Yes, we have no bananas . . .

It seems that one of the hottest trends in food right now is being a localvore. As far as I can tell this means you will not eat anything grown more than 100 to 300 miles from where you are located. As far as I know there is no agreed upon distance that comprises "local," and I have heard chefs use a variety of distances. If you do a Google search for “localvore” the majority of hits come from a group in Vermont, and they seem to lean toward 100 miles; but at the moment the definition is apparently based on the individual's conception of the term, and the variety of produce available in a given area. At one time you could assume anything that could arrive within twenty-four hours of harvesting was local, but that isn’t the case anymore. This being the early days of the Twenty-first Century we first generation Mousekateers were told we would be leading, just about anything within a two hour mule ride of some kind of airport can be delivered anywhere else in twenty-four hours.

The other major component of the localvore concept is that the methods used to grow the crops must be sustainable. Again there is a certain amount of wiggle room in the definition of sustainable, and to be honest I don’t really know what is meant by the term. I take it to mean that the materials and methods used must not do harm to the environment, and that the crops must be, if not indigenous, at least native to the same type of environment. The aim, as I understand it, is to produce crops that can be grown year after year without depleting the land or resorting to chemical augmentation. But I could be wrong.

At the first several glances the concept has much to recommend it. If the food you eat is grown locally you stand a better chance it will be fresh, ripe, and nutritious because it doesn't have to withstand the rigors of being shipped halfway around the world. You support the small farmers in your area therefore helping to maintain a traditional form of life. You are forced to become aware of the changing seasons and celebrate the shifting bounty of each. And, most importantly in my opinion, you help keep alive the wonderful, unique varieties (both vegetable and animal) that grow best, or perhaps only in your locale.

What's not to like?

With the concept, nothing. It's reality where things start getting messy.

First, all of the chefs I've seen or heard talk about only using local products lived in places where the climate and geology allowed for a tremendously wide variety of crops for most of the year. As you might expect, the chefs living in the more challenging areas had the largest definition for "local." So what is local? Is it ten miles or two hundred? An hour's flight by plane, a five hour drive by truck, or a ten hour sail by boat? Are the distances the same for Wainwright, Alaska; Scottsdale, Arizona; Portland, Oregon; Kansas City, Kansas; Tecumseh, Michigan; Batesville, Mississippi; Ozona, Texas; and Key West, Florida?

Even if we set the limit at 350 miles the people in Wainwright will once again have a diet almost entirely consisting of meat (fish, whale, walrus and seal, birds, perhaps elk) with brief seasonal infusions of birds' eggs. I don't know what plants will grow there, if any, but it would have to be something very fast growing like lettuce. When the ice pack recedes in the summer
they could probably harvest some forms of seaweed and perhaps some shellfish. The only people getting rice in my list of towns would be in Batesville, and just possibly Key West. The people living in Portland, Tecumseh and Kansas City would have the most diverse diets, but they would have to rediscover the joys of canning and pickling to get them through the winter.

Here in Scottsdale we'd get some vegetation, especially in winter, but mostly we'd be eating beans, squash and corn along with a bit of mutton and some beef and poultry. The only fish we'd ever eat would be whatever still survives in the Colorado River, and game fish from the streams in the high country.

Our food industry has a myriad of problems, and like the fiction, movie and music industries' descent into artistic whoredom these problems have almost all been caused by the business having been taken over by accountants.