you can take the boy out of the midwest, but...

[jfb]

I was reading about one Santa Cruz resident's experiment eating only locally grown food, an idea that I think about a lot, and ran across this:

Happily I am not a coffee addict, but I do enjoy a cup of tea each morning. That goes too. Away with the exotic spices, salt and grains, none of which are grown in our area: no bread, pasta, oatmeal or granola.

I knew about the coffee, tea, and spices, but I grew up in southern Minnesota, and for all my worldly travels, it had literally never occurred to me that I might be more than one hundred miles from a wheat field.

Last week on a whim I bought a basket of Concord grapes. That's how I reacquainted myself with the nuisance of non-seedless grapes. They were tasty as all get out, but I was too distracted by trying to get the seed out of the way, or by the experience of crunching into a grape seed. So today I made grape juice! Or grape juice concentrate. We'll need to water it down some to make it palatable. Actually neither of us likes grape juice, but hey, now I can say I've made grape juice.

Comments

[bushmiller.livejournal.com]

Right, well, no offense, but it's pretty common for Californians to come up with a plan like this which wouldn't make any sense anywhere else.

My point wasn't clearly stated, so I'll try again: Any rigid "only eat locally-produced food" plan seems to lead to one of three possible goals, as far as I can tell.

#1. Support your local economy. A great ethic, one I've got no problem with.

... but, since scant few places in the world are going to have a wide variety of foods available within, say, a 100 mile radius, then these seem more likely:

#2. Try the diet, fail, then thumb your nose at the way modern agriculture works. That is, by trying to eat from a 100-mile radius and failing (which, frankly, is what's gonna happen in rural Minnesota, not to mention West Texas or, say, Namibia), one is pointing out, I guess, that agriculture isn't distributed evenly or equally, and get people to think about how and why crops are distributed the way that they are. Again, not something I really disagree with, I'd just want that critical stance to be explicit.

#3. "California's a great place, ain't it!" This is the snide response, and reeks of the "hey, *I* live in a great place that has all this great food around me, it's TOO BAD that *you* have to live somewhere that doesn't have this?" mentality. Or, in other words, it's more snobby bullshit from the coasts, which is so, like, '98.


I think as a general maxim, supporting one's local economies and one's local agriculture is a fine enough thing to do. I think, though, we should question why anyone would want to do one of these rigid "only eat within a 100 mile radius" diets, and what doing that is really trying to accomplish. I suggest that it's a combination of the three things I listed -- first, someone wants to encourage people to support local agriculture, secondly they'll fail unless they live somewhere like, third, California! And, though there are explicit good intentions, much of this kind of thing ends up supporting a "God, I'm soooo glad I moved away from Missouri" mentality from the Internet cognoscenti.

[jfb.livejournal.com]

In general, I think rigidity is a flaw. Even the author's article doesn't hold hard and fast to the diet, although her exceptions ("I didn't want to offend someone who offered me food" and "I review restaurants for a living") aren't what mine would be ("I like chocolate") or yours ("Wisconsin agriculture doesn't support a balanced diet"). I think maybe we agree on this, that rigidity is a stunt.


I'm with you on #1. On #2, we basically agree, although I think our focus is a little different. For me the point is to raise awareness, first of all one's own, about how agriculture works, and with one's consumer choices to try to change it. I'm not thinking about failure and subsequent nose-thumbing, but this might go back to the rigidity thing.

On #3, well, yes, it's no accident that this trend started in San Francisco. But this article was written for a local audience in a local paper. It's not about how Missouri sucks; it's about how, hey, we (the paper's readers) *are* lucky enough to live in a place that can support this kind of agriculture, here's how we can be part of that support.

(Another point she raises is that, well, she has enough money to choose organic, local food, and enough time (I'd add) to cook decent meals with it. It's not just location that makes local eating a luxury.)


Finally, maybe it's just that I didn't think about this kind of thing when I lived in St. Peter, but I'd be surprised if you can't get a decent local diet in the Midwest. In Madison, for example, it looks like the Dane County Farmer's Market would at least cover all the food groups. Of course, not every town in Wisconsin or Minnesota has a Farmer's Market. Maybe it's more an urban luxury (ironically) than a coastal one?

Also, of course, that market doesn't run all year; you'd have to buy a pretty big freezer. In any case, I'm not bringing this up to be argumentative; I'm just genuinely curious about what local eating would look like in other parts of the country.

[greyaenigma.livejournal.com]

I'm sick and tired of you thumbing your nose at Oregon hazelnuts.