Have i ever shared my Bubble conceit with you? It goes like this: the Bay Area generates its own little bubble, and when you venture outside it, you're shocked -- shocked! -- to discover that people do not recycle, or have much disdain for our now-former AG, or leave a restaurant before lighting a cigarette, or ... you get the idea.
The Bay Area is also a foodie epicenter, and when that combines with the Bubble ... well, I am probably not the only one who has wondered whether large swaths of the U.S. will begin importing even more produce just to watch San Franciscans get the vapors or, more importantly, if this whole local-eating thing will ever be perceived as practical or desirable outside of a few privileged areas of the country.
The Ethicurean began looking for food bloggers who live somewhere other than the U.S. coasts and began running a series by Ohioan "Jennifer aka The Baklava Queen" which made great points about how seasonal food is often as much about storage as it is about shopping. The Baklava Queen's posts almost make me want to take up preserving. Almost.
And Reason has actually been giving the local-eating movement its usual treatment "The Year of Magical Eating" (Apr 30, 07) observes:
Those who defend the pleasures and economies of modern life against the romanticizers of a zero-impact, local eating, fresh fruits and veggies past often overemphasize the soul-numbing drudgery of rural life. Picking berries and turning them into jam while chatting with a friend has been one of womankind's great pleasures for centuries. But just because it isn't awful doesn't mean that it isn't time-consuming labor.
while the farm-raised reviewer who wrote "Barbara Kingsolver's Latest Fiction" (Jul 1, 07) states:
At one point, Kingsolver makes fun of a vegan movie star who wants to create a safe-haven ranch where cows and chickens can live happy lives and die a natural death. Kingsolver dismissively writes: "We know she meant well, and as fantasies of the super-rich go, it's more inspired than most. It's just the high-mindedness that rankles; when moral superiority combines with billowing ignorance, they fill up a hot air balloon that's awfully hard not to poke." That pretty much sums up how I feel about Animal, Vegetable, Miracle.
And I do wonder if the local-eating advocates are in peril of being written off as out-of-touch -- if not with actual logistical and economic considerations ("Don't Buy Local," NYT, Jun 13, 07; "Food That Travels Well," NYT, Aug 6, 07), than with the everyday practicalities ("How to Eat and Read Local," NYT, Aug 29, 07). Adam Gopnik walks around this argument in "New York Local" (New Yorker, Sep 3, 07):
You go local in Berkeley, you’re gonna eat. I had been curious to see what might happen if you tried to squeeze food out of what looked mostly like bricks and steel girders and shoes in trees. I wanted to do it partly to see if it could be done (as an episode of what would be called on ESPN “X-treme Localism”), partly as a way of exploring the economics and aesthetics of localism more generally, and partly to see if perhaps the implicit anti-urban prejudices lurking in the localist movement could be leached away by some city-bred purposefulness. If you could eat that way here, you could do it anywhere.
and he concludes:
There are powerful arguments against localism: apart from the inevitable statistical tussles about exactly how much fuel is used for how much food, the one word that never occurs in the evocation of the lost world of small cities and nearby farms is “famine.” Our peasant ancestors, who lived locally and ate seasonally from the fruit of their own vines and the meat of their own lambs, were hungry all the time. The localist vision of the tiny polis and its surrounding gardens has historically led to bitter conflict, not Arcadian harmony.
It is even perilously easy to construct a Veblenian explanation for the vogue for localism. Where a century ago all upwardly mobile people knew enough, and had enough resources, to get their hands on the most unseasonable foods from the most distant places, in order to distinguish themselves from the peasant past and the laboring masses, their descendants now distinguish themselves by hustling after a peasant diet.
This may be so; but the fact that one can explain everything in social life as a series of status exchanges does not mean that social life is only a series of status exchanges. It was cool to be a liberal in 1963, but that did not make liberal attitudes to race foolish. All human values get expressed as social rituals; we place bets on which of the rituals are worth serving.
If there was something to be learned, it’s that the question of locality is one that can be either narrow and parched or broad and humanizing. As usual, the frivolous reason is the better reason, and the better reason looks a bit frivolous. To shorten the food chain is to pull it close, close enough to put a face on one’s food and a familiar place on one’s plate. To eat something local is to meet someone nearby.
Like I said above, I live in the Bubble. But I know a lot of you don't. How do you handle the local-eating issue? Do you garden, freeze and can? Do you or a family member hunt? (And if you do, would you send me some venison? Yum.) Do you buy local for some things, but not others?
