From Jeff Cox
Repost

You hear a lot about eating locally these days. It’s one of the three pillars of eating correctly: 1) eat organic; 2) eat local; 3) eat in season. And all three pillars are important. But let’s take a closer look at “eat locally.” Let’s see what that really means, and why that’s such a good idea. And why, in the final analysis, it may be the most important pillar of them all.

Some aspects are obvious. When we eat locally produced food—grown within our local “foodshed,” as the current argot has it—we shorten the supply line from farm to table. Less gasoline or diesel fuel is used to transport the food from where it’s grown to where it’s bought and consumed. That means less air pollutants from fossil fuels and less carbon dioxide is pumped into the atmosphere on behalf of moving the food to market. So, eating locally produced organic food lessens the amount of greenhouse gases used to produce and transport that food.

Eating locally means supporting local farmers. This means keeping local family farmers on their land. Wendell Berry has written eloquently about the social benefits of strong, local farm economies. They translate into strong local communities. And they are the soil from which real democracy grows. Instead of being cogs in a massive production machine, family farmers are their own bosses. They are people who can voice their honest opinions without fear of losing their jobs. They can tell the truth, and the truth is contagious. It also sets us free.

Family farmers are also locally-focused, practical ecologists and environmentalists. Their environmentalism is not based on ideology, but on an intimate knowledge of the land under their care. They know where the pheasants and the quail lay their eggs, and can protect those spots. They can see climate change right in front of their eyes, as birds return earlier in spring, or plants emerge earlier or later. Instead of bulldozing their hedge rows, which are repositories of many of the elements of the local ecology, they understand the need to protect the hedge rows. That’s where the wild fruit grows, and where small, wild mammals make their homes. The family farmers live and work on their acres—they have every reason to farm organically, from the premium payments their food will bring, to the safety of family member, who will not be exposed to toxic agrichemicals. Family farmers are invested in the health of their land; they are the caretakers who keep the web of life under their protection strong and healthy.

When the person who grows your food is your neighbor, you interact with him or her. Your kids go to school with their kids. You may sit on a county commission or school board together. It is not in a local farmer’s interest to pollute the air, water supply, streams, or land he shares with his neighbors. It is not in his interest to farm in a way that erodes the soil. It is in his interest to be a good neighbor and fellow citizen.

From the consumers’ point of view, locally-grown food is fresher and may be of better quality than food brought in from far away. Because it doesn’t have to withstand the rigors of shipping, it can be one of the more tender and tasty varieties of the fruit or vegetable. It can be a variety developed locally as an heirloom—one perfectly suited to the local climate and soil. Here in Sonoma County, we have Crane melons. These extra sweet melons are an heirloom of the Crane family, grown along Crane Canyon Road. The roots of this fruit go deep in the local soil.

Locally-grown food is by definition available in season. When any fruit or vegetable is at the height of its season, it is most abundant, highest in quality, and lowest in price. Want to cut food costs to the bone? Eat fresh in season and can or freeze enough to last through the months when the food is out of season. In January, tree-ripened peaches from the local organic orchard frozen in a syrup of honey, lemon juice, and water are infinitely preferable to peaches from Chile, and for so many reasons.

Eating locally also keeps the money you spend on food within the community. More goes to the farmers. The farmers spend it at the local stores—it’s hoped. Keeping food dollars in the community is one big goal of the Eat Local movement.

There’s one other very good reason to eat locally-produced food, and that is the development of flavor diversity in foodstuffs. Preserving such diversity is what the Slow Food movement is all about. Here in the San Francisco Bay Area, the famous sourdough bread is made courtesy of some indigenous yeasts and bacilli that occur nowhere else. Lactobacillus sanfranciscensis naturally colonizes a bowl of flour and water here. The bacilli give San Francisco sourdough a flavor all its own. While San Francisco sourdough in unique to the area, every place in America has the potential to produce unique foods—and most did until the advent of national food corporations toward the end of the 19th Century. A case in point: About 90 years ago, Otto Mossholder, who had a background in cheesemaking, moved to Appleton, Wisconsin, and set about making some cheese on the kitchen stove and ripening it in the basement. Until a few years ago, his grandson Larry and Larry’s wife Lois still made small batches of cheese from their 40 Holstein cows, and still ripened it in the same cellar Otto used. I asked Lois what bacterial culture she uses. “None,” she said. “The mold that affects the flavor of the cheese just developed here—in the basement. Somebody told us that if we moved the business up out of the basement, we would make a different cheese.”

And so a system of farmers returning crop wastes to the land through composting, as organic farmers do, makes a closed loop that can lead to interesting variations in the flavors and kinds of food from place to place across the continent.

The bottom line: to eat well, eat local.
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Photos by Dave Smith, taken at Full Circle Farm
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