TracyFood

Hungry Tracy redux: eating local 20 April 2007 9:27 pm

Posted by Tracy in : agriculture,cooking,eating,environment,eugene,garden,hungry planet,identity,local food,school,seasonality,tea , trackback

Think of me when you’re eating whatever you want this weekend; I’ll be overthinking all my meals even more than usual. For class! You see, I’m supposed to consume only food and drinks that have been “grown or processed locally.” If you’re really curious, the specifics of the assignment are here, but the general gist is that we get to come up with our own definition of eating locally and live by it for two days. Locally processed is, of course, way too much leeway for me — who knows where those ingredients come from? (I emailed Surata Soyfoods about this very question today, actually, and to ask if they give factory tours. But I digress.) Honestly, I’d argue that everything I cook for myself in my own kitchen is locally processed, but the ingredients come from all over. So I’m going for broke here, for two days if I can manage it.

I want to define “local” in terms of food miles, in other words the distance a food item travels from the farm it is grown to the kitchen it is cooked in and eaten. The problem with food miles is that they can be very difficult to apply to any food product more complicated than a carrot. How do you determine the food miles traveled by an item with multiple ingredients? Add up the miles traveled by each? Take the average? If the latter, how do you average the food miles for multiple ingredients? By weight? By volume? By the number of calories each ingredient contributes? I have been wondering about these questions since a few minutes after I first read about food miles, and they make the question of eating locally a tricky one for me. (I’m partial to using calories in my definition, if only because tea and salt have no calories, and I suspect those are the two food items I will miss most.)

My plan is to go to Saturday Market tomorrow morning and buy what looks like two days’s worth of produce (and maybe some eggs and meat), and write down where I buy them and use that to determine the longest distance travelled by my food. Depending on how Saturday goes, I may broaden my definition — if it’s completely miserable, I’ll allow myself “locally processed” foods like Wandering Goat coffee and Sweet Life pastries. Heck, if I get really desperate, Stash Tea is an Oregon company. I can argue something fierce. No matter how the next days turn out, however, my final report will make much of the fact that some food has always traveled and always will, local food purists are orthorexic maniacs, and the only way to really be sure that your food is locally grown is to grow it yourself. Of course, then you can wonder about where your seeds came from, and your water, and the power that pumped the water to your garden, and your fertilizer, if you’re so bold as to use the stuff. And that’s just when you’re worrying about food. Good luck finding locally made toilet paper, toothpaste, and over-the-counter and prescription drugs, as Debra Solomon points out in her Culiblog rant on the subject. Me, I like this “local calories” idea, but even if 100% local food were remotely practical (like if somehow consumers were suddenly and magically obsessed with eating in season and no spices or additives ever?) I still don’t think it’s the Answer by a long shot. It might not even be one of the Answers. And I’m genuinely curious to see what I’m going to eat this weekend.

Wish me luck!