Newsday, NY
05-22-07
Local foods - the best of all worlds
You've heard of herbivores and carnivores. Now meet locavores.
Locavores are dedicated to eating food grown near home. Some set a limit of
100 miles, some a modest 50. This eating program makes it all but impossible to
drink coffee or eat chocolate chip cookies. Often, bread is taboo because the
wheat is grown far away.
The idea is to save on the fossil fuel that is used to transport out-of-season foods
for thousands of miles, to raise some food yourself and to get in touch with a
community of local farmers.
On Long Island, an eater following this program might have to give up milk, since
there are few cows here, and likely would eat no meat except poultry. Local
seafood could be foraged.
At locavores.com, members invite those interested to sign on and commit to
eating locally for at least a month out of each year.
It's a start at saving the world.
If it is an experiment you would like to try, several books offer help or at least
food for thought.
The challenges faced by Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon as they tried to follow
the 100 Mile Diet, chronicled in the new book "Plenty: One Man, One Woman,
and a Raucous Year of Eating Locally" (Harmony Books / Crown Publishing
Group, $24), might, however, make you think twice. The Vancouver couple spent
a year eating food grown within 100 miles of home. When they were finally able
to find local wheat, MacKinnon desperately and painstakingly separated the
mouse droppings from it using the edge of a credit card. A year of foraging made
them realize how they had taken such staples as olive oil for granted.
In the new "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle" (HarperCollins, $26.95), novelist Barbara
Kingsolver tells how she and her family raised turkeys and canned tons of
tomatoes on their southern Appalachian farm. With their two daughters,
Kingsolver and her husband moved to what had been their summer getaway "to
feed ourselves animals and vegetables whose provenance we really knew." They
took the locavore challenge, faring somewhat better than the MacKinnon-Smith
team because they were near neighbors who still farmed. But it was work, no
doubt about that. (I have read only an excerpt by Kingsolver in Mother Jones
magazine, but just reading about all those tomatoes brought back the exhaustion
of canning fruits and vegetables late into the night as I once did, too.)
Jessica Prentice, founder of the locavore Web site and the Eat Local Challenge,
is the author of another book that could serve as a guide, "Full Moon Feast: Food
and the Hunger for Connection" (Chelsea Green Publishing, $25). Prentice, a
chef and food activist, follows 13 lunar cycles of an agrarian year. The Moon
When Salmon Return to Earth comes in autumn, for example. Prentice's premise
is that we are disconnected from knowledge of where food comes from, and that
this results in a larger disconnect from the rhythms of life. Recipes are geared to
the seasons.
Kingsolver, MacKinnon, Smith, Prentice and other like-minded pioneers are not,
of course, the first to advocate growing what food you can and buying what you
can't grow from local sources. Scott and Helen Nearing pioneered self-sufficiency
and the simple life and described their experiences in "Living the Good Life," a
bible of the back-to-the-land movement in the last century, and other best-selling
books about homesteading on a Vermont farm. Many of the Nearings' books are
now being reissued by Chelsea Green, Prentice's publisher.
Much of the food we eat now comes from even greater distances than it did in
the Nearings' day. A lot of it travels 1,500 to 3,000 miles, according to Iowa State
University's Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture. Oil fuels farm
machinery, trucks and cars as you drive to supermarkets. Besides, eating locally
has a good chance of lowering the risk of contaminated food.
For those who may not want to go the whole 100 miles, so to speak, but do want
to do the right thing, a couple of other new books may provide inspiration. One is
"How to Pick a Peach: The Search for Flavor From Farm to Table" (Houghton
Mifflin, $27) by Russ Parsons, food and wine columnist for the Los Angeles
Times. There's practical, clear advice on which fruits will ripen after picking and
which won't, and how to choose the best, how to store each fruit and how to
prepare it.
The passionate founder of the Slow Food movement, Carlo Petrini, also has a
new book, "Slow Food Nation: Why Our Food Should Be Good, Clean, and Fair"
(Rizzoli, $22.50). (For more on Slow Food or to find a nearby convivium, as local
chapters are called, visit slowfood.com or slowfoodusa.org.) Petrini is given to
manifestos, and at the end he signs himself as a "gastronome" and defines that,
in part, this way: "I like to know the history of a food and of the place that it
comes from. ..."
Petrini would agree with Kingsolver when she writes, "Food is the rare moral
arena in which the ethical choice is generally the one more likely to make you
groan with pleasure. Why resist that?"