Join My New Cause: The Pokily Flown Movement

I used to live in Northampton, Mass., where every weekend I would walk to the farmer’s market and buy leafy greens that had been grown within a twenty mile radius of my house. It felt good. Satisfying. I felt in some small way I had contributed to an important cause.

Now, I’ve learned the truth: the whole idea of eating locally is bollocks. Sheer stupidity. Anyone that does it is willfully blind to their own hypocrisy, and what’s more, they are hindering the improvement of the existing system, a goal that is worth striving for.

There are many reasons why people in America live longer than people here, but one of them is surely diet. I know it sounds ridiculous to praise American eating habits, but the fact is that pretty much all Americans have year-round access to food with vitamins. The vitamins found in fresh fruit, for example, or leafy greens, or vegetables of any kind. The only green I’ve seen on my plate since August has been dill or pickles (dill pickles, anyone?), and I last ate a fresh vegetable a few months ago. Vitamins come in the form of Peace Corps-issue pills.

But I’m not living in a destitute country. People here wear high heels and nail polish. In the coming years this place will develop quickly. In the cities there are many wealthy people who eat plenty of fresh vegetables all year round. In the village I even saw a grapefruit once, although it cost about the same as ten loaves of bread.

Cheap grapefruits aren’t available, not because of general poverty, but because people here are the victims of lingering Soviet mentality and they tend not to demand things. Stop and Shop has strawberries on its shelves year-round for only one reason: because Americans demand them. We demand them because we want to feed ourselves well, because in the past we were a country of subsistence farmers and we wanted to improve our system and thereby our health.

Every time you buy a grapefruit in winter (or in Massachusetts) you are making a 1-dollar endorsement of the existing system, the system which keeps your belly full of delicious vitamins. And every time you pooh-pooh Israeli clementines or Alaskan salmon and buy local, you are spitting on that same system. It’s easy enough to belly-ache about how far your citrus had to travel when you don’t actually risk getting scurvy. But from where I’m sitting (which is in front of a plate of root vegetables for at least a couple more months) there’s nothing more annoying than liberal-artsy self-flagellation.

It’s definitely worth fighting to make the food-growing and transport system more ecologically friendly. Less harmful fertilizer, less polluting fuel, all that jazz. But local food is not necessarily better for the environment. For example, if ten farmers drive cars full of tomatoes 20 miles to a farmers’ market, do they really use less gas than a semi full of tomatoes that drives 200 miles to a supermarket? Who knows.

All I do know is that when I get home, I’m going to sit in a bathtub filled with raspberries grown in some Latin American country and eat Japanese bean sprouts and French veal fed on grass flown in special from Australia. And it will be brilliant.