Half Changed World

In her comment on Monday’s Eat Local post, Mary from Stone Court pointed me to this Salon interview with Peter Singer, in which he is critical of the local foods movement.

In your book you say that socially responsible folks in San Francisco would do better to buy their rice from Bangladesh than from local growers in California. Could you explain?

This is in reference to the local food movement, and the idea that you can save fossil fuels by not transporting food long distances. This is a widespread belief, and of course it has some basis. Other things being equal, if your food is grown locally, you will save on fossil fuels. But other things are often not equal. California rice is produced using artificial irrigation and fertilizer that involves energy use. Bangladeshi rice takes advantage of the natural flooding of the rivers and doesn’t require artificial irrigation. It also doesn’t involve as much synthetic fertilizer because the rivers wash down nutrients, so it’s significantly less energy intensive to produce. Now, it’s then shipped across the world, but shipping is an extremely fuel-efficient form of transport. You can ship something 10,000 miles for the same amount of fuel necessary to truck it 1,000 miles. So if you’re getting your rice shipped to San Francisco from Bangladesh, fewer fossil fuels were used to get it there than if you bought it in California.

In the same vein, you argue that in the interests of alleviating world poverty, it’s better to buy food from Kenya than to buy locally, even if the Kenyan farmer only gets 2 cents on the dollar.

My argument is that we should not necessarily buy locally, because if we do, we cut out the opportunity for the poorest countries to trade with us, and agriculture is one of the things they can do, and which can help them develop. The objection to this, which I quote from Brian Halweil, one of the leading advocates of the local movement, is that very little of the money actually gets back to the Kenyan farmer. But my calculations show that even if as little as 2 cents on the dollar gets back to the Kenyan farmer, that could make a bigger difference to the Kenyan grower than an entire dollar would to a local grower. It’s the law of diminishing marginal utility. If you are only earning $300, 2 cents can make a bigger difference to you than a dollar can make to the person earning $30,000.

It’s an interesting argument, and one that makes a fair amount of sense.  (I give the majority of my charitable donations to international aid organizations on the similar grounds that the same amount of money goes a lot further in third world countries.)

What Singer misses is the what Wendell Berry describes as "the power of affection."  Singer is famous for taking utilitarianism to its logical ends — holding that if you have the power to save two lives on the other side of the earth, but it would kill your child, you have the moral obligation to do so, because two lives are more important than one.  Only slightly less dramatically, he argues that it is immoral for any of us to enjoy the typical American (or European) standard of living while children are dying for want of medicines that cost pennies.  (The Salon article notes that Singer gives 20% of his salary to charity, which is far more than most of us, but still way short of the moral standard that he upholds.)

Berry’s response is that it’s fundamentally inhuman to expect us to value strangers’ lives as much as our children’s, to expect us to care as much about pollution someplace that’s a dot in the map as much as pollution in the pond down the road.  In his list of 27 propositions about sustainability, he argues against cities and globalization because:

"XX. The right scale in work gives power to affection. When one works beyond the
reach of one’s love for the place one is working in, and for the things and
creatures one is working with and among, then destruction inevitably results.
An adequate local culture, among other things, keeps work within the reach of
love."

I’m not willing to go as far as Berry.  But I do think that the challenge for our time is that if we’re going to live in a world of globalization, we need to extend the reach of our love.

So where does this leave us on food?  Singer actually has a lot in common with the local foods movement.  He offers a different general guideline:

"Avoid factory farm products. The worst of all the things we talk about in the book is intensive animal agriculture. If you can be vegetarian or vegan that’s ideal. If you can buy organic and vegan that’s better still, and organic and fair trade and vegan, better still, but if that gets too difficult or too complicated, just ask yourself, Does this product come from intensive animal agriculture? If it does, avoid it, and then you will have achieved 80 percent of the good that you would have achieved if you followed every suggestion in the book. "

Plus, this way, you get to keep drinking coffee.

Today’s book is The Disposable American: Layoffs and Their Consequences, by Louis Uchitelle.  It’s the book from which his NY Times article about displaced airline mechanics came from.

The book alternates chapters in which Uchitelle discusses the overall growth of layoffs as a phenomenon with ones in which he profiles specific laid-off workers.  One of the the arguments he makes is that white-collar workers who lose their jobs to "downsizing" or "outsourcing" or who accept early retirement packages are as much laid-off as the blue-collar workers that we associate with the word "layoffs."  (He notes that the specific questions that the government uses to ask workers if they’ve been laid off refer to "plant closings" and make it less likely that a professional will answer yes.)

Uchitelle makes a convincing case that layoffs have extensive hidden costs — beyond the well-documented loss of earnings — especially the emotional toll on workers who are told that they’re no longer needed, and who often can’t find a job at a comparable wage.  He also argues that they often don’t provide the expected economic benefits to companies that use them, as the remaining workers are demoralized and less productive.

