THINK GLOBALLY EAT LOCALLY

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So 23 years ago, I published a book, The Feeding Web, about our role in the global food system. Its message was that we in this rich country can pull food from wherever on the planet it's produced, so it looks as if we can always have everything. The trouble is that "everything" often is being produced and brought to us at a true cost that is hor rendous: wasted and irreplaceable groundwater and fossil energy, eroded top soils, polluted soil, water and air, and so on.

What could be done? Obviously the problems I had identified were invisible to U.S. eaters, most of whom had no idea how, where or by whom their food was grown. As a teacher, I knew how hard it would be to make food production relevant to eaters who had long ago learned from the abundance of the supermarkets and the blandishments of advertisers that they could expect to eat anything any time.

How, I wondered, could U.S. shoppers be made to understand the need to protect the people and places that grew their food? How could they be taught to care about farmers in California, let alone in Ethiopia or Guatemala? I concluded people had to be helped to unlearn the anything, anywhere, anytime lessons about food by being taught to eat from closer to home. Unless the demand end of the food supply could be changed, we rich consumers would continue to pull in foods from everywhere, no matter how hungry the rest of the world became, and no matter how much damage our demand was doing to our mutual biosphere.

Relocalizing the food system in this way seemed almost impossible to achieve, but worth trying, given the scary alternatives. In the early 1980s, I began to suggest to my colleagues in nutrition that we needed to change the content, not just the methods, of nutrition education and move people toward more local, seasonal diets. This radical idea that we should move away from the overflowing global supermarket, this marvel of modernity - was judged both impractical and silly given the convenience and abundance of the supermarket.

I disagreed with the silly part, but as for impractical, I wasn't sure. I had begun to talk about local eating with no clear idea of what a New York diet would taste like when the ground was frozen. I decided I had to walk my talk and move toward local, seasonal eating. Because farmer's markets were few and far between, my husband and I set out to do it in the only way it could then be done, by producing it ourselves.

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