Interesting New Yorker article, New York Local: Eating the fruits of the five boroughs regarding the (unheard of to me) “movement” called localisim – to act on a local level – and Locavores – to eat only items grown or produced in your local area (sometimes the two are intermixed). Adam Gopnik spent a month trying to eat only locally grown or produced food in the Five Boroughs of New York, and met some interesting characters:
Localism is a movement made of pieties. The cult of seasonality was a taste that evolved into a politics; localism is essentially a politics attempting to create a taste. It is built on the conviction that the industrial economics of food growing and delivery are bad for us and bad for the planet, but it also has an implicit moralistic attitude that prefers small country patches over big urban deserts.
It is possible to have localism without nostalgia, though, and Gabrielle urged me to look into the tilapia-farming program at Brooklyn College. I took the subway out and met with Martin Schreibman, a biologist who has helped pioneer an ambitious project to create an enclosed system of fish farming, which could serve as a model for urban aquaculture in the future. If the ethic of the pure localists is in part reactionary, Schreibman’s is scientific-minded, with Lex Luthor-like overtones: he dreams of giant translucent fish tanks surrounding our cities, where we would breed our own dinner in a ring of virtuous water.
“The demand for sustainable protein is the demand of this century,” Schreibman told me. “Somehow we’re going to have to produce enough protein to feed our population, and we’ll have to do it in urban locales, because the costs of transportation are going to become prohibitive.”
To see Locavores in action, you often have to go to the West Coast; San Francisco seems to have the largest concentration of locavores (via google) who often “challenge” others to eat locally:
We are a group of concerned culinary adventurers who are making an effort to eat only foods grown or harvested within a 100 mile radius of San Francisco for an entire month. We recognize that the choices we make about what foods we choose to eat are important politically, environmentally, economically, and healthfully.
There has always been a cyclical movement in urban areas regarding micro-sustenance farming on rooftop chicken coops, or back yard vegetable gardens. What changed is that a large segment of the population has grown prosperous enough to look back nostalgically at humanities’ peasant roots and yearn for a “simpler” way of life. Per Gopnik:
It is even perilously easy to construct a Veblenian explanation for the vogue for localism. Where a century ago all upwardly mobile people knew enough, and had enough resources, to get their hands on the most unseasonable foods from the most distant places, in order to distinguish themselves from the peasant past and the laboring masses, their descendants now distinguish themselves by hustling after a peasant diet.
Just like The Omnivore’s Dilemma (and rebuttal), this moralizing about food is the result of undirected prosperity and or time. Personally, I think it is amazing what people can do once they put their mind to it, but please don’t suggest that what I am eating is somehow morally wrong. There is a reason why each of us has an innate sphere of liberty where others cannot impinge: don’t tell me I can’t eat that Skyline Chilli Four Way!
Could you eat only food within the circle below?
