On the importance of eating locally

I'm not one of the nutty people. I swear. I'm not going to tell you Red Dye 40 will kill you, or that chicken from the supermarket will make you sprout wings, or anything like that. However, I will say that I have a pretty strong preference for eating locally grown foods. If I have time, I was planning to do a 100 mile challenge this summer.

There are many reasons to eat locally. First, quite often what is local and in season tastes better - it's fresher, it's more likely to have been picked when it was actually ripe, and it's often grown on small scale. Second, there are real social issues to local food security and agricultural preservation. Third, it takes less energy, and therefore less waste and carbon emissions, to move the food from place A to your table. Fourth, well, you get to know the people who feed you. There are a myriad of other reasons to eat locally.

I'm not going to throw a hissy fit about the mass production of food. Actually, a lot of it is incredibly beneficial to society. The number of people who are hungry has drastically reduced. Malnutrition is combated by some of this mass production. There is a lot of good in the food industry. But there's also negatives - and balancing those is something that every person must do for himself or herself.

I'm not going to pine for the time when every family fed themselves off their own land. I like my job, and my work doesn't allow me to run a farm at the same time. I like my baby townhouse, despite it's lack of land. My husband likes it for the lack of yard work. I like the fact that my husband can take mass transit to Our Nation's Capital, and do whatever it is he does for a living. I like the fact that I can visit just about any store I want, all within 5 miles of my home, eat at a myriad of restaurants, walk to the grocery store, and at the same time trek not too far to hit farm land.

However, a change is coming - localization is the wave of the future. Energy prices are going through the roof, consumer preferences are changing, and the revolution in communications allows for specialization and customization, rather than the mass standardization of the last wave of agricultural and industrial changes.

I like getting citrus from far away in winter. But in the spring and summer, I'm lucky enough to be able to taste our local bounty instead.