The 100-mile extreme

I was reading the other day about a couple near Vancouver, B.C, who decided that they would eat locally--truly locally--for one year. They drew a 100-mile radius circle around their home, and only ate food that came from within that circle. You can imagine them, reveling in fresh salmon and eating a lot of potatoes. (They've got a website where you can draw your own circle.)

The average vegetable or chunk of meat on the shelf at Safeway or Top Foods traveled over 1,500 miles to get there. I don't know about you, but I'm pretty worn out after a trip like that, and I'm still alive, still able to regenerate. That head of lettuce has been cut off from its roots. There are ample recitatives about the hidden costs, both in terms of damage to the environment and to ourselves and children of this type of food chain.

I hold that both of these scenarios are extremes, and I feel that there is entirely too much extremism in this world. Yes, the consequences of continuing blithely along, with no thought to where our food comes from are dire. But it is equally dire to cocoon ourselves in a local-only diet, never venturing out to understand how the rest of the world eats. But, you say, for hundreds of years that's just how people ate. Indeed they did. But they also died in what we now call middle age, and they never tasted chocolate. I call that extreme.

The answer is once again to find balance. My personal "circle" is about 150 miles, because that gets me some great grass-fed beef from the other side of the mountains. And it's a target I don't always hit--because wheat, which is nearly local, is off the menu, I'm eating a great deal of rice, which comes from California. I try to mitigate the petroleum impact by buying it in bulk at the local co-op.

A friend of mine attended a meeting this summer in New Orleans, where they dealt with sustainability of the food supply (along with other issues of sustainability--the whole report is fascinating reading, if you are so inclined). They chose the locale because it illustrated an important point. One of the most devastating blows to New Orleans was the pullout of the national food chains. Since these stores' supply chains were nationally-based and transport was difficult, they had no way to get food to their local stores, so they closed them. With no established supply chains for locally-produced foodstuffs, people were literally starving. Imagine a world without supermarkets, and you have post-Katrina New Orleans. But there is hope: The farmers markets that were niche markets before Katrina are now pivotal parts of making food accessible to residents who are slowly returning to the city. These markets, which one participant called "islands of possibility" are beacons in times of crisis that are serving to re-invent the region's food supply. If necessity is the mother of invention, residents of the Crescent City are learning to balance pragmatism and inspiration. It is now our turn to learn from them.