THINK GLOBALLY EAT LOCALLY

Article Tools

Image Gallery

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

Herman Daly noted we in the United States both import end export Danish butter cookies. He suggested we might better exchange recipes.

My food-system radicalization occurred when I found Haiti, the poorest country in the hemisphere, exports meat to us. Another insanity is that we export what we import. My favorite economist, Herman Daly, noted we in the United States both import and export Danish butter cookies. He suggested we might better exchange recipes.

Once, after I spoke about the problems of global agriculture, someone came up and said, "Do you really imagine there will be a time when our cities will be surrounded by farms producing much of their food?" I don't know. I can't imagine how we're going to get to such a place from where we are now, but I know what's out there now isn't going to last. The planet is already showing signs of a terminal illness. The simple fact is a global food system isn't sustainable; we might, just might, be able to make local ones that are. As someone concerned with food, I can't imagine any other way to live.

At the beginning of the 21st century, I'm no longer alone in my concern about the future of the food system; the idea that we might chose diets more responsible to the places where we live is no longer viewed as silly and impractical. Around the country are thousands of organized efforts to move the nation toward more seasonal local eating. What all are trying to teach to everyone from preschoolers to homemakers, from chefs to retirees, are these lessons: Get to know your farmer, because someone out there is growing you . Wherever you are, eat what your own landscape can provide.

I have lately learned to admire the novelist Arundhati Roy, who is using the fame she earned from her writing to wage a public campaign against nuclear arms and large dams in her native India. This is what she said: "When you go to Europe or America for the first time, you arrive in a city where you don't see any mud, and everything looks really nice, all the cars and the steel and the glass. But I look at a car and I think, `This came from earth and water and forest.' How? I don't know. But you need to know - you need to know what the connection is; who paid the price of what."

That's what I would say about the foods we eat. We need to remember that somehow they came "from earth and water and forest." We need to know how, and who paid the price. We need to know what the connections are, and then we need to use our power as eaters to demand delicious food produced by local food systems that are economically sound, ecologically sustainable and socially just.

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print