Eating For Beginners

Thanks to the magic of Twitter, specifically Mark Bittman on Twitter, yesterday I discovered this post on Marion Nestle’s blog (Nestle is the author of a whole pile of really good food books like What to Eat, Food Politics, Safe Food and others, and she’s a great, sensible source of information on everything from nutrition to grocery shopping to, apparently, pet food—the topic of her next book and also her last one, which has the amazing title Pet Food Politics: The Chihuahua in the Coal Mine).

Nestle’s post is about food miles and whether or not they really matter. This is, of course, a huge issue in the world of food (remember how “locavore” was the Oxford English Dictionary’s word of the year in 2007?). The Chair of Environmental Sciences at UCLA just sent her a paper arguing that the distance food travels has no effect on climate change (and that eating less meat does). And while Nestle (in a brisk tone I adore) doesn’t for a second pretend that she can tackle the complexities behind these conclusions—”Never mind the assumptions on which such estimates are based. I have no idea whether they make sense.”—she cuts straight to the heart of the thing I learned over and over again about buying local while I was writing Eating for Beginners.

I’ve always thought that the real benefits of local food production were in building and preserving communities.

She likes knowing her farmers and having farms near to where she lives, which is one kind of community. There’s also the kind that connects farmers themselves to the towns they live in, socially and economically,  which keeps those towns vital, as well as the kind of community I became a part of at applewood, which brings together farmers, chefs, neighborhood diners, distributors and a whole network of people who rely on each other. Buying local is about a lot more than just supporting individual farmers.

In closing, Nestle writes that she doesn’t even care all that much if local food helps climate change because she’s in it for the other “less tangible” benefits:

If local food doesn’t make climate change worse and maybe even helps a bit, that’s just icing on the cake.  Or am I missing something here?

I don’t think she is. Do you?

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