It is an essential American trait to take an activity that’s fun and attack it with such fanaticism that it starts to seem more like penance. Most collegiate drinking fits this description. And I sense that it’s starting to happen with the whole “eat local” movement.
Just to smugly establish my bona fides: During the summer and fall months, my family gets a significant share of its nourishment from the Greenmarket held on Fridays on West 97th Street in Manhattan, which features only locally grown fruits and veggies, locally caught fish, locally hatched laid eggs, etc. We do this because the stuff generally tastes better than anything you can get at a supermarket, plus it’s nice to buy food from the people who grow/raise/catch it. I also buy New York wine pretty frequently, not because it’s so great (some is, but the good stuff ain’t at all cheap), but because I like the idea of supporting local vintners in their quest to get better.
So I’m not against eating local. I generally agreed with John Cloud’s Time cover story on the subject.
Increasingly, though, eating local is being sold more as a moral choice than a flavor-related one and being adopted by scarily obsessive people. Evidence of both could be found in a Marian Burros article in the Times a couple of weeks ago (it always takes me a week or two to get around to reading the Dining section). The headline: “Preserving Fossil Fuels and Nearby Farmland by Eating Locally.” The opening passage:
Jessica Abel may have gone to extremes when she collected seawater from Long Island Sound and boiled it down to make two cups of salt. But people who are determined to eat only food made within 100 miles, give or take, sometimes find themselves reaching for creative solutions.
Ms. Abel and her husband, Matt Madden, cartoonists who work at home in Sunset Park in Brooklyn, have given three strictly enforced local-only dinner parties over the past year. A fourth scheduled for next month will feature fiddleheads, ramps, new fresh cheese and baby lamb. …
Ms. Abel and Mr. Madden are dabblers in a small but increasingly popular effort to return to a time before the average food item traveled 1,500 miles from farm to table. In that sense, the only thing new about the phenomenon is its name, locavore, which was coined two years ago in California. But the appearance of the word seems to have given shape to a growing subculture. Weeklong locavore challenges have been popping up all over the country, even in places like Minnesota and Vermont, where it would seem to be pretty hard to eat local foods in the dead of winter.
The fiddleheads, ramps, cheese and lamb sound pretty good–and I certainly don’t object to the occasional local-only dinner party. But “locavore challenges”? Way to take the wonderful esthetic experience of eating fresh, tasty food and turn it into a friggin’ competition. Burros’ article also mentions several recent books whose authors stuck out for a period of months or years eating only locally grown food. Arrghh! What’s wrong with a little pepper from India? Or avocados from California?
Here’s my prediction: Most of today’s hard-core locavores will get bored within a couple of years and move on to some other obsession. Hot-dog-eating contests, maybe.