Post-Local

Its been about three weeks since my 60 days of strict local eating has ended. I've been having quite the love affair with non-local food, and i think its time to really think about what this means. In the reality of real life where I'm not bound by a set of rules, how do my beliefs and morals really play out? Well so far, not very well. I pretty much haven't eaten any local food since my 60 days ended. I have been regularly eating tortilla chips made in needham, because they are so good and easily found at various stores, but where the ingredients come from I don't know. I've switched back to organic milk that comes from wisconsin because it taste better to me, and i don't have to buy such a big container, and thus don't have to drink as much milk so fast because milk often gives me a stomach ache. But shouldn't local milk taste better? Perhaps organic local milk would taste the best. I don't know what it is but the crescent ridge milk i get at whole foods doesn't taste very great to me. Perhaps it has to do with that the milk is sourced from all around new england. Turns out its not that easy to find out exactly where your milk is coming from even if there is a location on the bottle, which is usually where its bottled. The best tasting local milk I have had comes from shaw dairy which is sold at the dairy bar in somerville. Honestly though I haven't been motivated to drive all the way to somerville for milk, when i can walk two block to whole foods. I think this also raises an interesting point of transportation of food on both end: farm to store, and consumer to store. the milk from whole foods traveled 1, 158 miles to the store and i walked two blocks to buy it. the milk from the dairy bar traveled 39 miles and i had to drive 8 miles round trip to buy it. Its clear that the consumer takes on extra energy costs (gas), time, and carbon emissions to be able to support a local business/farmer, and get a quality product. It seems that the biggest issue for the local movement is not a matter of convincing people its a good idea but making it accessible. If after going so extreme to as to eat local for 60 days, I won't even drive to somerville for milk, how could expect the average person would? Organic has caught on at most large shopping conglomerates, which is a start. Its true that organic is better than not, but while organic original signified the values of local - safeguarding
the ecological integrity of local bioregions; creating social justice and
equality for both growers and eaters; and cultivating whole, healthful
foods.- it now often usually points to industrial organic farming. Large scale organic doesn't use chemicals (at least not much), but it still grows large monocultures of single crops which drains the land of resources, is transported high distances, usually from central or south america as more of food is being imported for a cheaper price, where labor can be paid for less, and rhe food is picked unripe and ripened in a truck, and threatens to put local farmers who can't compete in scale out out of business. With organic being the 'big thing' these days many large businesses are jumping to put the cachet on their product. But is more the idea of organic that they are actually selling? Let think whole foods for a minute who really markets the whole idea of organic and local. But to actually distribute on such a high scale of whole foods, how could they buy produce from a small farmer? Real, "whole" foods cannot be shipped around the country. Michael Pollan makes a good point that how our food is grow is inseparable from how we distribute it, which is inseparable to how we eat it. Its a toss up, who 'should' bear the responsibility, the system or the consumer? I think at this point, the system leave it all up to the consumer. Its hard, and expensive, and time consuming to eat your beliefs, but in the end we are a consumer of our food.