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[Gene GeRue <genegerue AT ruralize.com>]

A Locally Grown Diet With Fuss but No Muss

Trevor Paque at work in San Francisco in a garden his company planted  
in a client’s backyard.
By KIM SEVERSON
Published: July 22, 2008
Eating locally raised food is a growing trend. But who has time to get  
to the farmer’s market, let alone plant a garden? That is where Trevor  
Paque comes in. For a fee, Mr. Paque, who lives in San Francisco, will  
build an organic garden in your backyard, weed it weekly and even  
harvest the bounty, gently placing a box of vegetables on the back  
porch when he leaves.

Call them the lazy locavores — city dwellers who insist on eating food  
grown close to home but have no inclination to get their hands dirty.  
Mr. Paque is typical of a new breed of business owner serving their  
needs.

Even couples planning a wedding at the Plaza Hotel in New York City  
can jump on the local food train. For as little as $72 a person, they  
can offer guests a “100-mile menu” of food from the caterer’s farm and  
neighboring fields in upstate New York.

“The highest form of luxury is now growing it yourself or paying other  
people to grow it for you,” said Corby Kummer, the food columnist and  
book author. “This has become fashion.”

Locally grown food, even fully cooked meals, can be delivered to your  
door. A share in a cow raised in a nearby field can be brought to you,  
ready for the freezer — a phenomenon dubbed cow pooling. There is pork  
pooling as well. At Sugar Mountain Farm in Vermont, the demand for a  
half or whole rare-breed pig is so great that people will not be  
seeing pork until the late fall.

Although a completely local diet is out of reach for even the most  
dedicated, the shift toward it is being driven by the increasingly  
popular view that fast food is the enemy and that local food tastes  
better. Depending on the season, local produce can cost an additional  
$1 a pound or more. But long-distance food, with its attendant  
petroleum consumption and cheap wages, is harming the planet and does  
nothing to help build communities, locavores believe.

As a result of interest in local food and rising grocery bills,  
backyard gardens have been enjoying a renaissance across the country,  
but what might be called the remote-control backyard garden — no  
planting, no weeding, no dirt under the fingernails — is a twist.  
“They want to have a garden, they don’t want to garden,” said the  
cookbook author Deborah Madison, who lives in Santa Fe, N.M.

The rest of the story is at:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/22/dining/22local.html?em&ex=1216872000&en=3e079ade8d9776f8&ei=5087%0A