Whenever I walk into a Safeway, Whole Foods, TJ's or through the farmers market, I always ask the same two questions: 1. Do I know where this food is coming from? 2. How was it produced? Depending on where I am, the answer ranges from being readily apparent (at the farmers market) to being a mystery that even a super sleuth of my caliber finds challenging (at TJ's...EVERYTHING is from Monrovia, CA!). For the record, I'm no super sleuth, I just wanted to say that word. As a result, I have come up with an equation to help determine the quality of the food I buy. It's a very complicated, Good Will Hunting inverse quadratic function of two important variables: origin (where the food is from) and production method (how the food is grown). Given the information that I have about these variables with respect to any food product, I simply assign values to each of the variables and plug them into my nifty iPhone app designed exclusively to calculate the "quality" of the food. Accordingly, I make my decision. Genius, right? I wish.
400 (or so) years ago, the equation would have been simple, because the "value," if you will, of both these variables was readily apparent. Most people lived near the source of their food. In fact, most people were the source of their food. No, not like that. What I mean is that many people grew their own food. Additionally, food production was a highly decentralized, democratic industry. Well, it wasn't really even an industry back then. People produced food for themselves, their neighbors, and for anyone who was willing to buy from them at market. The quaint little family farm, which is now all but lost, was exactly what farms actually looked like. Unfortunately while the public conception of what a farm looked like stayed stagnant, the reality of farming evolved into something drastically different. Think: (Innovation of Eli Whitney x Ubiquity of Google) ^ Size of Mt. Everest. All the while, the public is clueless about these changes because the image on the carton of milk still shows a slim Holstein chewing on some green grass by a stream with a red barn in the background.
Now, fast-forward to today because, frankly, I don't know enough about the history of food production to take you all the way from the Industrial Revolution to present day in a concise manner. Our food system today is not only highly industrialized, it is global in scale. This makes for a very difficult trip to the grocery store for someone who wants to find out anything about the food he buys other than what is on the label. So difficult, that when I walk into TJ's and pick up that unnecessarily gigantic box of basil (seriously, who uses that much basil?) to try to find out where its from, all I can see is "Packaged and distributed from Monrovia, CA." Now, given that it's basil, I can make fair assumptions as to the climate that it originated in, how far it might have had to travel, and so on...but really, I'm just guessing. What about the frozen processed foods? Or the canned foods?
Now, the choice is supposed to be easier at a place like Whole Foods, right? They claim to sell mostly organic products, support local farmers and artisans, and have a generally more knowledgeable staff than other chains. They even label the origin of a lot of their produce! But even here, where the answers are seemingly apparent, it's a potential minefield for consumers. Large-scale retailers like Whole Foods need large-scale suppliers. Thus, while that head of cabbage may be organic, it may have been produced using the same industrial-techniques of a large-scale conventional farm, discounted only by the use of organic pesticides instead of conventional pesticides. I'm not trying to knock Whole Foods, but I think its important to recognize that while Whole Foods has ingeniously found a way to compete in the existing food system, it is still part of the existing food system.
Which brings me to farmers markets. Depending on where you live, your experience with farmers markets may vary, but generally speaking the food sold here is, by definition, local. Phew, at least I don't have to worry about that one. The next question, which is a little hairier, is how it is produced. This is where the struggle occurs, and where I really began asking the two questions that are the crux of this post. Just because a farmer isn't certified organic, does that mean she doesn't practice organic agriculture? How do I know that the farm is actually organic, without going to see it myself? At this point, does it even matter if the food is produced organically or conventionally, given that I am getting it locally?
I've come to the conclusion that the debate over local versus organic, on balance, is won out by local. The further our food is from where we are, the more energy it takes to get it from there to here, in terms of natural resources and labor. Also, it just doesn't make sense for my avocado to come from Mexico, or tomato from Chile, or olive oil from Spain, especially when they are readily available locally for, at least, part of the year. So, until someone makes a fortune off my iPhone app idea, our decisions on where to get "quality" food may well be somewhat less perfect, but no less thoughtful...and that's a step in the right direction.
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