Project to Eat locally Prefigures Disaster of "Peak Oil " Crisis

[nosmokes]

edited to change headline.

original

Student Project on Trying to Eat Locally & Organically Prefigures the Disaster When Global "Peak Oil" Crisis Hits

http://tinyurl.com/9qwl5
EATING LOCALLY IS HARDER THAN YOU THINK A Sonoma County Exercise Provides Valuable Planning Lessons--This Isn't as Easy as We Might Hope "I Hate Peak Oil" Cookies

by Wendy Talaro



November 21, 2005 1100 PST (FTW): -- Though I engaged in this two-week exercise as a specific homework assignment for a graduate school level Ecological Agriculture course, I would not hesitate to recommend that absolutely everyone living in industrialized countries participate in their own local food sourcing experiment. Where is your food grown and harvested? Not just some of it - this is a query about each and every component of your current diet, whether you're eating junk food for pleasure and solace, or enjoying mindful dining for nutritional health. Restrict your food purchases to items grown within a specific mileage radius and write out the rationale for the distance of the boundary. Find out as best you can about the farm sources of the produce, dairy, eggs and meat that you eat and ask grocers for this information if a food item's origin is not clearly labeled. If components of your standard diet are not locally available and readily accessible within the radius, make notes of all the food items that would otherwise be missing if not for global commerce and far-flung food transport. It is an eye-opening, if disturbing, exercise. Food security vulnerabilities are ordinarily easy to overlook until the veneer of plenty is ripped away. The vulnerabilities of Sonoma County's local food system were exposed through this assignment, as were the shortfalls for meeting the caloric, let alone nutritional, needs of the county's 478,400 residents.1

To delineate and clearly see my self-imposed boundary, I obtained a California State Automobile Association map of the state and drew in a circle with a compass. Any source within the boundary was fair game as "local." In my palette of culinary creations, there was no single dish

that could be prepared exclusively with locally grown items. The longer the ingredient list for the recipe, the harder it was to source every ingredient within the boundary. The success of finding or creating meals of entirely local ingredients was a complex function of available money, creativity, research, time spent in shopping and alchemical effort spent in the kitchen. Eating fresh food locally implicitly entails eating seasonally, but merely surviving by meeting caloric requirements alone entails some deprivation and self-denial of tastes and preferences, many of which have been shaped for decades by cheap fossil fuel driven imports and exports of unprocessed food and value-added manufactured foodstuffs.

Food shopping at locally-owned Oliver's Market in Cotati, CA was my best option, given its business hours and location. A 6-mile round trip on surface streets is arguably not the most efficient use of gasoline, but a special, longer round trip to a farmers' market under the same surface street travel conditions would've been even less efficient. I restricted my purchases as much as I could tolerate and afford, to (1) locally grown and (2) organic. Budgetary limitations required me to deviate from my self-selected geographic rule while the idealistic desire to give the assignment an honest effort cost me about 3-4 times as much in two weeks as food usually costs me in a single month. If I thought the cost was prohibitive, it was nothing compared to the time I spent fulfilling the requirements of the assignment. Food became a preoccupation to an exaggerated degree, not for want of more of it but due to the time sink of online recipe and food preparation research. Nor had I accounted for preparation and cooking efforts that needed to be completely reconfigured to accommodate foods that usually were not part of my diet, and in greater quantities than I was used to cooking with - pumpkins, dairy and potatoes, for example.

Fortunately, eating organic food no longer presents the same narrow range of choices and accessibility difficulties it once did; there has been explosive growth of this multi-million dollar marketplace. I had the distinct advantage of a beautifully organized and comprehensive manual, The Organic Guide to Sonoma, Napa & Mendocino Counties, 5 th edition, produced and distributed by Community Action Publications in Sebastopol, CA. Although the flavor, health and environmental benefits reflected in organic food pricing make this food competitive with cheaper, conventionally produced food (whose pricing reflects neither true long-term health detriments or environmental costs), the limits of the consumer's personal food budget can drive short-term choices to garner the most "bang for the buck" at the grocery store.
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complete article here

[TallahasseeGrannie]

1. This is why I raise my own chickens

I'm ready.

[kaygore]

2. Great if you are Atkins diet

but what about spices, staples, vegetables, fruits, etc.

[TallahasseeGrannie]

3. I plant a garden

and have herbs, but no spices. And no wheat or grain other than corn.

Pumpkins last a long time, as do the other squashes. Here is FL something is always growing. Right now, cabbages, broccoli, sprouts and collards.

Big problem without fuel would be watering the garden in the winter, which is pretty dry. The well pump is electric.

[kaygore]

4. I was yanking your chain

Get solar for the pump.

[TallahasseeGrannie]

5. Good idea

I know you were teasing me, but I take my garden seriously because all my life I have assumed that modern conveniences, including food delivery, would eventually break down.

But nobody starves in Florida. There's enough green stuff growing everywhere to keep us alive forever. And then there are palmetto bugs. mmmmm meaty

[DoYouEverWonder]

7. Plus there's plenty of fish

and other critters to eat. I'd trade some red fish for those pretty tomatoes.

[IDemo]

6. It's all right here -->>

http://www.peakoil.com/forum8.html

[Raydawg1234]

8. Americans are too lazy and spoiled, we'd be lost without the local

supermarket. There'd be chaos in the streets.