David,

       One problem with advocating local farms as better than distant farms is the basis.  Clearly Americans have shown little resistance to buying things manufactured elsewhere, so why would they object to buying things grown elsewhere?

       If you want to claim a moral value to local farms, you should know that most Americans are aware that Farmer Bob exploits undocumented workers with the best of them.  He might be in love with organics, but his relationship to his workers is not always any better than Big MacFarmer, the industrial guy.

       BTW, most Chinese farms are not industrial, they are too small.  You can criticize them for being far away, but they are not industrial.

       The taste argument would work, but really, for a nation that likes industrial pizza and chain fast food, I don't think it will go very far.

       There is also the danger of sounding, hmmm, ummm, elitist.

patrick

Patrick, sweetheart, this is brilliant!  We really should demand an ideal society, in which every object that we consume comes with a note signed in ink-pen by someone who was involved somehow in the production of that object.

You make another excellent point: We ought to make a practice of looking in on Farmer Bob.  And of asking him what's what regarding his workers.

Why in the world are the local NYC chapters of Sierra and Audubon not on top of this already?

God!, is this why we need Grist??

I'm not so sure your premise is correct, that food straight from the farm tastes very different from that that's been sitting in a modern refrigerated truck a few days. Not so most Americans would notice, anyway.

Especially when it's going to sit in the home fridge as long as a week before it's eaten.

Kathy, yes, it matters.

Tom Philpott and others could be much more eloquent on how it matters, and why it matters.

I am just a little, street-scrambling Merkin, knowin' nothin' 'bout nothin', and yet I would gladly testify before Chief Justice Roberts himself, admirable straight Catholic white male, that yes, indeed, there is a difference.

David's excellent question, though, has nothing to do with the law, and nothing to do with nature, and nothing to do with science.  It has to do with us: Why in the world have we been reduced to this point, in which we care little or nothing about flavor?

Greetings,

David's article and everyone's comments are fascinating food for thought.

I was raised on a farm - it's hard work.  Even years later, I can taste a fresh-picked vegetable.  I can tell a one-day old, two-day old, etc.  The flavor changes with time.

In my lifetime I have seen a tremendous disconnect from the sources of our food, shelter supplies, etc. It's much easier to sit behind a desk for hours on end than to bend over picking vegetables, washing the soil off the leaves, preparing or preserving it.

Even the farmers in my local Hudson Valley area have pointed out that they cannot find people willing to pick crops at $10 an hour or more.

We are not going to revert to an agrarian society, so I'm not sure there are answers.  What I do know is that when I want fresh-picked these days, I go foraging in the public parks.

I've picked enough lamb's quarters to preserve some for winter use.  

I was on a foraging tour with a group of inner city kids last week.  It occurred to me that what we are taught to see has everything to do with our attitude toward food - and consequently our health.

JJ Murphy WriterByNature.com Creative Content for Your Nature Endeavors 1-800-WRITE-02

David speaks to the tasty reasons why I grow a backyard garden.  Vegetables and fruits are very sweet if picked less than one hour before dinner.  Sugars are quickly used by the pods, the reason for blanching before freezing.  Commercial farmers can never be so quick and efficient.

Growing food is far less labor intensive than preparing and cooking food.  And it is a pleasure to be outside meditating while working the garden.

Also, I feel more self reliant and have less fear of the possible collapse of the industrialized economy, less vulnerable.

Only on a purely economic basis does it not make sense as I save only a few dollars per hour of labor, but that is a minor point.  I do not pay taxes on those saved dollars and I have garden security not under the thumb of human authority.

I get headaches from neurotoxins in pesticides, plenty of motivation for organic produce.

Quality of life over quanitiy of possesions and consumption.  That is the thing.  To energize the forces of re-evolution.

Food, exersize, converstaion..  it all has the capacity to be orgasmic.  Why waste the short time we have worshipping quantity?  

Eat less food. Eat food that is local and in season, preserve it for later use yourself.  Even if you don't grow it yourself.

Use the transcendant power of coincidence.  Be in the right place at the right time.  

Coincidence is real, the linear time/space cause and effect thinking that takes all value to the "bottomline" is the grand illusion.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog

   In China, most farms are small (very very very small by American standards), and most labor is by hand or close to it.

   People from local farms come into the city and set up stands (or sell to someone who does).  Recently, the apricots have ripened, and begun to appear on the street, lovely and golden.  Yum.  And dates are coming in.

