For every vegetable that David Kemp and Ratha Tep find exotic and extraordinary there is a place on this planet where it (or its genetic ancestors) grow natively and the locals find it ordinary.

A few of the things that both the author and the interviewer said rubbed me the wrong way. Farm-to-table can be an both unremarkable and a good buy for the consumer - look at the proliferation of community supported agriculture. Grocery shopping, like all consumption, is an economic act with ethical implications for local businesses and local watersheds.

While not every meal can now be prepared with local labor using local, sustainably raised products, it often makes good business sense to do so, for both the farmer and the consumer. Sustainable, farm-to-table economies are quite the opposite of elitist.

If you're fortunate enough to live somewhere with a weekly farmer's market, make sure to visit it. And support it!!!

I'm glad to finally see some discussion of the sustainable living movement in Salon. Growing food sustainably (or, "organically") is just ONE aspect of a movement that is quietly growing everywhere but still being dismissed as something "like the hippies did." Less visible aspects are experiments in sustainable home building and design, power generation and use, and community-building and design. Today the movement is being led by clear-headed folks who are building a solid foundation of knowledge gained from careful experimentation and research, often devoting their lives to back-to-the-land low-income living in order to practice their faith in these ideas.

Who are these visionaries that are designing the models for a new society that America will increasingly turn to as the oil supply runs out and climate change creates havoc? Who are the "organic" farmers running CSAs and the families who support them? If they are an "elite," it's not the vague and undefined "elite" alluded to in the article. The work many of these people are doing is largely VOLUNTARY and involves a passionate investment of their entire lives engaged in, what is often said perjoratively, "saving the world." These are regular folks from all walks of life who invest their own time and money to attend conferences and workshops on everything from building with straw bales to designing urban spaces to permaculture. They don't waste time watching TV every night. Then they spend their time and money to promote these concepts in their communities. Open your eyes and you'll see them. They have the compost pile in the back yard and the native plants where the lawn should be. They are radicals who refuse to buy a noisy expensive leaf blower and instead rely on a quiet broom or rake. They are CSA farmers working incredibly long hours and living on a small fraction of the money the rest of us think we need to live on for the joy of providing good food from healthy soil. These are not some intellectual elite sitting comfortably in a university office. They are out on the streets and farms getting their hands dirty for the rest of us (who have been watching tv every night) for when we finally awaken from our stupor, stop listening to and supporting the power elite, and admit the current ways of doing things arent working and we need to change the way the world works. If one who consumes less and intentionally lives on less money is an "elite," then it's an elite we can all easily join, and for the good of the planet and society.

As to the author's Jif comment, if he is so aware of "good-food" alternatives, I cannot understand his preference for such a highly processed food when it is painfully obvious that nearly every grocery store has a less-processed alternative: Buy the peanut butter on which the separated oil floats. The highly-processed peanut butters have their good-tasting and healthier peanut-oil removed and replaced with sugar and other foreign chemicals to prevent natural separation. Compare the labels. And you DON'T need to refrigerate it! Just give it a stir now and again.

Organic and sustainable do NOT mean the same thing. Organic means not using pesticides, fungicides, herbicides and chemical fertilizers in the production of food. Sustainable means not depleting one set of resources to produce food in a way that means the consumed resource will eventually not be available. Organic farming should be sutainable, but it isn't always. Most of the organic rice grown in the U.S., for example, relies on heavily subsidized water created by severe environmental degradation. Agricultural use of water in the WEST under current practices, organic or otherwise, is not sustainable.

shackindawoods,

i think you missed the author's point regarding jif peanut butter. he is not giving up jif because it tastes good. of course there are healthy alternatives (with oil separation on top), but usually they don't taste as good. so in conjunction with a healthy diet over all, a little jif every now and then won't kill you. finger-wagging foodies were exactly the types he lamented in the interview.

Organic food is now, because a flood of articles like this, associated with being intellectual, upperclass, healthy, socially responsible, politically liberal, fashionable and a good parent. Does anybody care whether there is an actual scientific difference between "organic" and "non-organic" food?

"It's certainly welcome to encourage oversight of natural resources, but a blanket insinuation that nature's products are always benign or better than "unnatural compounds" is pure hokum. For example, many organic products supporters maintain that "natural" fruits and foods are healthier than conventionally grown products. "It doesn't matter what's true, it matters what consumers think," said Chuck Marcy, CEO of Horizon Organic Dairy at an industry forum this past January. Consumers buy organic "because they think it's healthier, safer or more nutritious".[Horizon, the company mentioned in this article, is owned by giant food conglomerate Dean Foods]

As Horizon well knows, there is no scientific evidence to support this marketing fiction, as hundreds of independent evaluations by such groups as the Organic Farming Research Foundation and Consumer Reports have demonstrated. Zealots also ignore the reality that nature can be far deadlier than man - the natural bacteria in manure used as fertiliser in organic produce has led to far more deaths and sicknesses (think Odwalla and the recent spinach outbreak) than "unnatural" chemical fertilisers."...

So what is the lesson here? Many businesses including those purporting to be socially responsible have learned that hyping fears of chemicals and using shifty advertising can pay off. This "natural" nonsense has become an amazingly potent hot-button way to court aging baby boomer consumers and their families. It's also fraudulent. Demagoguing science,..., will certainly sell your product, but at the long term cost to society, which constantly wrestles with junk science and consumer hysteria." (stoplabelinglies.com)

Salon, food writers should stick to writing about the taste and aesthetics of food. Leave food science to the scientists.

P.S. I am no fan of Ann Coulter but mentioning her name inn the title of this piece is another example of associating organic products with the right "blue state" values.