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[bobf <bobford79 AT yahoo.com>]

I like this new, short commentary on locavorism in The Mother Earth News

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Locavore: A Word to Live By 

12/18/2008 9:35:26 AM

By Gwen Roland

Trendy’s not usually my thing. For more than 30 years, I’ve worn the same 
outfit of thrift store overalls colored with Rit Dye. My hairstyle has been 
pretty much the same since eighth grade; when it gets so long it hangs in the 
toilet, I whack off a few inches. So to find myself part of the hottest new 
food trend is unsettling. I’m a locavore, the New Oxford American 
Dictionary’s 2007 word of the year. Furthermore, since I was chomping local 
long before it was cool, you might say I’m a trendsetter. This is heady stuff 
for a person who has marched out of step and in the wrong direction most of 
her life.

For example, there was a year in the ’80s when we lived on a tiny hammock in 
the Everglades. Hunters stopped by our primitive camp site where we weighed 
carcasses, pulled jawbones from deer and measured antlers for wildlife 
biologists. The nearest supermarkets were a world away on the outskirts of 
Miami, but that doesn’t mean we went hungry. We feasted on local tomatoes, 
green beans, avocados, citrus fruit, game and fish.

The fish were hand-sized sun perch caught by our son Brint. Several times a 
week we’d roast a batch of them in a long-handled basket over the campfire. 
No plates required, we just nibbled them off the tiny skeletons. One night we 
were late starting supper and had to roast them after dark. Not only did they 
get too brown — charcoal comes to mind — but by the time we finished eating 
we were smeared with essence of fish from slapping at mosquitoes with our 
greasy hands. It seemed like a good night for a bath.

Most evenings we washed quickly at the artesian well that bubbled up in our 
yard. To take a real bath with hot water involved hauling a battery to the 
park ranger’s cabin for charging. While waiting for the battery, we carried 
buckets of water from the well to a propane water heater. By the time the 
12-volt pump chugged the heated water to our bath tub, we were giddy with 
anticipation.

Bath night also meant we could use the freshly charged battery to watch our 
little black and white 12-volt television. By 10 o’clock all three of us were 
scrubbed, dressed in clean t-shirts and perched on the end of the fold-out 
bed, waiting to connect with the outside world. The screen flickered on, and 
the first thing we saw was a pitch for paint-on goo that would make 
microwaved meat turn brown.

There was total silence as we looked at each other, puzzled at first, then 
gradually realizing we were not watching a comedy sketch but a real 
commercial. We had tapped into a parallel universe at just the right moment 
to make an uproarious memory. The story would be told at family gatherings 
for the rest of our lives.

That night the joke was on us for being so out of touch. Not wanting to spoil 
the gaiety of the moment, I didn’t mention the sadness I felt that there 
could be a market for such a product.

Two decades since that night, the pendulum has slowly swung back toward more 
Americans demanding real food grown close to home. The grassroots movement 
has been helped along recently by books like Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, 
Vegetable, Miracle and Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore's Dilemma.

The Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education program (SARE), where I 
work in the Southern Region, has funded more than 700 projects supporting 
local food systems. To read about them, type “local food systems” into the 
project database. Here are a few ways researchers, farmers and community 
activists are using those funds:

* The Save Our Seed project used a SARE grant to educate farmers in producing 
organically grown seed suited to their microclimates. They use the seeds on 
their own farms or to sell to other organic farmers. The website has seed 
production guides and other hard-to-find information.

* Another SARE project helped establish the web resource Florida Farmlink to 
help farmers and consumers find each other. The site also has listings of 
land and equipment for sale, educational events and jobs related to food and 
farming.

*  Appalachian Sustainable Agriculture Project used SARE funds to track the 
availability and demand for local food in western North Carolina and then 
went on to promote ways to get farmers and consumers together. Their 
farm-to-school project Growing Minds creates relationships between kids and 
food by taking them to farms and into kitchens to help prepare their own 
healthy meals. (See photos in the Image Gallery.)

I don’t know what the word of the year will be for 2008, but for those of us 
who know the satisfaction of eating food grown within hollering distance of 
our kitchens, locavore is good enough to live by for another year.

http://www.motherearthnews.com/Relish/Locavore-Local-Food-Projects.aspx?blogid=1508