   Just outside the city (say 20 KM or so), there are many small farms.  The farmers set up tiny stands all along the roadside, selling whatever is fresh that day or week.  Drivers stop and buy goods, but I have gone by bus to do so as well.

   Mostly people here buy enough fresh vegetables for one or two days.  I have never seen frozen or canned vegetables (except pickles, in a jar), though I am sure there are some around somewhere.

   Despite the size of the city and the huge numbers of people, most folks eat food that is fairly local and fresh, and in season.

   This is changing somewhat, but not for the vast majority of people.

   While I hate it when I can't get one of my favorite dishes because the vegetable is not available, I have come to associate the changes in what I eat with the seasons.

   Of course in the large foreign supermarkets, it may be different, but I don't shop there....

patrick

I too love food and wish others appreciated it as much and would pay a little more for it. And I am glad that most of you discussed efforts that involve education and didn't suggest heavy-handed government policy. On the issue of school lunches, I think huge improvements could be made if we simply took all of the ridiculous subsidies for the meat and dairy industry out of the equation (another area where subsidies are terrible) and gave much more freedom for schools to choose the types of food they want. I don't advocate indoctrinating children with anything, but certainly exposing them to healthy tasty food is a good start. What I like so much about this discussion is that most of it comes down to people expressing their preferences in the market, which is how it should be. I have no desire to force people to eat well, it should come from their own volition.

However, here's a novel idea: higher health premiums for people who don't eat well, which would reflect the cost to society- this might make people think a little more about eating Big Macs- we all pay different amounts for car insurance depending on where we live, our age, and how much we drive, so no reason that people who eat like crap and impose huge costs on society shouldn't pay more for health insurance. Maybe eating badly should be viewed just like smoking cigarettes.

J.S.

J.S. htt://voicesofreason.info

   There are (as usual) problems with free markets and school lunches.

   First of all, schools don't have unlimited spaces to prepare a huge variety of choices.  Secondly, as a matter of economics, they tend to buy in bulk, which means centralized purchasing.

   So, why doesn't the market work?  Well, gee, soft drink manufacturers will sell at a discount to corner the market (locking out milk producers), and large fast food producers will lock out the local producers.

   The market gives us mickieD and Coke.

   There are other problems (for instance, I volunteered in a school where the food was so bad that none of the teachers would eat it, local school board member's brother had the contract, it was a poor school, no clout by the parents, no media interest).

   Higher health premiums for the sick?  Hmmm, the point of insurance was, I thought, to spread the burden around.

   So, basically, the sick won't be able to afford insurance (under Jason's scheme) and then they can all just, what?  Die?

   Who decides what eating badly includes?  All meat?  All fish?  All vegetables?  We can have cultural wars over this!!  Remember what happened to a certain TV host when she suggested eating meat was bad?

   Funny, poor people usually don't eat as well, so under Jason's scheme, they would pay more, or lacking money, do without.  Sounds somewhat like our current system.

   This same problem applies to Biodiversivist answer.  Do people really believe that all health problems are due to bad habits?  

   The free market is a pretty sounding answer for all problems, but it rarely works in the real world.

   And is definitely not a good answer for anything related to health care!!

patrick

   Car insurance is not benignly priced according to a set of fair principles.  Rather it is priced according to state standards that list pricing rules and regulations.

   The reason we have those, is that when left to their own devices, car insurance companies invariably ended up discriminating on the basis of class and race.

   Even today, when under the watchful eye (at least once in a while) of state governments, they have problems.

   One is that for the sake of efficiency, it is easiest to put people in large classes.  All 18 year olds, everyone who lives in a city, and so on.

   The problem is that geography was a favorite risk factor.  But there was this funny little problem.  Certain zip codes had high accident rates, so people paid more.  Fair, right?  Well, it turned out those were zip codes with highways going through them, and the accidents were mostly involving non-residents.  Who didn't pay.  The univolved residents paid.  Many of whom were poor and minorities.

   Gee, the market is so swell!!!

patrick

With an Avgolemono-soup first course?

Or no, something really really red.  Intensely red.  Are tomatoes up to the challenge?  Hmmm.  How about grapes?

Oh, OK, sure, Roz will come up with something.

Main course:

Breast?  Wings?  Crunchable digits?  Ears?  Head?

No eyes, surely.

Tongue?  Probably bat's tongue was mentioned in Petronius, I cannot remember, one of Trimalchio's special treats.

Anyway ...

