It is my great pleasure to introduce our first guest blogger, good friend Bruce. He has been a loyal reader of Tropophilia from the very beginning, and asked us if he could contribute some of his own thoughts. Enjoy, and thanks Bruce!
Like many who have recently graduated college, I like to think of myself as a master of frugality – raiding the free bagel stash at work, going an extra two days without doing laundry so that I won’t use up as many quarters in the long run, et cetera. One of my ways to save money is to not eat out so often and to buy cheaper varieties of food at the grocery. I still eat well (I do like to cook), but I have always bought non-organic milk, meat, and produce. While I’m at the store, the bottom line has been all that mattered.
But recently I’ve come home from the store and thought of the implications of this economic behavior. I, like most Americans I assume, really have no idea where my food comes from, how it is produced, and who produced it. And when cost is the only consideration, that ignorance is not really a problem. But what about the hidden cost of a lot of that food? As Field Mahoney points out in a Slate column, even organic food, free of pesticides and produced by those romantic small farms, can come from thousands of miles away and will contribute to the burning of a lot of fossil fuels before arriving in the grocery store. In his book, Deep Economy, Bill McKibben states that “growing and distributing a pound of frozen peas required 10 times as much energy as the peas contained.” That’s a lot of excess CO2.
So my first question is this: should we, as conscientious consumers, consider local production of food as not only a choice we should make, but as a workable and feasible alternative to today’s food production system?
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