This Is Where You Belong by Melody Warnick

Author:Melody Warnick
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2016-06-21T04:00:00+00:00

Shop at Your Farmers’ Market

French winemakers figured out long ago that where food grows informs its flavor—a concept described by the fancy French word terroir, which loosely translates to “the taste of place.” As Rowan Jacobsen writes in his book American Terroir, terroir is reflected in foods that “celebrate the best of what the land has to offer.” That’s “land” broadly defined. For years, most Americans cared about the birthplace of their food only if a particular locale had a reputation for producing a tastier version—peaches from Georgia, say, or strawberries from California.

In the first decade of the twenty-first century, the same cultural shift that made “locavore” the New Oxford American Dictionary’s 2007 word of the year created a new idea of terroir: We want “the taste of place” where we live. Here. Foods that grow well in our town, right now.

Most conventional foods travel a gas-guzzling 1,500 miles to land on our plate. One study showed that a carton of mass-produced strawberry yogurt represented a collective 2,211 miles of travel for only its three primary ingredients, milk, sugar, and strawberries. (Presumably high-fructose corn syrup added a few more.) Local foods, on the other hand, average just 44.6 miles, meaning that a meal made from locally grown ingredients uses much less energy and far fewer greenhouse gas emissions.

Less-traveled food also tastes better. Foodies can’t stomach the rock-hard Central American plums and anemic tomatoes that huddle, cold and unappealing, in industrial supermarkets. Yet in most places it’s easier to buy an international jetport of exotic edibles than to find products from your own town or state. In a quick tour of my pantry I discovered Nutella from Canada and applesauce emigrated from France, along with oatmeal from Illinois, crackers from New Jersey, and refried beans from Nebraska. It made me think of the commercial where a group of rough-looking cowboys discovers that the cook has served them salsa made in New York City. “Get a rope,” growls one.

If you want to eat local food—and energy, the environment, factory farming, frightening product recalls, and (horror of horrors) withering flavor all present reasonable motives—you must work at it. Even a $6.1 billion local food market doesn’t make it a cakewalk. The author Barbara Kingsolver famously committed to a year of eating only local, mostly homegrown food not far from here in Virginia. In order to even begin the experiment, her family had to uproot from Tucson, Arizona, which “might as well be a space station where human sustenance is concerned.”

To keep to a self-imposed ten-mile food perimeter around her home in Whidbey Island, Washington, the writer Vicki Robin arranged to purchase all her grains, beans, greens, meats, eggs, honey, and milk from local farmers. Anything that didn’t grow locally she tried to at least buy locally, sourcing flour from an island bakery, for instance. Nuking a frozen burrito from Walmart wasn’t an option.

For a while I imagined that I, too, could draw a circle around a map and declare that none of my food would come from farther than Galax, Virginia.

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