Mailbag: How Hard Core Do We Have to Be?
JUNE 6, 2007 - We hadn't anticipated this particular criticism, but perhaps we should have. Natalie writes:
I was ultimately disappointed in your book because just as you were getting to what I anticipated as the hard part, winter, you started to travel. Sure, if we all want to dump another load of carbon into the air we can all go south for the winter and have no problem eating locally.
I see two questions here. The first is, "Did we cop out on winter?" The second and more difficult question is this: "How hard core do we need to be?"
On the first point, we certainly didn't "go south for the winter" - I travelled more than Alisa, and still spent three of the four winter months in Canada. The fact is, though, that winter just wasn't that difficult. Like Natalie, we were bracing anxiously for the cold months, and then...well, there was plenty to eat. We knew from those first tough months of the 100-mile diet in early spring (which is really late winter in terms of when things grow) that we had to put away food for the winter. We did just that, from June strawberries to November squash. Then we sat back and did what many indigenous people did during the tough months: we feasted. We had more than enough food - in fact, we're still eating corn from 2005. So we didn't "go south" because we needed to. We went because, like most people, we have other obligations in our lives.
And this gets me to the second, more delicate point. As we make clear in the book, we weren't out to be harder-core-than-thou on the question of local eating. We gave ourselves strict limits because we wanted to learn as much as we could from the experiment. We encourage people to try local eating not because they "should," but because we believe they will find the experience valuable, fascinating, or even (as it was for us) life-changing. We encourage people to stretch or shrink the 100-mile limit, and to try local eating in whatever way they feel they can with the energy and resources they have at their disposal. There are enough things in life to feel guilty about; local eating - to us, anyway - is about making our lives better through the unexpected pleasure of reconnecting to the land and people that produce our food (and maybe even producing a little bit of it ourselves).
Yes, Alisa and I ended up in Mexico eating 100-mile pineapples during our local-eating winter (I also visited Malawi on a research trip for an upcoming book). We went because I was asked to be a groomsman for a friend's wedding - a friend I've known since we were both four years old. I thought about staying home, sticking to the 100-mile radius, and pitting my local commitment against his long-distance wedding. And then I thought: I am going to be there for this wedding, and on my friend's terms. If we write people off for the very ordinary, very human, and very complicated choices we make each day, well, that's when I'll really lose hope for the world.-JBM
