Reddit mentions of Just Food: Where Locavores Get It Wrong and How We Can Truly Eat Responsibly

As someone who has read the book but but is still not a huge Pollan fan, I'd like to offer some thoughts:

While the book does have a ton of info and I think it's a solid introduction to a lot of big topics that someone who is less well-read in ag might not have encountered, the book is obviously very biased. This isn't even a huge insult or anything and of course you can expect it from anyone writing about something controversial, but it's just that Pollan has very clear opinions which he sometimes states like they are facts.

I think he has a tendency to sensationalize and over-simplify, saying things like "by fertilizing the world, we alter the planet's composition and shrink its biodiversity." While this might be true in some ways, its obviously pretty negative, as if shrinking the earth's biodiversity is the only thing that fertilizer does. I bet a lot of the people on here could tell you some pretty positive things about fertilizer that help everybody farm and bring food to your table.

I honestly don't remember too many details about this, but I remember him praising local food very wholeheartedly and there are many reasons that I think eating local isn't the solution to problems in our food system. I could write a book about why this is true (and many have- check out for example Just Food or Locavore's Dilemma. I'm saying this as someone who use to think local food was automatically better than imported food and I genuinely have the long-term health of our planet at the top of my list. My dream is to have a huge permaculture garden. I love /r/BackYardChickens and /r/Permaculture. I am the leader of my school's environmental club and voted biggest tree hugger. I'm clearly not just opposing the "eat local" mindset because I'm a huge supporter of conventional agriculture or am interested more in profits than environmental sustainability. Sorry for the digression and sorry if I'm starting to preach/get defensive but I think that locavorism is pretty closed-minded, isolationist, in many ways ungrounded scientifically, and not to mention elitist.

Also, one of the reasons I prefer to read books on food/farming other than Pollan's is that his can be very philosophical and heady. I think this can definitely be very interesting sometimes but other times I just want to yell at him "Come back down to the real, practical world where the majority of the population lives!!" Take his newest book for example- Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation or whatever. Though I haven't read more than a few pages of it, I went and saw him give a talk about it and I understand one of his points is that cooking is one of the best things we can do for the environment/future of sustainable farming. How can this be helpful/practical at all if so much of the population is working all day and doesn't have the time to cook or the money to finance it or the desire to do it in the first place?? I guess this is what I'm really asking and what I think is more important: If cooking is so great for our health and the planet, how can we realistically get more people to do it? He may answer this in his book. I don't know. But for me at least, he often seems to put a lot of energy into things (like the central idea of Botany of Desire) which are more philosophical and less down-to-earth. It's interesting, but in my opinion it's not going to do much to solve problems with our food system. I don't really know if I'm describing my thoughts well here but I hope I am. That said, as I mentioned above, Omnivore's Dilemma (and what I've read of Cooked or his other books, seen in his talks, etc.) does have some cool and informative statistics. Still, these are just an intro and not the whole story at all.

Another simpler reason for the downvotes is just that so many people on /r/farming farm in the exact way that Pollan criticizes very harshly. I'm not taking sides at all, but it's a pretty big difference of opinion that divides everyone.

Sorry for the wall of text, hope this helps! Read Omnivore's Dilemma if you haven't but please please please do not have that be the only book on agriculture you read. Someone could just as easily have written a book that is just as convincing as Omnivore's Dilemma but takes the opposite side, praising and showing the amazing accomplishments of conventional ag.

Final note- As a rule of thumb, I like to be a little wary of best-sellers, NY Times or otherwise. Consider what sells and what people want to hear. The theoretical book I described above which explains all the advancements in conventional ag and argues that our current agricultural model is already awesome in a bunch of ways isn't going to sell at all. Criticism and bad news is easy to write and easy to sell!

PS Sorry if I sound like I think I know everything and that I'm right about everything because I know this isn't true. I just get excited about my strong opinions sometimes. Also as I said I haven't read Omnivore's Dilemma for a while or most of Pollans' other books at all. Hope this helps, though!

I didn't say anything about organic food, I addressed the latter portion of your comment in which you failed to read the links provided by /u/ADexter and reached an incorrect conclusion.

Your logic is faulty, let's work out why you're wrong.

As I pointed out, the "Local food, food miles and carbon emissions" study shows that consumers' commutes to and from local vendors often give rise to larger carbon footprints than receiving vegetables directly from large-scale suppliers. Consider that the footprints produced by consumers' vehicles are one factor of the (GHG) emitted during the transportation of food products. Another factor relates to the Travelling Salesman Problem which, in this case, explains the inefficiency of small-scale farmers' redundant routes to supply various local markets as opposed to the large-scale model of distribution centers. Here's a relevant video.

If you find my explanation distasteful, perhaps you'll be interested in reading this book: Just Food: Where Locavores Get It Wrong and How We Can Truly Eat Responsibly

I hope this helps.