Just read the book Plenty: One Man, One Woman and a Raucous Year of Eating Locally by Alisa Smith and J.B. Mackinnon, the people behind the 100 Mile Diet website.
It's about a couple in Vancouver who decided to eat only foods produced within a 100 mile radius for one year. And they were way hard core about it, too (no sugar, no chocolate, etc). It was a good read, and not just because they talked about food pretty much the whole time. If a book is about food, it's almost guaranteed to be a winner with me. And lately if it's about local food then it's even better. You remember how much I loved Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. The thing that hits me about these books is how well these people are eating. Yes, they have to do more work and more research and maybe pay more money. And they make choices that I will possibly never make (like the chocolate thing). But man. It just sounds so, soooo good.
Am also slowly getting through Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma. Have told myself I have to finish it before I can start on his new In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto.
The other day I read a few pages of Omnivore's Dilemma before bed and came to a paragraph that made my mind explode, but in a good way. Pollan stayed a week at Polyface Farm in Virginia, following around the owner, Joel Salatin, to see how his operation works. At one point they talk about how organic food (or sustainable food, or local food, or whatever) is seen as elitist and only affordable for the rich. And then Salatin said this:
“. . . whenever I hear people say clean food is expensive, I tell them it’s actually the cheapest food you can buy. That always gets their attention. Then I explain that with our food all of the costs are figured into the price. Society is not bearing the cost of water pollution, of antibiotic resistance, of food-borne illness, of crop subsidies, of subsidized oil and water—of all the hidden costs to the environment and to the taxpayer that make cheap food seem cheap. No thinking person will tell you they don’t care about all that. I tell them the choice is simple: You can buy honestly priced food or you can buy irresponsibly priced food.” (p.243)
Instead we pay them in the form of taxes to subsidize farmers who are paid to produce more corn than we can ever use.
We pay with the pollutants in our water from all the nitrogen fertilizer needed to grow that much corn year after year on the same bits of land.
We pay with the extra calories in all of our processed foods (thank you, high-fructose corn syrup).
We pay in the form of medical bills for obesity-related illnesses, Type II Diabetes, and heart disease.
We pay with the e. coli in our spinach and the mad cow disease in our beef and every other time our food is tainted in some way (results of large-scale production practices).
We pay with the lack of nutritional value in our foods.
We pay when we have no local food options left because they’ve all been muscled out.
We pay when the farmers (or would-be farmers) in our communities fail because there isn’t enough demand for local goods.
We pay with the needless burning of fossil fuels required to transport foods in from thousands of miles away—foods that could be (and possibly are) grown in our own towns.
Does anyone else think this is crazy? But even so, it's hard to decide to pay more now and go to the extra work of finding non-mass-produced food sources. Especially when money is tight and a cheaper alternative is right in front of us. And when we're so unconnected from the big picture of what's behind our food, and where we'll be if things keep going the way they are.
Michael Pollan acknowledges this and says that as the system stands in our country, with “cheap industrial food” being heavily subsidized, many Americans don’t feel they can afford to buy non-industrial food. But, he makes this very good point, I think:
“As a society we Americans spend only a fraction of our disposable income feeding ourselves—about a tenth, down from a fifth in the 1950s. Americans today spend less on food, as a percentage of disposable income, than any other industrialized nation, and probably less than any people in the history of the world. This suggests that there are many of us who could afford to spend more on food if we chose to. After all, it isn’t only the elite who in recent years have found an extra fifty or one hundred dollars each month to spend on cell phones (now owned by more than half the U.S. population, children included) or television, which close to 90 percent of all U.S. households now pay for. Another formerly free good that more than half of us happily pay for today is water. So is the unwillingness to pay more for food really a matter of affordability or priority?” (p.243)
Does anyone else have any thoughts about this stuff? Catfights are fine as long as you leave my mom out of it.
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