Eat Local!
As Lee joins Ezra Klein in cautioning against an overemphasis on locavorism, I’d like to emphasize in turn that there are lots of reasons to eat locally-produced food that have very little to do with the desire to reduce emissions. For one thing, as Jim Henley points out, local food tasty – and for a few others, it facilitates community, revitalizes local economies, and encourages the kinds of interchange that make us less reliant on the all-seeing wisdom of the centralized state. Oh, and it’s tasty. Call it the Cloth Diaper Rule: if you’re only including the emissions in your analysis, you’re probably leaving a bunch of important stuff out.
Ezra’s right, though, that not everyone can be a locavore year-round, though I don’t think that even the most extreme Slow Foodists would want to claim otherwise – for example, one of the best bits in the “Year of Eating Locally” chapter in Bill McKibben’s Deep Economy comes when he admits that he just can’t do without the (decidedly not Vermont-grown) bananas. And yes, if reducing emissions is your top issue, then the “food miles” approach is pretty clearly overrated. But none of that means that eating local and seasonal food is anything but good for the culture, quite a lot of fun, and very, very tasty too.
Filed under: energy, environment, food
Perhaps I’m woefully uncaring, but the carbon-footprint argument for eating local never appealed to me. The other arguments you mention are far more attractive to me. Looking for one way to bring down modernity? Eat fresh winter squash from the local farmers market.
I think that the reaction of a lot of people to such an admission would be that, yes, you ARE woefully uncaring – but I’m the same way.
I don’t know if it’s the same for you, but here, it’s also conveniently CHEAPER to buy local food, if you’re looking for things that were grown more or less responsibly. (So tack on “Battling the Monopolistic Price-Control Tyranny of Whole Foods” to that list. Seriously: they want to charge me $5/lb for tomatoes.)
Whole Foods actually does better than most supermarkets when it comes to selling local produce – or at least that’s true of a lot of their locations. But yes, price is another plus – I talked a bit about that in my TAC piece, actually.
[...] back in Louisville)—I feel like I need to offer it a thanks of some kind. It’s not because you ease my conscience (or try to, at least). No, the best way I can think of is to say, “Without you, Evanston [...]
I don’t think anyone’s arguing (well, certainly not me!) that there aren’t other good reasons for eating locally. (I’ll be heading to Eastern Market like a good smug Capitol Hill liberal elitist tomorrow morning, in fact.) But I do think it’s worth pointing out the limits of locavorism, lest it become a shibboleth.