Is local food sexier?
This question is open to debate. Maybe a better question is what sexy people might eat.. The above picture seems to suggest fresh and seasonal cherries, Ooh!
I was sparked by an e-mail today from a retired woman with a cheesy musical, although extremely cute, website about “Being Green and Simple“. As I sit here, in my lonely bed, all day and all night, sick with a fever and horrible sore throat, I wonder whether my diet and smoking has anything to do with the fact I’m ill. The tip of the day: eat local. Why eat local? I caught up with my friend Beth’s blog,BethEatsLocal. Beth pledges to eat within 100 miles of Brighton, where she lives, and it’s not as easy as it sounds.
Although I’m no ethusiast, I recognise the importance of local food in my diet (minus chocolate) but it definitely needs to be reconsidered, which I’m open to. Are you? Below are four reasons I’ve dug up about why local food it rocks (my personal favourite: everything about food is a metaphor for sex).
Firstly, you support a large-scale revolution by relying on small-scale growers. According to George Monbiot(1), the USA, Canada and Australia trade representatives have refused “to help farmers, particularly small-scale producers, increase production and integrate with local, regional, and international markets.”(2) Although small farms are as much as 20 times more productive than larger farms, largely due to the amount of labour spent per hectre of land(3). According to Policy Innovations (who published the above report), this should have an affect on distributions of land, particularly in Turkey, but this is another issue. Meanwhile, back at the ranch; in the UK, large retailers take a portion of the profit from the small- to large-scale farmers, force them to sell low and are far more discriminatory about the products they let into their doors. This means although you might have a beautiful tomato, it might taste like nothing. If being revoluntionary tastes this good, I welcome it with open arms!
Second, local fruits and vegetables taste divine raw, sauteed, steamed, roasted, fried, baked, simmered or even deep fried. You can even try a recipe or experiment. My neighbour is growing a massive garden of herbs to spice things up (for next to nothing; soil is cheap and seeds are cheap) including lemongrass, french thyme and mint.
Third, local food can be cheap or cheaper than your supermarket equivalent. If you go to your local farmers market or one of many fruit and vegetable box suppliers such as Abel & Cole, Riverford or for the classier the Organic Delivery Company you can find some great deals. With a fruit and vegetable box coming at around 14 squids for a large variety of seasonal food, why not induldge in some Jerusalem Artichoke or that alien-looking califlower I’ve been dying to try.
Lastly, less packaging is used to transport local food to you. Why do you need packaging when in fact, in your short-term future you’re far more likely to get sick from smoking and having a lack of hygiene than saving yourself from out-of-package germs. More on this later, but there is no reason to see unpackaged foods as inferior to packaged ones–in fact, a lot of packaging is unnecessary. Unpackaged, of Islington, a store with little to no packaging, has enabled stores to rethink the need for packaging and this definitely seems the way forward.
The only challenge? What we’ve all grown to be addicted to–sugar. From Canollis to HoHos, Green & Blacks to Hershey’s, we love it. Niether is it local nor ethical; much of the small-scale cocoa farmers grow the lusty pods with lots of help from their children (who should be in school) and at marginal rates to provide a cut to the intermediary. That’s standard practice. Although a company called Silver Spoon grow sugarbeet in Norfolk for a significant portion of their sugar supply. This wasn’t confirmed on the internet so still remains a mystery!
So do you want to do your bit to save the world: why not make move towards local today. Find out where your local fruits and vegetables are. Who knows? Your sexy neighbour might be growing a hot pepper… you could eat it with dinner, maybe breakfast??
1 George Monbiot. The Guardian. 10 June 2008. www.monbiot.com
1 International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD), 2008. Global Summary for Decision Makers. www.agassessment.org
2 Declaration of the High-Level Conference on World Food Security: The Challenges of Climate Change and Bioenergy (Page 2)
3 Fatma Gül Ünal, October 2006. Small Is Beautiful: Evidence Of Inverse Size Yield
Relationship In Rural Turkey. Policy Innovations.
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