Plenty?

I'm currently two pages from finishing Plenty: One Man, One Woman, and a Raucous Year of Eating Locally. The basic premise is a couple in Vancouver, BC, who decide to spend a year eating nothing that is not produced within a 100 mile radius of their home. There are many interesting ideas contained herein, information about food miles, the failings of the industrial food system, the degradation of place that modern society engenders, and so on, but to me the overwhelming appeal of the book is not intellectual--I've heard all this stuff before--but gastronomical. I love the authors' descriptions of the various local treasures they uncover during their trial, their joy at discovering some unexpected delicacy, their despair at not being able to source a beloved food locally. There's something fundamentally invigorating about good food, and the food they find in the small farms of British Columbia and the (mostly) fished-out bays of the Salish Sea is some of the best. Truly, you can't beat local produce. It's ripened in the garden, on the vine, not in a truck, and it just tastes better. Local cheese and wine, local meat, local grains--the list goes on.

OK, so there's a little bit of food porn in here. I like to eat. I love to eat, and that's part of the reason I'm fascinated with this book. I'm also fascinated with variety in food. I'll eat and enjoy almost anything. When you go to the supermarket regularly, you soon realize that the apparent year-round plenty of the produce section is reliant on a couple dozen commercially viable species that don't even taste all that good. This throws the variety and freshness of the farmer's market and kitchen garden into sharp relief. I guess this is one of the things I like most about this book. The authors don't just get by on local food, they thrive on local food.

Sure, it's hard for them at first because they don't know where to go for what they need. The farmer's markets and local organic groceries are places to start, but they can't get everything they need there, and the prices at the organic groceries are too high for them to be a realistic everyday source of food. Not to mention a lot of that food is flown in from all around the world. So they dig in. They find farmers growing fruit, beans, wheat, making cheese, slaughtering grass-fed beef. (They start the year as vegans but with tofu out of the picture, quickly start eating dairy, eggs, seafood, and eventually even beef. But they feel good about it. It's one thing to avoid factory-farmed beef, which comes from an unhealthy animal that's practically been tortured most of its life, so poor are the conditions it is raised in, and quite another thing to eat a healthy pastured cow that has been respectfully and cleanly killed by its owner.) Above all, they discover that the local food they find is more nourishing, more varied, cheaper, and just better than the food they've given up. There are certain things they miss--avocados, beer (some of the ingredients even in the local brews are sourced from far away), and so on--but they find many more things they never even knew they loved.

There's also something about their DIY mentality that appeals to me. I love the idea of baking my own bread, fermenting my own yogurt, making my own cheese. Of course, finding the time to do it is another problem for a 9 to 5-er like myself. The authors are freelance writers and journalists and, though busy, have a more flexible schedule that can accommodate tasks like these.

So where does that leave the book? As I said, it primarily appealed to the Epicurean in me, but I did find its other points interesting and salient. Sure, it is impossible and absurd to absolutely refuse to eat ANYTHING grown or raised more than 100 miles from home. But the point being that it is equally and perhaps more absurd to eat only or mostly food grown thousands of miles from home. The transportation costs involved are reliant upon cheap oil and mask a host of externalities that are someday soon going to bite us in the ass. In fact they already are. Not to mention the farming practices in much of the industrialized world are hard on the land and unsustainable in the long run, or even the medium run. A local food system is not only tastier year-round (and not just in Vancouver, as the authors point out with a midwinter visit to a group in northern Minnesota pursuing a similar dietary regimen), it is also more stable and more sustainable in the long run. It also doesn't mean we can't eat food grown in other regions or parts of the world, but such things should be delicacies and not an everyday part of our diet.

Yeah, this seems a little Quixotic. I have a really hard time imagining a majority of people in this country giving up their McBurgers and midwinter spring mixes in favor of canned corn left over from last summer's harvest. But stranger things have happened. And if cheap oil peters out without a good alternative, we may not have much other choice. It also seems fitting that this dismantling of powerful but ultimately self-destructive industrial systems could begin with a return to local food. People have historically been touchy about what they eat, attaching an almost religious importance to diet (or explicitly religious; see Kosher rules or Indian vegetarians). If there is one area where people are finally beginning to see what has been lost in the switch to large-scale industrial production, it is in the food we put on our tables.

As for myself, I probably won't adopt a strict 100-mile diet anytime soon. But I do plan to eat a lot more local food this summer. I've planted a garden (not necessarily because of this book--I planted it before I read it--but it makes me more excited about my garden), and I plan to spend a lot more time at the farmer's market than the produce aisle this summer. Maybe I'll even poke around and see if I can't find some local flour, or local fish. Who know? Maybe I'll find some tasty delicacies I never even dreamed existed. The plains of Colorado seem barren compared to the Pacific Northwest, or the Illinois farm fields I grew up in, but surely they have their hidden treasures, as well. I look forward to finding them.