You can watch a video of Barbara Kingsolver and her husband talking about her new book at the Book Passage bookstore in Corte Madera, CA on May 16, 2007.

http://globalpublicmedia.com/barbara_kingsolvers_animal_vegetable_miracle

Enjoy!

and in fact I already agreed with them and have for some time. Guess I spent too much of my youth around West Coast deadheads and heard one too many righteous lectures from leather-sandaled vegans about my dietary choices and anything smacking of that makes old Godmonkey grow terribly, terribly cranky.

I support local business as much as is practical both at home and wherever I travel, and I in fact am a member of the "choir" -- one who shows up stoned and hungover, reeking like an ashtray, but sings the songs with reasonable enough conviction.

Saturday I attended a local foods fair at our grocery Co-op here in Greensboro. That morning I attended our Saturday farmer's market. We have two farmer's markets here; a huge, state-operated one and the smaller, city-operated one. The latter requires that all goods sold must be produced locally.

It's all about choice. We can choose to subsidize and patronize factory agriculture, or we can contribute to our community, build up our neighbors, keep the money flowing locally. It's about more than the food.

I do not understand those that try to advocate against local food. There is no sound basis for that stance. Often, proponents of factory agriculture or opponents of local agriculture try to claim economies of scale keep food prices low. In reality, it is our tax dollars funnelled by the billions into unsustainable factory agriculture. More and more funds must be diverted in order to shore up this failed system. Migrant workers must be forced to work for less than minimum wage just so someone in a temperate zone can buy citrus fruit in February. Fully a fifth of factory-produced fruit delivered to your local grocery goes in the trash.

There are no economies of scale. Monoculture is fuel-intensive, capital-intensive, resource-intensive and labor-intensive. Even the big farms have to get their products to market. Often, foods must be shipped 8-10 times in order to get it to your table. Local food is usually moved twice. From the farm to the market and from there to your home. Far, far more fuel is used to move factory-produced food. Waste is staggering.

The local food movement is a choice, not a mandate. It is a wise choice for those that value community.

refer to it as moral superiority. kingsolver was demonstrating that it can be done, and how it worked for her. i doubt than anyone, anywhere, can live on exclusively local food, nor that they really want to. the point of the whole experiment, the book, and the larger cultural conversation is that we need to take steps to make everyone's lives healthier and that it's not that easy to just up and do it. do you think kingsolver is going to continue to eat only local food now that her book isn't paying for it? probably not. but she's probably learned a lot about doing so, and probably wants to work on some ways that she and others can improve their food chain without having to put forth some ridiculously large effort.

Does Laurel962 live in the same Northern Ohio I do? Guess not - we have much less snow here, and much more good food.

We eat 90% locally during the growing season, and perhaps 40-50% during the winter, because it's easy, cheap and tasty. Year-round, our animal foods come from a small family farm. Our grocery bill plummets in the summer, when we participate in a CSA, eat like royalty but rarely set foot in a supermarket (and find them depressing when we do). We freeze the excess. In the fall, we buy cellar keepers in bulk and supplement with non-local fresh salad greens and citrus fruit. Our more-industrious neighbor (in this same Ohio wasteland) walks twenty feet to his small, simple hoophouse for his February salads.

I'm all for a few choice exotics. Even the Ingalls family had oranges for Christmas, and we buy bananas and cereal for the kid. To make Thai, I have to buy coconut milk and rice, but the cilantro, lemongrass, lime leaf, ginger, galangal, hot peppers and meat are all grown here - some of it in my small city yard. Pizza is goat cheese, chicken, flour, and eggs from the next county, tomato sauce and herbs from the garden.

It's a matter of degrees. Humans have always traded for what they could not grow (salt, oil, spices). What's so weird and unhealthy and unsustainable and economically risky is that now we truck in what we could easily grow ourselves.

Even ten percent makes a difference. A few dozen people eating mostly local can support a small family farm. A few hundred thousand could stop sprawl. Here in Northern Ohio, every dollar we keep at home matters. So this summer, when you're standing in the market holding a tired $3 head of California lettuce that you could have grown at home for pennies, ask whether this is really the best way. Ask whether the Washington apple that's been held in storage in a warehouse could instead be an Ohio apple held in storage in your basement. Look, really look, at your shopping cart. How many brokers and processors are in that cart? How much petroleum? How much of what you spend is really for food? And then do something about it.

when we say "local food" we mean "locally produced", not "locally sold".

I don't think that's necessarily true. "Buying locally" encompasses a very large range of issues. Reducing the amount of energy needed to ship product from its point of production to its point of sale -- that's the "locally produced" part of the equation, or...a part of it -- is one of the issues, but not the only one. The importance of small businesses, whether we're talking about farms or pharmacies, is another. Small businesses, IMO, are vital to the health of a community, and they are also vital to the health of the industry of which they are part: A monopolized industry, one run by the equivalent of "big box" stores, has no incentive to respond to customer needs and wants, and no incentive to cater to anything other than the lowest common denominator. For me, "buying locally" is as much about supporting the other businesspeople in my community as it is about reducing the distance a tomato travels between its mother-plant and my ball of delicious, still warm, dripping-with-milk mozzarella from Joe's Dairy on Sullivan Street.