Home Consumption
One way to understand what’s on our plates is by measuring the food-miles a meal has traveled. It isn’t just the distance a product has been shipped, but the infrastructure necessary for preserving that food during transport--for example, the long “cold chain” to keep vegetables or meats from spoiling. In addition to this direct transport, there is also the related shipment of fertilizers, equipment, and animal feed associated with our current practices. Research suggests that food miles account for one-fifth of total agricultural emissions and are driven by the affluent world: 12.5% of people on earth are creating about half of the global food-miles and their ecological impacts (Li, et al.). These issues gain new meanings when juxtaposed to New York agriculture two hundred years ago, a time when the movement of commodity crops and people was rapidly changing.
The orchard shown here was growing a food relatively well-suited for transport. Apples could be safely stored in wooden barrels and survive even weeks of travel by wagons, canal boats, trains, or ships. Other important crops from our region were potatoes or grains like wheat, oats, and corn. Farmers wanted to produce beyond what was called “home consumption,” in other words export their goods, because their crops could reach additional markets and sometimes receive a higher price elsewhere. In 1845, the Genesee Farmer reported on a Westchester County orchardist who shipped Newtown Pippen apples to London, where they sold for $21 per barrel--more than $800 in current terms (“American Apples”). Still, canal and then railroad shippers, along with mill consortiums, came to control much of the market and were the source of bitter grievances by farmers. Governments wanted home production, along with both home and foreign consumption, in order to balance trade deficits from the import of manufactured goods. Individual orchards were linked to world markets a lot earlier than old black & white photographs would suggest.
Growing for home consumption was considered a sign of underdeveloped agriculture, economic subsistence at best, so it was argued that farmers “must prepare themselves to meet the competition of the commercial world in the markets of the commercial world” (Wright 238). In theory different regions were ecologically suited to different crops, as a state agricultural commissioner explained in 1846: “The western and northern portions of the state are best adapted to the cultivation of wheat, potatoes, oats, while the southern and eastern portions seem most favorable to corn, barley, peas, beans, [turnips], and flax. The middle counties afford the best encouragement to the raising of cattle” (Randall 183). And in fact the average bushels per acre for wheat--to mention one example--showed a yield ranging from 15 bushels to 19½ in different counties. It would make sense for regions to exchange crops that are less resource-intensive and require fewer amendments to the soil, but what is the circumference of that foodshed? What kinds of cargo are being transported, for how many food-miles, to make those journeys worth the cost in economic and ecological terms?
In practice, the dynamics of home consumption vs. the export of commodities were far from rational. Some farmers followed sustainable practices, whereas most simply followed traditions or trends. The search for novel crops that could be exported led to interest in hops, grapes, and alpaca. There were those who persisted in the hope that wheat could be grown in places like New England by amending soil with South American bat guano--a miracle product of the 1800s sometimes faked in New Jersey factories (“Wheat Culture” 283; “Manufactured”). Newer regions in the West seemed more productive only because they hadn’t exhausted their soils, yet, while using the same unsustainable practices as their Eastern counterparts. And then there were those who praised an “enormous increase of the home consumption, as it indicates a corresponding increase in our manufacturing and mechanical industry.” In other words, the deprecation of home consumption seems to have been premised upon a desire for industrial development, for fear that--like the American South-- the nation would be primarily a “great exporter of agricultural staple products” (S.W. 339).
The consequences of those priorities have shaped today's global food system, and not just in the obvious sense that ingredients for a meal might have originated anywhere on our planet. It’s also what food-miles researchers call “the year-round habit of consumers in rich countries for non-seasonal food products that need to be shipped from elsewhere” (Tandon). Needful Labor has attempted to re-insert farmworkers into agricultural history, so in this regard it’s important to consider labor-miles associated with any given practice. Local labor shortages during the 1800s encouraged mechanization, along with the transport of migrant workers across thousands of miles. Currently it’s unthinkable for a region in New York to provide both the food and labor for home consumption--we want to eat crisp apples at all times of the year but expect others to harvest them. And so the current arrangement is to have year-round migrant residents, with no legal status and the object of xenophobic fears, pick the apples while we pretend they're not here.
In 1850 editors of The Genesee Farmer, at this point watching a boom in agriculture away from Western New York, bitterly criticized the logic of aspatial food systems: “Let us construct railroads and canals, improve our navigable rivers and lake harbors, purchase the best farm implements, and then employ all our capital and energies in transforming every atom in the soil which will make grain, provisions, and wool, into those marketable commodities, and send them to distant cities and nations for consumption” (“A General View” 133). All of that infrastructure, for everything besides healthy soil. Radically reducing food-miles forces us to confront a different set of choices, one that initially looks like impoverishment--no strawberries in January?--but restores our broken connection to local ecosystems.
Works Consulted
-- “A General View of American Agriculture.” The Genesee Farmer 11.6 (June 1850): 130-133. Courtesy of Internet Archive
-- “American Apples in England.” The Genesee Farmer 6.11 (June 1845): 175. Courtesy of Internet Archive
-- Li, Mengyu, et al., “Global Food-Miles Account for Nearly 20% of Total Food-Systems Emissions,” Nature Food 3 (2022): 445-453.
-- “Manufactured Manures--Good Evil Spoken Of.” The Genesee Farmer 17.11 (Nov. 1856): 337. Courtesy of Internet Archive
-- Randall, S.S. “Agricultural Statistics of New York.” The Genesee Farmer 7.8 (Aug. 1846): 183-185. Courtesy of Internet Archive
-- S.W. “Notes for the Month.” The Genesee Farmer 19.11 (Nov. 1858): 339-340. Courtesy of Internet Archive
-- Tandon, Ayesha. “‘Food Miles’ Have Larger Climate Impact Than Thought, Study Suggests.” Carbon Brief 20 June 2022. Link to Article
-- “Wheat Culture in New England.” The Genesee Farmer 13.8 (Aug. 1852): 283-284. Courtesy of Internet Archive
-- Wright, Silas. “Address of the Late Silas Wright, Read Before the State Agricultural Society, at Saratoga Springs.” The Genesee Farmer 8.10 (Oct. 1847): 238-242. Courtesy of Internet Archive