Eating locally gives new meaning to ’takeout food’
By Beth Teitell
Boston Herald Columnist
Tuesday, August 8, 2006
Just when it seemed there were more than enough reasons to feel guilty about your lifestyle choices, you non-hybrid-driving, Internet-book-buying, giant-carbon-footprint-leaving slacker, - the P.C. dictators have raised the bar yet again.
Anyone worth her artisanal French sea salt now eats ”locally.” No, the McDonald’s near your office doesn’t count. To make the grade in the ever-shifting world of food one-upmanship, you need to throw around terms like ”sustainable agriculture” and ”local growers,” and anything that passes your lips should be able to take a bus to your plate. In Massachusetts, if you’re a ”local-grown” diehard, that means no bananas, chocolate or citrus. And you thought the first few days on Atkins were tough.
What about coffee? For a ruling, I called the Food Project, the nonprofit organization behind last week’s ”Eat In, Act Out” event. That’s an annual guilt-athon aimed at encouraging people to eat locally and think critically about their food choices (thankfully the event’s over now, so you can eat your imported cocktail tomatoes with abandon once more). I wanted to find if there were any exceptions made for good behavior. There are, sort of.
The message I got from Bob Burns, a farmers market manager and urban growing assistant, was this: If you must drink a soy latte, please do so responsibly, and at least buy shade tree or fair trade coffee.
Ever on the lookout for a loophole, I asked Burns if a banana brought as a hostess gift by a friend visiting from some banana republic could be considered ”local.” Although he wasn’t happy to think about all the fuel a traveling banana would use, or the environmental damage caused by trucking, he conceded it was preferable to buying myself a banana at the local grocery store.
In fact, he stressed tailoring your diet ”within reason.” ”No one is advocating a cold turkey shift in the way people eat,” he said. Not even an organic, local, cold turkey shift.
While I’m willing to help the cause by patronizing restaurants and stores that work with local growers and farmers, and, of course, going to farmers markets, the idea of going without some of my imported, gas-guzzling treats seemed daunting.
Until I checked out some prices on Expedia. They say Belize is lovely this time of year - the chocolate is running.