His discussion of solutions is less convincing.  Even a die-hard liberal like me finds it hard to believe that increasing the minimum wage to $12 an hour would automatically result in productivity increases enough to cover the costs.  He suggests massive governmental public works spending, prohibitions on compensating executives with stock options, and a complicated system of reporting all layoffs.  By contrast, he sees most of the political solutions of the past decades — promoting lifetime learning, increasing the portability of health insurance and pensions — as acquiescing to layoffs.

At times, Uchitelle’s criticisms seem simply contrary.  For example, he writes: "Like Stiglitz, and many other academics, he [Robert Reich] accepted the findings of empirical research concerning education.  In virtually all of this research, people with a college degree earned more than workers with only a high school degree."  The implication seems to be that it was a mistake to accept this empirical research, but Uchitelle doesn’t offer any explanation of his critiques.  (The problem is that there’s also been an increase in within-group inequality, so the averages don’t mean that a college education is a guarantee of security.)

I noticed over at Life Begins at 30 that they’re doing the Eat Local challenge again.  Their goal is, for the month of May, as much as possible, to eat only locally grown foods.  The idea of eating food that is fresher, that hasn’t been bred for maximum durability, that you know where it comes from, is very appealing.  Of course, it’s a lot more appealing in May than in November, at least in these climes.  (There’s a great Margaret Atwood story in which the protagonist worries that her lover, a Canadian opposed to NAFTA, will "smell the kiwi on her breath" in winter.)

And then I read this article at Mother Jones about one of the advocates of local food, Joel Salatin.  I was somewhat bemused by the idea that he made Michael Pollan drive to Swoope, Virginia in order to buy one of his chickens.  I’m sure it was a delicious chicken, and Pollan learned something from the trip, but the gas consumed driving down there almost certainly outweighed any environmental benefits.

Last week was T’s birthday, and by trash day we had quite an impressive and slightly appalling pile of boxes from Amazon and other stores to put out on the curb.  But would it have been any better for the environment for me to drive around to half a dozen stores looking for things rather than having the UPS guy able to deliver everyone’s packages in one trip?  I’m not sure, and I don’t know how to figure it out.

Susan at Crunchy Granola had a post recently in which she asked her readers what each of us are doing to balance our needs with those of the planet.  It reminded me of a book I read a while back, The Consumer’s Guide to Effective Environmental Choices, put out by the Union of Concerned Scientists.  This book argues that there’s a handful of decisions that we make that really matter from an environmental point of view — especially where we live, how much we drive, and how much meat we eat — and that we should pay attention to these choices and not sweat the small stuff. 

The comments on my post about the "spoiled?" meme have been really interesting, and there’s also a good follow-up discussion going on over at Phantom Scribbler.

I do agree with Phantom Scribbler that if you re-frame the meme as "privileged" instead of "spoiled," I’d have no problem with the label.  At least some of the frustration with the meme is because a good part of what I associate with being "spoiled" is a lack of awareness of privilege.

Andrea (Beanie Baby) commented on how this meme has created controversy, and no one argues with the results of what Greek Goddess are you.  I think that’s because people don’t have an intuitive sense of what makes someone Hera, or a knee-jerk reaction against being Aphrodite.  "Spoiled" or even "upper-class" have every-day meanings, and so people are arguing when the results aren’t what they expect.

The NY Times today has an article about how unequal wealth can affect friendships.  Nothing terribly profound, but it reinforces the idea that people feel rich or poor compared to the people around them — in their workplace, in their neighborhoods — not to the world as a large. 

Last week, we were having dinner with some acquaintances, and the topic turned to houses, specifically the McMansions that are being built all over the place in the DC area.  A couple of people starting singing the praises of smaller houses, and how much more usable and friendly they were.  I had to bite my tongue not to say anything inappropriate, because one of the people making this case was our host — and I would guess that the house we were sitting in had approximately 3 times the square footage of ours.  What’s big and what’s small is all a question of what your comparisons are.

Judith Warner’s back blogging in the New York Times, and this week she takes on Caitlin Flanagan:

"The Caitlin Flanagan interview turned into a knock-down-drag-out fight. I had entirely misunderstood her book, which is, in large part, a paean to traditional wife- and motherhood, and which I had read as an extended metaphor, given that — as Flanagan makes exceedingly clear — she is a modern working mother who does no housework whatsoever."

"I’d taken her book — which begins and ends with chapters about Flanagan’s mother’s death and the author’s own bout with breast cancer — to be about love and yearning and identity and desire and memory, when, in fact, it is about cooking and cleaning and sex and child-rearing (sometimes a pressure cooker is just a pressure cooker)."

