Local food systems

I just finished a fascinating autobiographical account of a young BC couple that decides to eat only food produced within 100 miles of their home for a year. The book, Plenty by by Alisa Smith and J.B. Mackinnon, suggests what locally-based, resilient communities of the future may look like.

The authors discover that most of the items on the shelves of their neighborhood grocery stores and co-ops are off limits. However, they also slowly come to appreciate the utter bounty that does surround them. They learn to eat seasonally, can and store for the winter but they also discover that they enjoy a more varied diet and that the tastes of their new diet are profoundly better than before.
Living in the region where this experiment commenced, the chapters that described past and present ecological abundance in our temperate "rain forest" are particularly interesting. Finishing the book, however, I now hunger for not only for some fresh local food, but for a stronger analysis of this and similar movements towards regional food systems.

Being a first person narrative, the book focused on the logistics and emotions of a 100 mile diet. The authors do not spend much space debating the merits or short comings of various local and regional food systems approaches. One study they do mention indicated that it was more energy efficient to ship fresh food from New Zealand to British eaters than to get the same food to them from the English countryside. Inefficiencies and waste are apparently replete in the local British farms.

I completely agree with the authors that this suggests that the British system needs improvement (not that the trans-global food system is necessarily better). But still, there are questions that need deeper discussion. Is the trans-global trade more energy efficient because regional markets try to replicate what can be grown better elsewhere? What does the balance sheet look like when comparing a standard no-season trans-global diet with a local, seasonal diet?

And how to include the energy costs that the authors induced during their 100 mile diet? One of the reasons they put forth for attempting a 100 year diet is that it was ecologically unconscionable and wasteful to have fresh food, on average, travel 1500 miles to their plate. Yet, they seems to also log many miles in their car that year driving out to local farms for the small amounts needed to sustain two people. The authors learned much in the process and came to emotionally connect with their food suppliers. This is important and cannot be discounted, but it was likely also a lot less energy efficient than a more centralized distribution system (certainly a centralized, regional distribution system).

They also did not address the politics of food distribution. While this made the book less provincial, I just happened to read a New York Times op-ed, entitled My Forbidden Fruits (and Vegetables) by Jack Hedin, the day after completing Plenty. The op-ed discusses how federal farm subsidies penalize a farmer who switches from soybean, rice, wheat, or cotton to fruits and vegetables in order to meet rising demands for local fresh produce. The piece is eye-opening, and suggests that there is a lot more politics to a wider adoption of a local foods diet (100 miles or not), than appears.