Living local

I'm reading this book about what it might be like if you really tried to cut the petroleum out of your food chain by having your own garden and getting anything you couldn't grow yourself from farmers/ranchers/mills near by. Lots of people (see Michael Pollan, Carlo Petrini, etc.) talk about the horrors of the military industrial food complex, but I think it would be really eye-opening if nothing else for people to do this eating local experiment for themselves.

And when I say eating local, I mean ALL local - everything from your oranges to your chicken to your walnuts to your oats, olive oil. There will obviously be things you can't eat for as long as you're running your experiment, but - and this is where I feel like I'm having a slightly newish idea - if everyone did this, you could start to see differences in regional cuisines again. There would be pluses like everything being in season and probably mostly home made (which is a plus for me, at least), but, beyond that, I think it would be more exciting to travel, if things weren't always the same everywhere you went.

It would be like taking the idea that baguettes are better in France up a notch because maybe they'd only exist in France. Maybe you'd have to come up with your own bread shape or regional dishes that worked for your climate and lifestyle. You could get excited about food again, because it would be challenging and new. And, if you grew it, it would be a lot more personal and meaningful.

And finally, if we were able to save all that oil that we pour on our fields to produce states and states-worth of corn and soy beans maybe we'd be able to spare a bitty bit of fuel for transporting us to faraway and actually foreign places.