And she concludes:

"I will start by saying: I disagree with Caitlin Flanagan. I believe that the enormous investment we bring to things like “home” and “motherhood” — as to things like birthday parties and profiteroles — is metaphorical. It’s about ideas, not reality, and those ideas can’t be taken at face value. Our lives are material. We have to mine that material for the deeper truths it can reveal about ourselves and the world around us. And we have to have a sense of humor about it. For the other way, madness lies."

I didn’t think I’d ever find myself agreeing 100% with anything Warner wrote, but this comes pretty close.

I really appreciated the thoughtful comments that people left on the post about the MotherTalk event.  I don’t think Flannagan makes a serious argument that any of us should feel compelled to respond to.  (And if you’re really looking for a book about the satisfactions of ironed sheets and vacuumed floors, I recommend Cheryl Mendolson’s Home Comforts. )  Hirshman at least makes a case, although I think she’s fundamentally wrong in her claim that women who succeed by following traditionally male career paths are necessarily going to be better for women’s rights than their male counterparts.

Last week, Danigirl at Postcards from the Mothership did a meme that’s a checklist of things that you might own or have done.  The claim is that if you answer yes to 40 or more of them, you’re "spoiled."

I’m not going to show my answers, but I came embarassingly close to being officially spoiled, which sort of surprised me.   I think both the fairly high score and my surprise have a lot to do with the attitude toward spending that I inherited from my parents — travel is always worth spending money on, but god forbid you should buy clothing that isn’t on sale. 

The list of items is also sort of weird, and not terribly well thought out.  Why on earth should going to New York and visiting the Statue of Liberty count as separate items?  And the list mixes things that cost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars (having a second home, owning a boat, having a college education without student loans), with things that are far less expensive (we don’t have a TV or DVD player in our bedroom, but that’s a matter of preference, not cost).

I was curious to see where the list came from, so I tried following the chain of links back to the start, but ran into a dead end with a friends-only livejournal.  As others have pointed out, the list is both very American-centric and apparently aimed at a young audience (is having a queen sized bed really a big deal when two or more people are sleeping in it on a regular basis?).

Today’s book is Crashing the Gate: Netroots, Grassroots, and the Rise of People-Powered Politics, by Jerome Armstrong (of MyDD) and Markos Moulitsas Zuniga (of DailyKos).  It’s their breezy take on why the Democrats can’t win elections, in spite of being demonstrably better at governing.

As Peter Beinart pointed out in the NY Times, Jerome and Kos deliberately don’t discuss "message" — they argue that we need to stop trying to achieve the perfect platform, and start focusing on winning some elections.  (Peter, of course, has a book coming out this summer in which he argues that Democrats should be talking about a liberal foreign policy agenda.)

Parts of their analysis are totally on target — the incestuous relationship between the party committees that control the money and don’t take candidates seriously unless they hire the "right" (insider) consulting firms, the failure of progressive organizations to pay their employees enough to make them a career path for all but the most dedicated (or independently wealthy).  And I liked their argument that campaign dollars don’t have to be a limited resource that need to be hoarded for the most competitive races — by running serious candidates in even less competitive districts, more people are energized to participate and contribute, expanding the pot.

But the heart of the book is, I think, their claim that the biggest problem of the Democratic party is single-interest groups like environmentalists, the labor movement, and pro-choice activists.  They argue that these groups give Republicans easy targets, and hold candidates hostage to ideological purity.  The explicit comparision is to the Religious Right, which has used its power to support Republicans for the long-term benefits, even when their issues weren’t front and center in a given campaign.  They are particularly angry at pro-choice groups which have mobilized against pro-life Democrats. 

The irony of the argument is that Jerome and Kos are generally opposed to the DNC and other party insiders coming down from above and trying to annoint a candidate.  And, my reading of the situation is that NOW and NARAL have only really dug in their heels against candidates when they feel like the Democratic party leadership is trying to annoint a anti-choice candidate before the primary (cf Pennsylvania).  Obviously, they’re not happy when a pro-life Democrat wins the primary, but they generally just quietly look away, and recognize that the Democrat is usually still the better candidate on their issues.  But they’re trying to draw a line in the sand and say that they’re not going to acquiese when someone else tries to play kingmaker and expects them to fall quietly in line.  In other words, they’re not going to be the labor movement, which has loyally provided the muscle for Democratic campaigns for decades and gotten essentially bupkes in return. (Jerome and Kos also don’t seem to notice the irony when they proudly recount how bloggers knocked Tim Roemer out of contention for DNC chair because of his pro-life stance.)

