food miles

Last week I found myself in a conference room with an aquaculturalist, a mushroom grower, a hops grower, and a handful of CSA farmers.

 This may sound like a great setup for a terrible joke, but the occasion was a serious one. We were sitting in Minneapolis City Hall along with an assortment of other farmers, gardeners, would-be farmers, extension workers, advocates, and city planners, all with lists of policy goals spread out in front of them on the table. The extraordinary thing is that most of them do their growing right here inside the Minneapolis city limits, and that’s why they made the trip to City Hall: to have a say in the first public meeting for implementing new zoning policies for urban agriculture here in the Minne Apple.

 A little over a month ago, an op-ed in the New York Times got the online locavore community all worked up. Stephen Budiansky’s “Math Lessons for Locavores” contended that many of the commonly-spouted arguments for eating local are misleading or downright bogus.

The benefits of eating local cannot be understated: fresher and more flavorful products, economic support for local small-scale farmers and producers, less harmful environmental impacts and better appreciation for the delicious bounty to be found closer to home. But for many food lovers, embracing this philosophy comes with a trade-off.

Call it the Locavore’s Dilemma – how can one reconcile an earnest desire to eat local with the enjoyment of certain foods whose best examples are imported from great distances? Must we resign ourselves to giving up authentic Italian prosciutto or France’s renowned fromages, in effect abstaining from some of Europe’s finest culinary traditions, in the name of conscientious consumption?

The only reasons why I do anything are because it is fun now, it allows things to be fun later, or it ensures that things will continue being fun. Eating? Fun now. Working? Fun later when I eat what I bought with my paycheck. Shoveling the walk? Ensures that when I haul my groceries into the house, I don’t slip, fall, and ruin the fun of eating them.

So, obviously, the main reason why I’d buy local food is because it’s fun in so many ways:

It’s been a weird growing season in the Twin Cities this year. We had a hot spell in spring, then crazy rain, then a dry but cool summer. Not so much fun for my flowers, but good material for grousing with fellow gardeners. It puts me in mind of that old saw, “Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.

Nobody says that very often anymore, perhaps because it’s no longer true. Most of us do, in fact, contribute to the root causes of unstable weather, the climate change it heralds, and the general planetary degradation that marks our age.

Alex Christensen is a regular contributor to Simple, Good, and Tasty.