Poor Biodiv.  What we do, for our children!  A single slice of cheese, in white bread!  Washed down with chocolate milk!  Yuck!  What kind of country do we continue to live in, in which chocolate milk is legal, and marijuana is illegal??!

What would be the problem with setting up a connexion with the Southwest Indian Foundation, and running in a steady supply of green chili salsa?  From New Mexico!!

I mean if you are going to die choking on a piece of American cheese on white bread, why not at least smear some New Mexico green chili on it first.

Scripsit Biodiversivista: "Defining what it means to eat well would also be impossible. The things people around the world eat would curl your hair--caterpillars, rats, bats, snails."

Having little hair left to curl, I am happy to assert myself as a bold experimentalist.

Concerning bats, enough said.  Yum yum.  Not the eyes though.  Nor the fuzz.

Snails are escargot, and presumably, nos tre's bons amis les francais know exactly what to do with them.  They are mollusks, after all (snails, that is, not the French, who are I believe a kind of crocodilian), and we all love to munch on clams and oysters, squids and octopodes, don't we.  So why not snails?  Admittedly, the one and only time I ever was served escargot, it tasted like cigarette ash.  But, hey, that was anecdotal.

On caterpillars: Well, I like butterflies as much as the next lepidopterophile and fan of Nabokov, but I do not think they are exactly endangered.  Anyway, bug-eating desperately needs to be studied and researched and explored.  I am on the record for professing my love of chapulines, grasshoppers or locusts or crickets or whatever, an important part of Oaxacan cuisine.  I am also on the record for encouraging the development of bug food for farm-raised fish, as opposed to fish food.

On eating rats: Oh whoa.  Not my cup of tea.  But who knows, this is where Art moves in, and what better place than Seattle!: Rat-tail omelette!; Rat-haunch salad!; Rat-belly milk shakes!; Rat-liver pate'!; Rat-claw pizza!; Rat-ear chocolate mousse!; Rat-eye frozen margaritas!  By all means, get all that organic stuff workin' round and round!

Myself, I have my eye on the Rat-claw pizza.  Thin-crust, of course.

Chickens are our cousins! So are other sensitive animals! Enough is enough! No more factory farms!

The problem is that, even if you lead the horse to water (for example, feeding lazy eaters a perfect late-summer corn chowder, only possible for a couple weeks of the year), you cannot make him/her drink.

I have friends who do not cook at all: they eat pre-packaged things out of boxes in the freezer. When I feed them real food, they acknowledge that it is delightful and incomparable, and yet they aren't interested in duplicating it for themself. Why? Americans do not want to spend time or money to eat well. It is not that they don't see the benefits of eating more pleasurably, it is that they are not willing to shell out (time, money) for it.

I remember seeing all the wonderful (and unfamiliar) fruits for sale at street markets in Italy. I asked my dad why we couldn't buy cool fruits in the US, and he said, "Americans would never pay the money for those."

So we have to do more than lead them to the water. We have to get people to where they see the value of shelling out for good, real food.

   When I volunteered at a poor school in Boston, there was no cafeteria, so lunches were brought in pre-packed and micro-waved (this was in the early days of the machine, so they were maybe partially to blame).

  The food was considered inedible by adults, but the kids were poor and hungry.  One wonders if they ever developed a "taste" for the nicer foods?

  One day the lunch consisted of partially thawed peanut butter and jelly on white bread, all soggy and half frozen.

  Don't know it if was local or not.

patrick

Interesting, Jason.  You don't want "food police" but you have no problem with waistline police?

In case you didn't know, body size/shape, cholesterol levels, etc, are determined by a lot of things.  Diet is certainly one of them, but as a fat person who eats a very healthy vegetarian diet and is more fit (by any measurement other than weight) than most thin people, I would really like to think I won't ever be penalized financially for my size.  I'm already punished for in in enough other ways, thanks.

I'd also like to think people with high cholesterol, or even people who like to eat jelly donuts, won't ever have to pay higher insurance premiums for their bodies' quirks, or their choices to do things they find pleasurable.  

It's interesting how the pleasure of food is only considered a good thing when people are taking pleasure in the "right" things.  Yes, I prefer fresh produce over jelly donuts, but I have the good sense not to go around claiming to be morally superior every time I eat a local peach.  Jeez, you people are enough to drive me to drink (or maybe jelly donuts?).

Oh, and David, a "palette" is a thing you put paint on.  I think, perhaps, you meant a "palate"?