What to eat?

The problem with dinner is that most of us don't have much choice about what to eat - or at least that we don't value food provenance enough to do the things that we would if we could be bothered.  There's a small farmer's market close to my home in London, but only on Wednesdays in the middle of the day; how many working Joes can support it?

The bigger problem is not just that we don't choose to eat local produce (or decide whether it's better to buy our what-have-yous - apples, let's say - from farmers in far-away places where the climate is right for apple-growing at certain times of the year vs. from chaps just down the road who use much more cheap energy to grow the same things in hothouse conditions), or pay attention to seasonality or food miles to the exclusion of all other things.  It's that we don't look at the system as a whole.

Sure, local food sounds great.  But what of the logistical system - or lack thereof - which it implies?  I'll freely admit that I haven't found the numbers which would prove the point either way, but what seems better:  A host of individual farmers carrying out their own small-scale harvests, getting in their little white vans, and driving their produce around highways and byways to get the food to local markets?  Or a smaller number of highly mechanized super-farms selling to big supermarkets, which use enormous logistics systems and centralized processing centres to make distribution as efficient as possible?

And what are we trying to optimise, anyway?  Carbon emissions?  Flavour?  Employment, either local or in far-away places?

I won't be the first person to point out that eating a local diet in some places could be pretty boring most of the year.  And that it's more efficient (certainly from an energy, and therefore carbon, perspective) to produce certain things in certain places; so shouldn't we be thinking about the balance of energy calculations required to decide whether to produce X easily in Y and ship it to Z vs. producing X in hothouses in Z?

Carolyn Steel points out that the Industrial Revolution, and the taming of distance that came with it, allowed London to feed itself by rail, as it were:  Farmers no longer had to walk their cattle down the road to a market; they could put it on a train, thus opening up new possibilities and vastly increasing the amount of food available to the city, which allowed it (and countless other cities) to grow into the metropoles we know today.  We can't expect those cities to shrink back to their pre-Industrial Revolution sizes (nor would I want them to), but we do need to decide how we will continue to feed our city dwellers.  And much as some would have it that vertical farming and Utopian ideas of new centralized urban distribution/logistics systems are the silver bullets that will fix everything, I have a feeling that the reality will be much more mundane, and that - whether we like it or not - the supermarkets may, far from being the problem, hold the key to the answer.

Update on Friday, October 16, 2009 at 8:41 by Eli

Just found this article covering the issue of transport, energy, and food:  http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2007/07/22/the_localvores_dilemma/.  It covers the bases pretty well.  And it's great to see this kind of thinking in the general press, too.