, which was used as a location reference in Ratatouille, lost two of its three Michelin stars. By selling off an estimated £1 million of its £22.5 million wine cellar it hopes to free up capital to reinvest in its kitchen, build fans amongst younger diners, and make room for more modern vintages.
I haven’t read In Defense of Food, which I’m told has excellent arguments against organic.
The rich looked inside their food and didn’t like it, so they voted with their wallets to set up a parallel agriculture system: organic food. They could have lobbied the government to restrict pesticide use. Instead they said, “let the poor eat pesticide-contaminated, low-nutrition cake”.
The decision to check out of organic food is to choose consumption over collective action. Partially it’s just easier to set up another agriculture; partially it’s fun that buying expensive food can define your identity (literally, you are what you eat). It’s not just in a Rawlsian sense: it doesn’t make the poor better off.
If you had two companies selling food, they’d attempt to differentiate themselves in the market. One might start making higher quality food and the other might make lower cost food. That is precisely what has happened to the two whole markets in this case: 100-mile heritage biodynamic fair-trade vegetables vs This is Why You’re Fat. Buying organic food might actually cause non-organic food to get worse.
It’s also not just in a Kantian sense: The categorical imperative says that you should act as you wish everyone acted. If everyone tried to live off organic food, 2 billion people would die. (Kyla shared that article, which I’ve used twice, with me on Earth Day – yay!)
This afternoon I rowed down the gorge to glo on Jutland (warning: the website makes awful noise).
The first thing that strikes me about a restaurant is the approach, the grounds, the exterior. glo is surrounded by great public walkways, great public sculpture, and overflowing public trash cans.
I anticipate the excuse, “picking up garbage is the city’s job!” Well, the government is ruining your restaurant: Stop making excuses and busk the cans into your dumpsters.
I love the space glo is in, and hate the hip hop blasting over the front door. I’m a giant hip hop fan, but when the music is so loud it’s fuzzing your speakers you are doing it wrong.
I’d add something in the long entrance hallway as well, video screens or similar. The corridor is perfectly designed for busy waiting — don’t bore the people lining up to give you money. That said, my party was immediately seated on the patio on a sunny, beautiful, busy day.
The interior was almost empty, except for delivered cases of kitchen supplies which hadn’t been properly received littering the tables.
We were seated outside under pleasant shade, which is a neat trick. I’ve been red for a few days, first from the beach, second from a patio with poor brolly shades. Worse, however, are those patios that are over-shaded and get no sun. glo achieved a nice balance.
Then we got our menus.
Laminated, dilapidated menus with no graphic design didn’t fit the quality the rest of the establishment was aiming for. This is basic stuff: Use heavy paper with a standard design, possibly a cover, and reprint and recycle as needed.
Edifice: 2 of 5.
Our server introduced herself and recorded our drinks. My new trick has been to ask for an Arnold Palmer, which seems beyond most Victoria bartenders. She repeated the order and I could tell she had no idea what I wanted.
The server returned with an iced tea, coffee, and a question for me: “Okay, we’ve had a discussion. Some of us think an Arnold Palmer is a light beer with a shot, some of us think it’s iced tea with a shot. Which is it?”
Fail.
I changed my order — they didn’t have lemonade — and ended up waiting an unreasonable amount of time. The tea eventually showed up with a round of waters, nicely sweetened. Lots of iced tea in Victoria is over-sweet, which is confusing because Americans, our main tourist demographic, drink the stuff sugar-free.
The drink service foreshadowed the food: slow, and not quite right. The medium-rare steak in my party came medium, and our eggs benny had clearly spent some time under a hot lamp. Not only that but the English muffin — which the server called an “English McMuffin” — was burnt.
I had a chorizo goat cheese omelet with spinach, mushrooms, diced tomatoes, and disgustingly overcooked eggs: scorched rubber. The flavors and textures would have worked had the dish been properly cooked — one side effect of the excessive heat was to string out the spinach.
These cooking problems were all a symptoms of an overly-busy kitchen. Obviously a steak order takes time, and when you’re busy it might go out a touch over-done (and should then be sent back). Omelets and poached eggs take minutes, or seconds, to cook and should be done last. Even a busy person has enough time to send omelets back until they’re right.
The egg dishes tasted like they’d been started with the steak and then kept warm — unacceptable. Here’s how to properly scramble eggs, imagine your way to a properly cooked omelet from here:
None of the tables around us got food in a timely fashion. glo’s kitchen is either under-staffed, under-experienced, under-motivated, or under-skilled. Or maybe some combination thereof.
The food was served without an eye to presentation, which is disappointing because most of the dishes I saw on other tables were presented with a pseduo-haute flair.
Service: 1 of 5.
glo feels more than informal — it feels too relaxed, like the difference between a sweater and a sweatshirt.
The patio’s bamboo shades had been trimmed into uselessness and then left in place. The planters blocked isles and bottlenecked traffic. They’d been useless long enough that waiters were stepping over the boxes — so why even have them?
Combined with the trash cans, the tatty menus, the entryway speaker-fuzz, and the unstowed cooking supplies, the unthinking arrangement of the bamboo planters gave the place the feel of a restaurant without a manager. Or maybe with a tasteless one. In either case, that lack of care was reflected in the food.
That said, the space is great and the “hard” aspects of the design — those that are more resistant to a lack of care, like the building and internal fixtures — work well. And being in Victoria on a sunny day is pleasurable by default.
Ambiance: 2 of 5.
Overall, glo is fine for a relaxed time out. I feel as though I’ve panned it more than it deserves, like a nice-but-stupid dog you keep having to choke. Let’s put this review in the context of the reviews I haven’t written yet: glo is above-average for its class in Victoria.
But with a little discipline it could be so much more. It just feels unmanaged — no consistent vision, no steady hand.