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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] Local Food: Part 1
  • Date: Thu, 11 Jun 2009 19:05:34 -0600




Local Food: Part 1
Wednesday, June 10, 2009
Tom Hyden For El Defensor Chieftain
http://dchieftain.com/news/89575-06-10-09.html

Local food is a very hot trend across the country. This column uses it as a
theme so let's see what it means and why it's important.

An enormous amount of energy goes into producing the food that we eat every
day. The process starts with tractors plowing to fertilizer being spread to
field laborers to combines harvesting and, finally, to the trucks that
supply the grocery stores and keep our refrigerators full.

Vegetables and fruits in the supermarket travel an average of 1,500 miles
from the farm where they were grown to your dinner plate. Transporting a
single calorie of perishable fruit from California to New York takes about
87 calories worth of fuel. We have created a diesel-intensive system that
gives us fairly inexpensive (but not very fresh) vegetables, tons of carbon
dioxide exhaust and an unsustainable energy budget.

What is local food?

Author Barbara Kingsolver answered the question in her book "Animal,
Vegetable, Miracle." Kingsolver and her family moved from Arizona to
Virginia. Once settled, the family vowed to eat only what they could find
in their rural neighborhood. They would grow what they could, buy the rest
from their neighbors or do without. The goal was to get food so close to
home that they would know the person who grew it.

Alisa Smith and J.S. MacKinnon present another way to define local food in
their book "The 100 Mile Diet." The pair proposed to survive for 100 days,
starting June 1, only on food that was raised within 100 miles of their
home in Vancouver, British Columbia. Visit their Web site and sign up to do
"The 100 Mile Challenge." You decide how long you can survive on food
produced within 100 miles of Socorro.

Another example of local food is a restaurant in central Vermont called the
Farmer's Diner. The owners have a simple concept: everything on the menu
comes from farms within an hour's drive. Their goal is to spend 75 cents of
every food dollar with local producers because farmers inevitably spend a
good share of their profits locally and keep dollars circulating in our
community.

"100 mile diets or in-state diets are simplistic," writes Dr. Gary Nabhan
of Northern Arizona University.

Instead, for Nabhan local means a farm, ranch or fishing boat that is
locally owned or operated using the management skills and labor of local
community members. Food that comes from some other part of the country does
not benefit our community as much as it could if it were locally grown.

Nabhan advocates fair-trade with other regions and cultures. Fair trade
insures that farmers and producers receive their fair share without
middlemen gobbling up profits.

We should also invest in our unique regional foods that cannot be grown
elsewhere. These are the foods that are most endangered by the
standardization that has become part of our food system.

Finally, one of the most interesting and challenging ideas for local food
is seasonality — or eating in season. We should eat tomatoes in the
summer, peas and spinach in the spring, winter squash and sweet potatoes in
the winter.

We eat those foods in season because that is when they taste the best. We
can enjoy these foods all year long if we learn to freeze, can, dry and
build a root cellar just like our parents and grandparents did.

In summary, the one thing that the ideas and people presented here all have
in common is creating a new relationship with food. A relationship based on
knowing who grew it, where it came from and how it was grown.

Part 2 of "Local Food" will explore three questions: What do we grow in our
community? What could we grow? and What would it take to make that happen?

Hyden began his gardening career at age 8 in order to win a Cub Scout
badge. Since then, he has been a school teacher, served five years in the
Peace Corps, survived earning a master's degree, and is still in search of
the perfect tomato and rhubarb in the desert. He and his wife, Robyn
Harrison, live on a farm between Luis Lopez and San Antonio, N.M







  • [Livingontheland] Local Food: Part 1, Tradingpost, 06/11/2009

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