Friday, August 20, 2010

Eating Local

It seems that eating local isn't necessarily the best thing.
The best way to make the most of these truly precious resources of land,
favorable climates and human labor is to grow lettuce, oranges, wheat,
peppers, bananas, whatever, in the places where they grow best and with
the most efficient technologies - and then pay the relatively tiny
energy cost to get them to market, as we do with every other commodity
in the economy. Sometimes that means growing vegetables in your
backyard. Sometimes that means buying vegetables grown in California or
Costa Rica.

Eating locally grown produce is a fine thing in many ways. But it is not
an end in itself, nor is it a virtue in itself. The relative pittance of
our energy budget that we spend on modern farming is one of the wisest
energy investments we can make, when we honestly look at what it returns
to our land, our economy, our environment and our well-being.

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