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livingontheland - Re: [Livingontheland] Food miles and distance

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Subject: Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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  • From: Dan Conine <dconine@bertramwireless.com>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [Livingontheland] Food miles and distance
  • Date: Tue, 23 Oct 2007 08:03:12 -0500

I commented somewhere else about this article. It doesn't consider the economics of local foods properly, and all of the factors that go with centralized management of resources. Local food is basically a long-term thinking issue, not an immediate ecological or global economic one (which is how we get 'efficiency' experts to take over our food supplies).

In the long term, diversified food supplies and distributed labor forces will be necessary as the trucking companies go out of business from the high costs of fuels. If we think about switching to train transportation, it is better to have local places for people to take their products (these used to be called 'towns') for the train to pick them up. This whole interstate and massive road system is designed by city-based thinking, where everyone is supposed to live in ever-larger cities, sucking the life out of the land through a network of roads and pipelines.

If you reverse that system, the cities have little to offer the land that can be delivered through pipelines or roads, whereas a distributed population of people has a lot to offer the land in terms of husbandry.

The local foods movement isn't about the food as much as it is about having local people who are valuable to the land, but that's too abstract for the news to report.

Dan Conine
Belgium,WI





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