Is Eating Local Even Possible?

By Suzi Steffen, AlterNet. Posted August 25, 2007.

I'm a grasshopper by nature. I procrastinate, I put off, I delay. Sometimes I simply can't get anything done -- and it's all because I love to read.

But reading can kick your ass. Thanks to books, I'm spending my summer like the fabled ant, building up food stores from local providers. Eating local -- goat cheese from the farmers' market or eggs from my friends' chickens, vegetables and fruit as abundant as weeds -- is easy right now in Oregon's fertile Willamette Valley. But I want to stay as local as possible in the winter. And that desire has turned me into an ant, the workhorse of food procuring -- I don't even have time to read for pleasure anymore, except when I'm walking to the farmers' market. And it's all the fault of books.

Why am I spending my free hours drying, freezing and canning food? Three books. One is a work of fiction, Susan Beth Pfeiffer's 2006 young adult novel Life as We Knew It. Her dystopian disaster narrative clearly reflects fears about global warming -- and terrifies everyone who reads it. The other two are the hot nonfiction books of the liberal moment, at least for those of us concerned about food security, food safety and a cleaner, less polluted environment: Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle and Plenty (called The 100 Mile Diet in Canada, a far more accurate title), by young Vancouver journalists Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon.

In Life as We Knew It, a huge meteor hits the moon, causing massive tidal problems and creating volcanic upheaval. Smoke spreads over the globe, causing little light to get through the particle-laden atmosphere (like the year after a volcano caused the explosion of the island Krakatoa in the late 1800s). Nothing can grow. People subsist through the winter weakly on canned food and vitamins. The intimate terror of this book causes young adult librarians and high school teachers I know to purchase food in bulk from Costco. I'm not a Costco person. I decide to go local.

That attitude only grows after I read Animal, Vegetable, Miracle and Plenty. I must say I adore Barbara Kingsolver's essays but find her fiction a bit too didactic. Animal, a work of nonfiction, frustrates me too, especially in the sections contemptuous of city dwellers and exalting of farmers. Sorry, good lady and your family, but city dwellers tend to use less energy per person than those in rural or suburban life. You know -- public transit? Apartments? Biking or walking to work and school?

Food miles, however: Those might run a little farther. She's got me there. Kingsolver, and Smith and MacKinnon, quote an Iowa State University study that shows the average piece of food in 1980 traveled 1,500 miles before it hit our plates; Smith and MacKinnon point out that's has only increased and that it isn't counting processed food like, say, my favorite Turtle Island tofu products. Damn!

While reading the anxiety producing Plenty (the couple does not have an easy time of it), I visit San Francisco and find myself searching out a local breakfast and ending up with goat yogurt. Hello? I don't like the taste of goat milk. But I'm adapting -- after eating goat cheese for a few weeks, I'm starting to enjoy it. And there's a cow dairy about 45 miles away that delivers organic milk, half and half and cheese.

I've been trying to eat organic for many years now, but I can see that organic Granny Smiths from New Zealand maybe aren't the answer. (Plus, if you can get local organic apples, you'll see how very much better they can taste: Cox's Orange Pippin bursts in the mouth with tart beauty at the Eugene farmers' market.)

But signs are positive for locavores this year. All over the country, 100-mile diet clubs and the Slow Food movement -- as the books and associated websites show -- spread the word. And the community garden movement isn't restricted to city-sanctioned places. Heather Flores' Food Not Lawns, another book I read early this year, suggests revolutionary food growing: planting zucchini seeds in cracks in sidewalks, reclaiming junked-out city lots and generally making our cities more efficient food production places.

See more stories tagged with: 100-mile diet, local food, barbara kingsolver

Suzi Steffen is a freelance writer in Eugene, Oregon and an arts editor at the Eugene (Ore.) Weekly. Read more of Suzi Steffen at the Eugune Weekly's blog.

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