THINK GLOBALLY EAT LOCALLY

Article Tools

Image Gallery

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

I think I said we intended to "grow our own food," a formulation that seems remarkably naive in retrospect, since we only grew fruits and vegetables. But since the things people worry about most when you talk about eating locally are fruits and vegetables ("What would I do for salad in January?") the effort seemed worthwhile.

My goal was not to prove that everyone could grow her own if she wanted to. My goal was to create a model of what local farmers could make available if we set out to create a market for what they could produce. I was trying to model - and I still am - the sort of eating choices I thought we all needed to work toward if we were to have a sustainable food system and world. I wanted to demonstrate that responsible eating could be done without real pain. And 25 years after I decided to live by my convictions, I know that it can be. I demonstrate the tastiness of local eating every time I serve a splendid local meal in the dead of winter.

Having made my point, I obviously would help farmers more by buying their food than by growing my own, assuming I could find a local year-round source. But now I'm totally addicted to growing the vegetables I eat and eating only the vegetables I grow. To assure myself that this obsession is rational, I use my own farming crises to teach me lessons about what farmers go through to feed us all. So I want to conclude this manifesto with a couple of stories from my book to illustrate two of the lessons I've learned in 30-odd years. The first of those lessons is that if we eat locally, weather will matter a lot more.

Two summers ago, we had a drought in my region, and it got so dry that rats chomped into every one of my tomatoes as they ripened. I live on the Hudson, a tidal river with a wedge of salt flowing upriver under the surface. When there's no rain going into the river to dilute it, it gets increasingly salty. Well into my rat crisis I learned from the mayor, a former fisherman, that the rats couldn't handle the salt. They were eating my tomatoes for liquid. So I called Roger, the village's exterminator, who is paid to keep the riverfront free of rats. He scouts the community garden out of generosity, and, since I'm right next door, fits me in, too. In the midst of my despair, I shared his diagnosis and my own frustration by e-mail with the community gardeners:

By restricting myself to eating vegetables I grow, I'm constantly reminded that food is the generous outcome of a collaboration between our species and the rest of nature, not simply another product of industrial civilization.

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print