Is Eating Local Even Possible?

In her latest blog, Suzi Steffen poses this rhetorical gem: Is eating local even possible?

Eating local — goat cheese from the farmers' market or eggs from my friends' chickens, vegetables and fruit as abundant as weeds — is easy right now in Oregon's fertile Willamette Valley. But I want to stay as local as possible in the winter. And that desire has turned me into an ant, the workhorse of food procuring — I don't even have time to read for pleasure anymore, except when I'm walking to the farmers' market.

It's a good question really, and one that we preachers of the Slow gospel need to be able to answer readily. What I usually say is that of course it is, because that's what humans have done for the entirety of their existence, save roughly the last 80 years or so. But Steffen too recognizes the lesson taught by Barbara Kingsolver in her current book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle:

As Kingsolver says, "Eating locally in the winter is easy. But the time to think about that would be in August." So it is.

WaPo Investigates Terroir

Such food luminaries (and friends of Slow Food) as Rich Pirog, Arlin Wasserman and Gary Paul Nabhan explain how and why Terroir is important in this August 22nd Washington Post article

…Wasserman has a growing roster of clients, from General Mills to a co-op of Amish goat and lamb farmers, as well as a group of Minnesota artisans with a line of charcuterie, preserves and wild rice dishes in the works. Similar projects are taking shape across the country. On Lummi Island, off the coast of Washington, salmon fishermen have formed a co-op to sell local sockeye salmon caught in reef nets, a traditional Native American method. Researchers in Iowa have done feasibility studies on bringing back the Muscatine melon (see "Certified Levels of Terroir," Page F6 [requires free registration to view]), a variety of cantaloupe that owes its juicy fragrance to the sandy soil on the banks of the Mississippi, and I-80 beef, ultra-marbled steaks from the northwest corner of the state.

I found it intriguing that General Mills is one of his clients. These are signs of real progress, when Slow Food's ideas make their way into the mainstream. We will not achieve a food system that is Good, Clean and Fair by demolishing the current system, but rather by transforming it. Every time they acknowledge the value of our ideas we must not feel threatened but rather say to them, "welcome to a better way."