Informative and interesting! I'm looking forward to reading other people's comments on this article (except for the usual trolls).

By the way, the Whole Foods near my house has started labeling produce that is local (or, more often, "regional" would be a better word). But I'm tired of seeing mangoes there year-round when they are shipped from halfway around the world. Also, I recently made the mistake of purchasing some tomatoes. They looked beautiful, thanks to a shiny, waxy coating, but they had a only faint resemblance to the taste of a farm-fresh tomato. Blah.

I live in a beautiful small southern Italian city, Matera. I could swear that almost every bite that goes into my mouth and the wine and milk I drink comes from a 50 mile radius. The bottled water from a 60 mile radius. if I wanted to, I could track down every bite and every sip. I see from my terrace the wheat that will be turned into the famous local bread (known throughout Italy as Altamura bread). My butchers are adamant about using only locally produced meat, only from suppliers THEY have known all their lives. most of my vegetables come from a peasant farmer named Vito who stops by twice a week and most everything I buy was harvested early that morning (and is delivered full of dirt, alas). Vito never uses anything on his plants but what he calls 'sun, earth, water'. The wine is superb (Cantine del Colle, won some big California award) and is sold to us in bulk, grown in nearby Apulia.

Then there are the presents. My husband is a hospital physician who makes housecalls but doesn't ask for money. We get crates of organic oranges from the nearby Metaponto area (the California of Italy), bottles of homemade wine (mostly good, sometimes a bit sour because not pasteurized and certainly does not age well so has to be drunk immediately), home made pasta, homemade pecorino cheese, freshly-laid eggs (of course free range). in the tomato season, late summer, I am drowned in flats of tomatoes.

My son is so used to this that he can tell if the mozzarella was not made that morning and has rarely tasted bottled tomato sauce for his pasta.

this kind of eating is, alas, addictive and nowadays very rare, even in Italy. once you've had a washout and your system if full of fresh food with as few chemicals as possible, other food -- especially vegetables -- tastes flat or slightly funny, certainly off.

from a spoiled reader in Italy

I love home-grown tomatoes. I go to the farmer's market every saturday and get locally grown produce, locally produced olive oil and wine, and enjoy handmade tamales.

But I don't kid myself that this is particularly sustainable or energy-efficient practice. The truth remains that a traincar load of hothouse tomatoes shipped up from Mexico uses less oil per ton than the gorgeous heirlooms at the local certified organic farmer's market. Both in production and in distribution, economies of scale favor industrial agriculture when it comes to the consumption of fossil fuels.

But that doesn't change the way they taste. I'm content knowing that the inspiring home-grown tomatoes in my salad were moved by the bushel in an SUV, because they taste better.

Sustainability has become a marketing buzzword; attaching it to delicious produce only makes it easier to monetize.

Our population is obviously too large for us to eat local. To eat local we need to decrease the population. Our massive immigration gurantees that we cannot eat local.

Sodhexo was the largest investor in Corrections Corporation of America before students nationwide embarrassed them into ending their majority position in the dangerous corporation. (The Not With Our Money, capaign.) However, Aramark, which has prison feeding contracts around the nation could not abandon the same sordid business.

In New Mexico, Aramark had a registered lobbyist who was the deputy director of a state prison in southern Illinois. Apparently the only thing that she brought to the "job" was her relationship with the married ex-GEO Group Warden, and now director of Corrections in NM, Joe Williams. She was his, er, traveling companion, according to public records and newspaper articles. She was also the registered lobbyist for Wexford Health Services, of Pittsburgh, PA, which provided abysmal medical care for New Mexican prisoners. Wexford just had it's contract cancelled.

Cell phone records showed that DOC Director Williams was on the phone to her for almost a hundred hours, loging hundreds of calls.

Will tripe specialist Aramark be next to get the bums' rush? Stay tuned.

(More info at www.privateci.org )

(or if anyone else cares to respond): Are you implying that Aramark is falsely claiming to be serving "local" food? Should we watch out for whether or not the word "local" is being used honestly? I ask because vendors at the Farmer's Market in my town have been known to run to the grocery store and buy produce there (and then resell it at the market) when they don't have enough of their own. Also, I live in Texas, so the words "Texas grown" don't necessarily mean that the produce comes from nearby. Thoughts?

I spent two years in the Peace Corps eating almost entirely local food. I arrived in early spring and I remember the first time I wandered into the bazaar and looked, appalled, at the piles of small, misshapen apples, some random root vegetables, and not much else. But then I tasted the apples, misshapen though they were, and they were delicious. And a month or two later, when the stawberries arrived, I gorged on the most tasty, juicy berries I had ever had.

As the year progressed, it was so eye-opening to see the process of in-season produce arriving in a glut in the market, the women arriving to buy vast quantities to can and preserve, and then the disappearance of that item for another year.

This is a pattern that was familiar just two generations ago here in the U.S. I realize that very few of my peers will have the chance to actually live this way for an extended period of time, and I also realize it's a way of living that would feel like a hardship for many, including me, to return to. I can't imagine my most precious holiday memory being the arrival of the one winter orange! But I feel fortunate that I had the opportunity to see the benfits of this way of eating, first-hand, and hope that a growing local food movement will offer the same glimpse to others.