With the pet food recall and the focus on poor Chinese agricultural practises, the 100 Mile Diet is starting to sound pretty good.
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If you haven't heard of it, the 100 Mile Diet recommends eating food that has been produced within 100 miles of your home. It is not a gimmick diet focused on weight loss or any other nonsense.
The argument in favour of the 100 Mile Diet is top-heavy with the typical Green stuff -- pesticides bad, genetically modified organisms bad, and so on -- but there are a lot of reasons for the 100 Mile Diet that are appealing:
1. Taste the difference.
At a farmers’ market, most local produce has been picked inside of 24 hours. It comes to you ripe, fresh, and with its full flavor, unlike supermarket food that may have been picked weeks or months before. Close-to-home foods can also be bred for taste, rather than withstanding the abuse of shipping or industrial harvesting. Many of the foods we ate on the 100-Mile Diet were the best we’d ever had.
3. Meet your neighbors.
Local eating is social. Studies show that people shopping at farmers’ markets have 10 times more conversations than their counterparts at the supermarket. Join a community garden and you’ll actually meet the people you pass on the street. Sign up with the 100-Mile Diet Society; we’ll be working to connect people in your area who care about the same things you do.
5. Discover new flavors.
Ever tried sunchokes? How about purslane, quail eggs, yerba mora, or tayberries? These are just a few of the new (to us) flavors we sampled over a year of local eating. Our local spot prawns, we learned, are tastier than popular tiger prawns. Even familiar foods were more interesting. Count the types of pear on offer at your supermarket. Maybe three? Small farms are keeping alive nearly 300 other varieties–while more than 2,000 more have been lost in our rush to sameness.
9. Give back to the local economy.
A British study tracked how much of the money spent at a local food business stayed in the local economy, and how many times it was reinvested. The total value was almost twice the contribution of a dollar spent at a supermarket chain.
13. And always remember:
Everything about food and cooking is a metaphor for sex.
Nice to see they have a sense of humour. Too may Green-types come off as irredeemably dour.
In any case, for me the real strength in the 100 Mile Diet is the accountability that is inherent in pure capitalism. I expect farmers to use the tools at their disposal to grow a crop efficiently and cost-effectively. If they choose to hand-pick aphids off their bean plants instead of using pesticides, that's fine, but they'll have to compete against the farmer who did use a pesticide. But then some people will pay a premium for that pesticide-free food.
That's great. That's market forces in action, with individual actors making decisions on their own based on factors that they find most important. With imported food, a half-dozen intermediaries are making decisions along the chain, eliminating your ability to influence your purchase in a meaningful way. It runs counter to capitalism.
Instead, farmers choose to grow crops to please the people who eat the food, and not to please the distributors or the grocery chains, who instead are working, quite correctly, to please shareholders. Producers connected with consumers in the marketplace -- pure capitalism.
And if something is wrong with the food, you know who is responsible and can call that person to account, which is key to all of this. The FDA still can't get visas from the Chinese government needed if an inspection of the plants suspected of contaminating the wheat gluten, rice protein, and corn gluten with melamine is going to be carried out. No doubt the visas will come once the evidence is cleared away.
As consumers, we ought to demand accountability. As conservatives, we should seek to do as much as we can without government support to hold people accountable. If that means buying some portion of your weekly groceries from a local farmer's market, I say go for it.
Just smile and be polite if the conversation at the market turns to global warming.
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