Beyond Food Miles

The locavore movement has been misunderstood, perhaps willfully, by quite a few people. Newspapers characterize it as being simplistically, or militantly, focused on food-miles and ignoring the “fiendishly tricky business” of balancing your carbon emissions on your dinner plate.

Never mind that many of the objections raised in the above Guardian article are canards. Environmentally-sound growing practices in Kenya for beans could easily be used in British bean growing, erasing the supposed advantage of the Kenyan produce in the carbon calculus. That isn’t exactly what I see as the point of being a locavore.

Being a locavore is about more than just food-miles. It is about community. It’s about the quality of food you get, and who you get it from. When I buy tomatoes from a local farmer, not only do I interact directly with the person who coaxed them out of the ground (something of emotional value to me personally), but I am able to buy thin-skinned, juicy, flavorful tomatoes that could never have survived transport from some far-away agronomic combine.

I have always preferred train and automobile travel over air travel for one simple reason: air travel obliterates geography. You enter the hermetic tube in one place, sit a while and exit the hermetic tube in different surroundings. The intervening spaces are obliterated, are no longer part of your reality, and your travels become a series of points, not a journey. Modern food distribution does much the same thing.

Having the produce of the entire world available everywhere in the developed world all year long irrespective of season also destroys any sense of place, perhaps more so than air travel, in that the ubiquity of food stuffs available seems normal and commonplace. A locavore on the other hand endeavors to discover something about where they actually are now. It is an investigation of place.

If the locavore dream of the 100-mile (or 50-mile) diet is impractical currently, that in no way damns the locavore ideals. It points out the destruction of place, of locality, in the current food system, and asks the important question: is this the only way? In a myriad of ways, it also answers that question with a resounding No. Perhaps where I am now does not produce an abundance of food, but in most cases, it could, if only the will were there to do so. Locavorism is that will. It points the way to a different, older, way of eating, of living, of connecting withthe place where you are now.