3 ms·

Is locally-sourced food worth it? Three geeks try to survive a week on local food only.

3 points by thenomad 18y ago

vaksel 18y ago
why is that guy dressed as Zorro?
mdasen 18y ago
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.

3 points by thenomad 18y ago

why is that guy dressed as Zorro?

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.