Eating Local

I've been watching the TED Talks about Food and Eating lately- well, the ones that are available streaming through Netflix, anyway.  It's generally a bunch of chefs standing up and talking about food and how obese America is and how we ought to eat local and how we need to eat more whole grains...and that everything needs to be sustainable.

I have mixed feelings about these talks because the people standing up there are not environmentalists, but chefs, and while they can have a strong (perhaps even educated) opinion of the environmental impacts of our current global food strategy, they are not environmentalists.  That's not what they spent their life doing.  They don't study the varying levels of gases over biomes and the affects of using a particular fertilizer.  They just read about it.

And this means they it's all hearsay.

Sorry, but true.

They haven't studied it.

Even the scientists that do study Ecology have dramatically differing opinions of the impact of various modern forces on the environment and how changing any one of them might lead to positive (or negative) changes.  So, hearing someone's colored opinion of the current state of environment and how to make changes- well, that's just propaganda.

This is the same force that got Germans in trouble in the 1930s and 40s.

This is the same force that got slavery going in the US.

If you don't get the information yourself, you're just repeating what you've heard.

If you don't get both sides of the story, what you're hearing is propaganda.

Now, don't get me wrong.  I'm a tree-hugger.  I'm very much into "Do no harm to the world" and "Live in Harmony with the Natural World".

But I'm also a realist.

Nothing I am doing is going to affect the world as  whole.  It might make changes locally.  It will definitely make changes for my family.  But it won't make any difference to the destruction of the Amazon.  It won't make any difference to the Argentinian beef market.  Those decisions rest in the laps of a few rich and powerful that are completely removed from public opinion.  They want money and until the time comes where their current process doesn't make them money anymore, they won't change it.

That's a social implementation of Newton's Third Law:  A body in motion will stay in motion until acted upon by an equal and opposite force.

So, things aren't going to change until there's no other option.  The world is too far down the rabbit hole to start learning to fly.  It's going to have to hit rock bottom before it learns that there is no return. A great example of this is the hypocrisy of the chefs standing up at the TED Talks mandating a change to eat locally and decrease the carbon footprint.

Yet, they will drive all over the country to spread this news.

How does that help the carbon footprint?

Do they give discounts to those walking or biking in to their restaurants?  Do they charge a luxury tax for those arriving in Hummers and Limos?

I've also noticed that every chef that is advocating for eating locally is below a certain latitude line in the world.  Of course it makes sense to eat locally when you're in the middle of the food belt!  It's easy to go to the farmer's market and get anything you want, any day of the week in California.  That's where all the vegetables come from!  But living in Minnesota, it's completely illogical to eat locally unless you want some mercury-laden pond fish or dried feed corn...oooh, or lutefisk (that's fish that is "cured" in lye by burying it in the snow.  It's Norwegian).

And there aren't any farms around most of the world's major cities.  Eating locally is a joke.

Do you know how much energy and fertilizer would be required to grow orange trees in Minnesota?  or Sweden?  How's that better than getting them shipped in from Florida or California?


Oh, wait, you could  can or dry some things for use during the winter months, but that puts a ton of sugar and salt into your food, not to mention that boiling leeching out all the nutrients.

How is that healthier that buying that fresh tomato from Chile during the winter?

Oh, and let's not forget the number one fresh fruit sold and readily eaten by youths and adults:  the banana.  How many banana trees do you see in Kansas?  They don't even grow well in most of California because it's too cold- not enough sun- not wet enough.

So, listening to these short-sighted, propaganda-laden "solutions" just makes me sick.