La Vida Locavore

When a guy like Mark Bittman says that locavorism is not an elitist plot, you know that it is. In case you haven't heard of locavorism, so-called locavores believe it’s best to eat foods grown within about 100 miles of wherever you live because it’s supposedly more environmentally friendly than shipping food around.

Obviously, the widespread adoption of locavorism would limit almost everyone’s food choices in some way and would kill off a whole industry (think of all the businesses that ship food around). Sure, it's reasonable to say that a state like California should export more food than it imports, but not every state is as agriculturally abundant. If locavorism were the norm, most Americans wouldn’t be able to enjoy avocados. And that would be a tragedy.

As The Center for Consumer Freedom (a foodmakers’ advocacy group) notes, Bittman’s recent blog post “strays from the typical (long-debunked) argument that locavorism is eco-friendlier, instead claiming that ‘when imports stop we won’t have the food to replace them.’ This is blatant fear-mongering … what’s the likelihood that importation will just ‘stop’?”

Bittman asks “wouldn’t you prefer to eat food that came from, say, your state, or one nearby? Or at least from within our national borders? Food you can touch, grown at farms you can visit?” To me, broccoli is broccoli; why would I care about the farm it was grown on? Locavores seem to want to go back to a simpler time when people grew their own food on their own land. Like environmentalism, the hunger for local food is also a hunger for connection and authenticity, with a side of self-importance. If the source of your food is important to you, fine. But trying to make it important for everyone would be kind of like an elitist plot.