Local food

Food is a paradox. Many of us now are attracted to local, sustainable, food, organically grown in the sun and clean country air. That was pretty how things were a century, or certainly two centuries ago: few chemicals, everything fresh and local (there was no refrigeration), no agribusiness interests. But – here’s the paradox – at that time food was also a lot more expensive and a lot worse. A century ago food required over 40% of the household budget in the U.S.; now it’s about 15%. There were only a few foods available, and the quality was often poor. Lard was a staple. People just didn’t eat as well. It was also not much fun to be a farmer: the hours were extremely long, the labor backbreaking, the returns meager.

So what we want is to go back to the good parts of the past, but not the bad parts. That pretty much describes how we all feel about a lot of things in this unstable age. We’d like the stability and warmth of small towns, but not their suffocating conformity and limited horizons. We’d like the job security of traditional corporations, but not their bureaucratic rigidity and hierarchical control. We like to hear authentic music from isolated regions, but we’d go crazy if that was all we could hear year in and year out.

It’s not easy constructing a life that keeps the good and shucks off the bad. There are many organic farms near me in central New Jersey, but they’re struggling and they’re expensive. Most of the farmers love the land, the animals, the change of seasons; they just don’t love the backbreaking, grinding labor and the poor return. The ones who grew up in the life are selling their land and moving to cities, as farmers have been doing for generations; the newcomers are often giving up.

Does anyone have a way to square this circle? Not that I know of, not yet. The good news, perhaps, is that a lot of people are working on it.