The conventional wisdom seems to be that contested primaries are a bad thing, by draining resources from the general election, and causing the victor to be tarnished.  I’m not entirely convinced of that, for some of the same reasons that Jerome and Kos argue that Dems ought to be fighting in more districts.  I think primaries can draw more attention to campaigns, expand the pool of interested people and reduce public cynicism about elections.  The key is to figure out how to have real primaries and then still be able to talk to each other at the end of the day.

The Republicans seem to be better at this than Democrats these days, but I don’t think it’s because they have a magic strategy that the Dems are missing.  I think it’s something about being the majority party.  When you’re in charge and control the goodies, people fall into line even if they’re furious.  When you don’t have goodies to give out, the backbiting begins.

Other interesting reviews of the book:

• Mark Schmitt in the Washington Monthly
• Lindsay Beyerstein at Majikthise (particularly addressing the abortion issue)

As some of you guessed, the stuff going on that I couldn’t talk about is that I’m changing jobs.  I’ve accepted a job offer from the Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP) to work on workforce development issues, mostly focusing on issues of job quality and public and private supports for low-income workers.  I’ll be leaving my current job in 3 weeks and starting at CLASP almost immediately thereafter.

I’m very excited.  It will be a chance to work on a much broader set of issues than I’ve been working on, and to write under my own name. And I won’t have to argue for policies that I think are misguided. 

But I’m also more than a little nervous.  After nearly 10 years, I can do my current job in cruise control mode.  I know exactly what is expected of me, and I’m good at it.  The idea of facing a totally empty desk and trying to figure out what I’m supposed to be doing is sort of intimidating.  I was a very different person the last time I started a new job.

I also have a lot of good friends at my current job who I’ll miss.  I spent most of today walking around the office and telling people so that they’d hear from me before my boss sent out a group email.  It was emotionally draining.  It doesn’t help matters that I’m the third fairly senior person in my office to leave since January.  I know the series of departures makes morale even worse, and I truly feel badly about that.

I’m taking a pay cut, which is always a little scary, but I think we’ll be able to get by.  My guess is that I’ll probably wind up working a bit more hours than I currently do, but I’ll have more flexibility in when I work them (e.g. if I take a morning off to do something kid-related, I can make it up working from home later, rather than using annual leave).  I won’t be the only one in the office with young kids, which is encouraging.

I’m not sure what this change will mean for the blog.  I started writing this blog in part because I was so frustrated with what I was writing all day.  Maybe without the pent-up frustration, I’ll spend more of my free time exercising, or watching TV.  Or maybe I’ll use this blog as a space to try out ideas that I’m thinking of turning into more polished pieces.  I’ll have to see how it goes.  I’ll keep all of you posted in any case.

If you have a chance to go to a MotherTalk event, go!  I went to the one last night, and had an absolute blast.  It was worth staying up way past my bedtime, and walking around in a haze much of the day.

Miriam Peskowitz talked about her anti-mommy wars book, and then read her essay from It’s a Girl, about what’s a feminist mother to do when her daughter is obsessed with all things cheerleader.  Andi Buchanan read her essay about her daughter’s use of writing to separate from her.  Marion Winik read a hysterical essay from The Lunchbox Chronicles about the 10 stages of dealing with lice, and a tender essay about grieving the loss of the infants and toddlers her children once were, as they grow up.

The place was packed — 50 or 60 women were there (and RebelDad).  I saw some old friends, and met some new ones.  I had a really good conversation with Devra Renner, co-author of Mommy Guilt, about the tension between wanting to be the best parents we can, but knowing that we’re going to screw up some of the time, and needing to be able to accept that and move on.  (Devra, if you’re reading this, here’s the post I mentioned.)

There was an intense conversation about girls’ fascination with pink and princessy dresses, and I was reminded of Jo(e)’s post a while back about the role of shoes in holding girls back.  (I concluded that someone ought to market sneakers that are hot pink and sparkly, but have good treads.)  Someone asked Marion (who has kids ranging from 5 to 18) about the idea that daughters grow up to be closer to their moms than sons do, and she said that after going through an awful teenage stage where they cursed at her and didn’t want anything to do with her, her sons were now incredibly sweet and communicative and she couldn’t imagine that a daughter could be closer.

A group of us also talked about the spate of high-profile, divisive books about mothers (apparently Linda Hirshman has a book coming out this summer) and whether each book had to be even more shrill than the last one to get published, and whether there was a backlash coming, and if so, would it open the door for non-shrill books, or would publishers just say "we’re all done with books about mothers."

So, check the calendar, and if there’s one in your area, go!

If you’re planning on being at the Darfur rally on Sunday and are interested in trying to get together, drop me a line with a valid email address or cell phone number.

If you can’t make it on Sunday, but want to help, you can sign onto the Million Voices for Darfur campaign.