THINK GLOBALLY EAT LOCALLY

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Some groups of consumers who support farmers directly through Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) are learning lessons we all need to learn about weather and changing seasonal menus. Faced with unfamiliar early spring and late fall vegetables, people learn to change their diets with the seasons. But everyone can't join a CSA, and there are lots of people who need educating - food writers, among others, who all too often feature recipes that have nothing to do with what's seasonally available.

I am moved and encouraged by the thousands of efforts around the country to connect schools and farms, chefs and farms, and consumers and farms. I chair the board of a group in New York City, called Just Food, which has helped start 19 CSAs. Using the new census figures and estimates of the number of people our CSAs feed, I calculated our CSA farmers are feeding one out of every 2,000 New Yorkers. That's a fabulous beginning. But small.

The overwhelming majority of people still choose their foods mindlessly from the global supermarket the rest of the world provides for us, choosing for price, taste and variety (with an emphasis on variety and price, good taste being represented by what they're used to), heavily dosed with sugar and salt.

It won't be enough to convince those people to shop at farmers' markets in the summer, helpful as those are. We need people to shop mindfully year-round, seeking out seasonal local produce even in the winter.

There's much work to do. Those of us working toward relocalization need to talk seriously about just what we mean by local. How local? Grains and beans might reasonably be shipped, for reasons I explain in my book. And I see no reason why people who live in colder climates can't sometimes have oranges, though a daily glass of fresh orange juice north of here oranges grow is prob ably self-indulgent. Spices which are light and of high value should be shared around the world. But, overall, produce is about 90 percent water: We are warming the planet shipping cold water around the world It costs 435 fossil fuel calories to fly a 5 calorie strawberry from California to New York. Yet a strawberry researcher from Ithaca told me that we could have a much longer run of local strawberries in the East if there were rewards for raising them, and they would be grown here if California produce didn't arrive so cheaply in our markets. Many food trade patterns are irrational.

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