What Does the NY Times Have Against Local Food and Green Living?

The New York Times giveth, and the New York Times taketh away. On the one hand, Nick Kristof's eloquent plea to treat our farm animals more humanely moved me to tears. On the other hand, I've barely got enough digits to count the noxious "let's not save the planet" columns that John Tierney, Stanley Fish, and Stephen J. Dubner have tossed off in recent weeks like rancid croutons.

John Tierney -- the thinking man's John Stossel -- delivers his trademark contrarian drivel with 10 Things to Scratch From Your Worry List, in which he gleefully skewers a whole herd of sustainable sacred cows: plastic bags, plastic water bottles, food miles, the Arctic meltdown, and so on. Treehugger tackled half of his half-assed claims, noting that:

This may all be a joke to Tierney, but the truth is some of these issues are areas of real concern and because of this piece, his misinformation will be quoted back to us in comments every time we write about any of these subjects for the next two years, as the word from The authoritative New York Times.

Then Stanley Fish had to weigh in with a weary, Larry David-style kvetch in which his eco-freak wife sabotages his quality of life with recycled toilet paper, fluorescent bulbs, and grass-fed beef, of which he says:

It is of course expensive, but what is worse, it tastes bad. That is, it tastes like real meat, gamy and lean, rather than like the processed, marbled, frozen, supermarket stuff I had grown up on. I'm sure it is a better quality, and that buying it sustains the local community and strikes a blow against agrabusiness, but I just don't like it. And since I hate vegetables, becoming a vegetarian is not an option.

Never mind that he can't spell agribusiness and writes off a whole world of botanical bounty from amaranth to zucchini. I'd dismiss this as a tedious Andy Rooney-ish tirade, but actually, Andy Rooney gave a shockingly spot-on spiel last month about how Agribiz has spoiled our milk; it was a rant worthy of a raw-milk renegade. Fish, by contrast, comes off like just another tired, deflated geezer à la McCain mocking Obama's call to keep our tires inflated. Hey, when Andy Rooney's hipper than you are, maybe it's time to retire.

And then there's Stephen J. Dubner and his Freakonomics blog, where he recently wrote a post entitled Do We Really Need a Few Billion Locavores? in which he recounts his family's disastrous attempt to make homemade orange sherbet:

It took a pretty long time and it didn't taste very good but the worst part was how expensive it was. We spent about $12 on heavy cream, half-and-half, orange juice, and food coloring -- the only ingredient we already had was sugar -- to make a quart of ice cream. For the same price, we could have bought at least a gallon (four times the amount) of much better orange sherbet.

Dubner cites this sad saga as proof that when it comes to food, you're better off leaving it to the professionals. This is just willful incompetence, and so lame that I hardly know where to begin. Homemade ice cream is truly one of the greatest pleasures in life; to claim that you could buy something "much better" at the store is absurd, unless the store in question is some sort of high-end gourmet grocer that sells the finest gelatos.

Besides, half the fun is making up your own flavors -- we made a batch of burdock/dandelion/ginger last month that was wonderfully root beer-y; this weekend I'm adapting a Victorian recipe for cucumber/lemon verbena ice cream. And even our plain ol' chocolate is special because we make it with the best bittersweet Callebaut chocolate chips and Valrhona cocoa powder from France (remember, we're retrovores, not locavores.) Try finding that at the store.

I almost felt sorry for Stephen J. Dubner and his lousy overpriced homemade sherbet, until I saw the reader-generated Q & A he subsequently posted with agricultural economist Daniel Sumner. A reader asked:

"How feasible is it that the majority of U.S. food consumption be shifted to a local mode, how long would it take, and would it necessarily be a good thing?"

Sumner responded:

It is...far from clear that local production is more conserving of energy, has a smaller greenhouse gas footprint, or is otherwise nicer to the environment. Consider the energy it would take to grow lettuce in greenhouses compared to in the fields of Monterey County. It turns out shipping long distances is cheap in many ways compared to fighting natural comparative advantage to grow crops in inhospitable environments.

Ah yes, the old greenhouse red herring. Locavores don't advocate buying out-of-season lettuce grown in a greenhouse -- the whole point of being a locavore is that you base your diet as much as possible on what's in season in your region. As for inhospitable environments, is there a horticultural zone anywhere in America where you can't grow lettuce in the spring or fall?