

Is locally-sourced food worth it? Three geeks try to survive a week on local food only.  - thenomad
http://www.kamikazecookery.com/blogs/107

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mdasen
It depends.

Local diets will be fresher. Often that leads to better taste and nutrition
since, for example, a fruit can be picked closer to its peak ripeness which
means better taste and nutrition from it. The nutritional value can be
salvaged with storage techniques, but most people dislike those techniques
because they don't taste as good (I think they taste fine, but I'm not a
foodie).

Local dies will be seasonal - sometimes _very_ seasonal. In a place like New
England, it means a winter of Apples and other produce that stores well,
pastas and such, and salty, smoked meat. It's not how people who can afford
otherwise want to eat.

Local diets could be impossible. Take an area like Boston. It's heavily
populated with not so fertile land. With so much land already in use for
things like apartments and offices, there's a decent chance it isn't possible
to eat that local. If local extends to the rest of New England, the situation
looks better. Right now, local food is available to pretty much anyone that
wants it because few care.

Local food may or may not be more environmentally friendly. There are two
things at play here. First, transportation and the associated pollution.
That's pretty easy to calculate. The second is what you have to do to the land
in an area to make it good for growing. New England will require more
resources to be spent growing that a more fertile environment. Heck, Arizona
and New Mexico wouldn't survive. You simply can't grow enough food there for
the population because it's a desert.

Variety will be constrained by local produce. Avocados would become unknown on
the east coast. Oranges in the northeast. This has two effects: 1) people like
variety and "exotic" things like oranges and avocados; 2) it means that food
that is very healthy for us (like oranges) disappear from our diets and our
nutrition goes down.

For the most part, we don't really have a choice. We're not going to move
people out of deserts because they can't grow local food and we aren't going
to give up our variety and luxuries. Local food can be a good thing
environmentally (especially for items that grow well in your locality), but
the environmental cost of transport is less that the cost of local grown in
other cases.

I think the easiest thing to say is, be conscious of what you're doing/eating.
Don't deprive yourself of the vitamin C in oranges, but try not to make exotic
foods a staple. And don't waste food. Learn how to store food before it goes
bad. That will do a lot more good than arguments back and forth by people that
want to stroke their own egos about how great they are.

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vaksel
why is that guy dressed as Zorro?

