 | The Bullroarer - Friday 30th November 2007 | TOD: Australia/New Zealand | Australia, The Place to Be: Part 3b |  |
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I don;t understand those guys - they are objecting to locally grown food as if it is some kind of sacrifice. Sure, if there is nobody around where you live that knows how to grow vegetables or raise livestock then you have no choice but to depend on other countries for your food. Or, if you eat Mcnuggets you won't be able to tell the difference of how the "chickens" were raised.
But, I personally find the tomatoes and other products i can get at my locally-grown farmers market to have much better flavor than the store bought stuff (which often has no flavor). You can even get tomatoes out of season (hot house) at the farmers market but they aren't as good.
So for me, it is about quality as well as being more locally self-sufficient and secure.
Dinopello,
The idea is that if you grow your food locally, you actually use significantly more energy/resources.
Plus that it makes you poorer.
I haven't seen any compelling proof of that, but I will not pass judgment on that aspect.
My point was that I eat better food by eating locally grown/raised food and I get to know the farmers and learn from them which is an added benefit. There are many meanings of being "poorer".
Well, the kind of poor we talk about here is the 'less money' kind of poor.
I see. Around here, we include happiness, friendship, education, security and health etc as important things you can be poor in as well.
Fair enough. But how about: not enough to eat?
You cannot expect the world to localize and still have enough to eat. That is a very unrealistic assumption.
So yes, I agree it is important to know your neighbor, but I would suggest it is slightly more important to eat.
As a token, be it incomplete, of proof: all present day localized societies are dirt poor.
At least, that's how we around here think about it.
That would be covered under "health" -LOL!
Yes, this the the key -energy/climate cataclysm. Present day energy conditions are not like they were 100 years ago and beyond and present day conditions are about to undergo accelerating change. It's a matter of what systems are most robust under these changing conditions. Fortunately for me, the more robust arrangement of reasonably scaled systems (locally scaled in terms of just about everything - food, goods, retail, education, governance etc) yields what I consider a better quality of life as well due to what I value.