I grew up in an area that was known for its agriculture and farms (Niagara, in southern Ontario), and it was easy for us to buy fruit or vegetables from local farmers during the summer to eat or preserve. Down the road, there was a butcher who made great sausages and from whom we would buy the occasional roast. In the winter, my dad would snare the occasional rabbit (mmm... rabbit stew). As well, my dad's family was (and is) actively involved in the fishing industry on the east coast, so we got a lot of fresh frozen fish and canned delicacies from them, too. In an area like that, where farming is easy, it's possible to eat locally on a regular basis.
However, now I live in an area with a very short growing season (snow in June anyone?) and not much agriculture. The fruits and vegetables at our local farmer's market are mostly imported from my hometown, or from farms outside the region. Sure, there are a lot of seasonal berries, and the hunting is good; the fact remains that there aren't a lot of farms in the area because the terrain and the environment are unsuitable. I try to make up for it by buying in-season and/or Ontario-grown produce in the meantime.
I'm on the waiting list at the library for Kingsolver's book, despite Bailey's dismissal of it. My understanding of the book is that it makes you think about where your food is coming from (as did Pollan's) as opposed to an outright endorsement of everyone moving to a farm to grow and raise your own food while ignoring how much work it takes, which Bailey seems to think it's saying.
Posted by: Rebecca | 2007.08.31 at 20:45
I buy organic, and if there's a local option, I'll buy that largely for the freshness factor (although preserving farmland is also a nice bennie). I don't really see the point of buying local over buying organic, though, because IMO that's basically paying people to spray their pesticides where I live.
Posted by: Polly | 2007.08.31 at 21:40
Basically, I eat as locally as I can, with local defined for me as "grown in Ontario." I use a organic produce delivery service that favours local produce and won't include anything that travelled to Toronto by plane. (I realize that this is both a luxury, and an example of me paying someone else to do the hard work of searching these items out.) I buy meat from Ontario farms, almost exclusively. I go to a farmer's market in my neighbourhood every week and buy produce and meat from local producers, as well as chocolate and coffee from people who are not getting their source materials locally, obviously -- not a lot of coffee plantations in Toronto -- but who are doing some of the processing here and paying a fair wage for it.
But soon the farmer's market will close for the winter, and my options for local produce will dwindle. When that happens, I'll continue the preference for organic, local will get defined as "North American" and I'll do the best I can -- still eating mindfully, but also making sure I'm eating well and not making it a miserable experience to find things to put in my mouth every day. I can only eat so much squash.
And I will buy clementines at Christmas, because I look forward to it and that's when they're delicious.
Posted by: drunken monkey | 2007.09.01 at 07:05
Up here, Southeast Alaska, you can get all the food you need if you spend your entire summer gathering it. They call it subsistence--a lot of people live that way. There really is abundant food here between fish and game and berried. Much of the intertidal vegetation is edible. (My friend make awesome kelp pickles.)
I have to work, unfortunately, so I can't spend as much time out as I would like. My husband and I do invest a great deal of time in catching/smoking/ freezing/canning salmon. I pick gallons of berries to freeze and can. We hunt for the deer on the island. Last year was the first year in my life where we didn't buy any meat from the store. I'm pretty proud of that. Next year I will be starting a garden too. Gardens are limited here...the soil never really gets warm enough to produce tomatoes or peppers. I can't live without either so I have to take what comes into town.
Thank you, Lisa, for talking about canning and preserving. There is nothing prettier than a shelf full of home-canned goods. Also, those canned huckleberries make summer seem like a possibility during January.
Posted by: Jacquie F. | 2007.09.04 at 12:11
i'm lucky enough to have a mother who gardens extensively. she gives me a ton of stuff from her garden and i freeze it. she also cans me lots of goodies and makes jam. i also frequent my local farm stand in the winter who grows their own lettuce, which i live off of. i do buy winter citrus fruits, which are of course trucked in. and i do occassionally indulge in out of season stuff, if only to make a cocktail with on my blog (intoxicatedzodiac.com). as for organic versus local, it's a toss up. of course the pesticides and gmos are killer, but the image of starving polar bears has been burned into my brain, and every time i buy something imported i think of this. so, co2, or pesticide & gmo? is there really a worse of these two evils?
Posted by: gwen | 2007.09.08 at 18:52
so, co2, or pesticide & gmo? is there really a worse of these two evils?
It's not quite frogs-v.-polar bears: Industrial farming practices are also thought to contribute to global warming.
Posted by: Polly | 2007.09.09 at 20:45