[Homestead] Are you a locavore?
Gene GeRue
genegerue at ruralize.com
Sun Apr 29 10:16:37 EDT 2007
On Apr 28, 2007, at 7:10 AM, Clansgian at wmconnect.com wrote:
[James, I found this post in my spam filter file. Probably, I
suspect, because you changed your e-mail address. Don't know about
the rest of this tribe, but this spam filter is smarter than I am in
that it rejects all strangers.]
> . . . Somone (may or may not have observed) "100 years ago everyone
> was a locavore." . . . . True enough, but we don't have to go back
> nearly that far to draw a line where eating far distant foods was a
> luxury and and option and not an necessity. . . .Sometime between
> then and now all the food for the common masses moved farther and
> farther away. Now there are no bakeries, no slaughter houses,
> almost no dairies, and eggs come from several hundred miles away.
> Heck, even our cornbread and beans are from more than 100 miles
> away. . . . I would suggest a view of our eating history not just
> as local diet vs imported diet as much as when we became utterly
> dependent on the imported diet.
Seems to me that for nearly everyone food purchase decisions are
purely economic, e.g., if I can pay the price I will continue to eat
wild Alaskan salmon and drink Colorado beer and Columbian coffee,
knowing full well that environmental degradation results from the
energy used to bring those items to me. The health and pleasure
benefits outweigh my concern for Gaia. Today.
Food production facilities are run not on what is good for the
planet, but what is good for the bottom line. Local slaughterhouses,
dairies, bakeries, processing plants, and restaurants cannot exist
but for elite and discrete consumer groups. In few areas of the
country--California, Florida--is food production parallel to consumer
demands. Chez Panisse, the Berkeley restaurant founded and run by
Alice Waters, is an example. Here are some telling quotes from the CP
web site:
"The menu changes every night, designed to be appropriate to the
season and composed to show off the finest ingredients obtainable
including meat, fish, and poultry. . . .
"Alice and Chez Panisse have become convinced that the best-tasting
food is organically grown and harvested in ways that are ecologically
sound, by people who are taking care of the land for future
generations. The quest for such ingredients has largely determined
the restaurant's cuisine. Chez Panisse has tried for years to make
diners here partake of the immediacy and excitement of vegetables
just out of the garden, fruit right off the branch, and fish straight
out of the sea. In doing so, Chez Panisse has stitched together a
patchwork of over sixty nearby suppliers, whose concerns, like the
restaurant's, are environmental harmony and optimal flavor."
A glance at the menu--http://www.chezpanisse.com/pgcafemenu.html--
tells us that dinner for two, even without wine, will cost about a
hundred dollars.
More information about the Homestead
mailing list