There was a lot of talk about eating locally grown produce as the price of fuel rose to historic levels over the summer. It was probably the one real motivator for some media outlets to begin adding it to their news agendas. While it's seemed like a fad this year, local food consumption has been a growing trend for at least a decade. It just hasn't had the marketing dollars to get into the hearts and minds of Americans.<br><br>A basic primer on eating local is Barbara Kingslover's book Animal Vegetable Miracle. In is she and her husband and two daughters move from Tuscon, AZ to a farmhouse in Virginia her husband owned as a summer home and residence while he taught at a nearby college. They elected to try to live off the land for one year, only purchasing food that was grown within 50 miles of their home. They did make an exception list for things like flour, spices and coffee, but you get the idea. Written with her husband and teenage daughter, the book details the how's, what's, where's, why's and when's of their adventure. It's a good read, even if you're not going to try anything like their experiment.<br><br>I think it's important for our family to be raised knowing where our food comes from. Even being exposed to Midwestern farming as a child (my father managed a fertilizer plant and sold fertilizer to farms), by 13, I still didn't know how a caw turned into hamburger. I know that I'm not alone in having been that disconnected with what I've been eating my whole life. I think that's a mistake that should not be passed on to future generations.<br><br>Our family owns a share of a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture program) and we try to supplement with as much locally grown foods as we can at a reasonable cost. We have started investing in growing a lot of our own food, even though we live in the heart of a city. It's something that's become more important to us. In our 10-15 year plan, we are targeting the purchase of land to add to the availability of local food in our area. That's a long way off, but we're committed to the sentiment at the very least.<br><br>There are a whole range of reasons to see where your food is grown and processed. Between Chinese Milk contamination, diseased spinach, lettuce and tomatoes, Mad Cow Disease, Hoof and Mouth Disease, corporate scale animal cruelty and undocumented farm workers, you could be just about anywhere on the political spectrum and have plenty of reasons to buy into local foodways. But we're generally not doing it.<br><br>Since this is a place for conscientious dads (and moms, too), what are you thinking about your family's food supply? Have you tried eating local food? Do you know where and how your food is raised even if it's trucked in or organic? (Organic probably doesn't mean what you think it does, by the way.)

Now that you've completely depressed me I'll be thinking about it. Seriously, we do think about every week that we buy food for our family. Although Bea is still very little, she gets her food from mama.<br><br>We try to buy local and fresh organic when we can; there's a farmer's market right across the street from us every Saturday. We eat fresh veges everyday.<br><br>We avoid high fructose corn syrup and other crap, but still enjoy our sugar fixes.<br><br>My wife used to be a vegetarian, so I learned to eat much less meat at home. She does eat seafood and pork and a little beef, but no bird at all.<br><br>Even with a healthier choice of markets where we live, we still mainly shop at mainstream stores (Trader Joe's, Safeway).<br><br>We have expressed interest in tending our our garden, but to date have not done that. We have discussed changing our shopping and eating habits even more when Bea is eating solids and is old enough to ask questions.

Hey, I'm recycling cans, and turning off the lights (and most everything else that I can) when not in the room... That's about all you're gonna get outta me. I could tell you it's because I don't have the availability of a better selection, I could tell you that I don't have a green thumb (I really don't), but honestly, it's sooo much easier to just go to the grocery store and get what I need. Prepackaged, prescreened, preprocessed, overpackaged, overscreened, and overprocessed... all true... Lazy, you could say that, but I just try to spend my time doing other things. I do try to make sure the kid is eating right/safe/healthy foods ('tis relatively easy right now), but my own eating habits... aren't likely to change anytime soon.<br><br>Though I do admit, that whole tainted Chinese Milk thing, that's some scary chit right there. 10s of thousands of kids sickened! OMG! WTF are they doing... very frightening indeed.

Whether my food is grown 50 miles away or 5,000 miles away, I never visit the farm, and I have no idea how it is grown either way. How does buying local add to my knowledge of how my food is grown? Am I to believe that the small farmer 50 miles to the South of us is somehow immune to crop or livestock contamination?<br><br>And if you're concerned about the fuel usage of the US, then you should buy the cheapest food available to you, because the cheapest food probably consumed the least amount of fuel to grow and transport. Expensive food is expensive because it was grown in an extremely inefficient manner that wasted resources unecessarily.

Yes. You can rely that the farmer who will sell directly to you down the road isn't going to have livestock diseases from overcrowding and eating the deteriorated carcasses of other animals (the USDA finally prohibits feeding animals the bodies of animals of the same species). When the food you eat is eating a diet that is 30% ground animal carcass, you'd think people would pay attention. They don't grind up the animals we'd eat. Someone who allows you to Meet your Meat isn't going to be showing you where they grind up the dead cows to feed to the chickens because they won't be doing that. Partly because they don't want to eat that themselves.<br><br>The cheapest food is more often than not the food that has traveled the farthest. There are chickens that are grown in the US and sent to China to be butchered, only to be returned to the US for sale. Fruits and vegetables are almost exclusively grown in California and places South. One major issue is that there are subsidies for transporting food across the country by the truckload. We don't see it in our food bill, but we see it in Farm Bills and highway taxes.<br><br>I think you're confusing local food with organics. Organics can be more expensive because there are a lot of extra costs to get to use the label. Many farms grow using organic methods because it's cheaper, better for the land and easier to maintain but they don't use the organic label because it costs them so much more.

There's a lot of gross stuff going on in the back rooms that I don't want to know about. Ever work in the kitchen of a restaurant? Regardless, from daily experience, I'm confident that my food is safe. I rarely, if ever, get sick from food. I'm even more confident because I know that if a manufacturer does experience a contamination incident, he is going to suffer a major financial loss. There is already lots and lots of incentive for him to sell safe food.<br><br>At our local farmer's market, there's a guy who drives in to DC from West Virginia every Saturday in order to sell a few dozen heads of lettuce. That doesn't exactly sound fuel efficient to me either.<br><br>I'm just not buying into this for a whole multitude of reasons.

We did some pre-production for a Lab on this subject, but it's been tough to find a local farmer that isn't so busy that s/he would have time to talk to us. We are going to get this off the board and onto the site one of these days.<br><br>One of my favorite writers in the world, regardless of subject, is Michael Pollan. The guy is a friggin genius. And he just happens to write on issues of food and the food supply. His book The Omnivore's Dilemma makes my top 10 all time non fiction works, probably right behind Song of the Dodo and The Year of Magical Thinking. That one is a must read.<br><br>You can also read his open letter to the next president that appeared in the New York Times Magazine a couple weeks ago. I kept it around the house until I finally had sometime to kill during soccer practice. Nobody articulates the issues more clearly than this guy. If you'd rather listen, here's an interview he did on NPR's Fresh Air.

I tried to read the article, I really did. But, oy-vey, another lecture from the self-righteous. Belief in the special interests of Wash DC rather than the reality of modern economic theory. Can't take it anymore…

What has modern economic theory have to do with the subsidy soaked disaster that is US Ag? I think the system could use a healthy dose of libertarianism/free market, but there is a lot of junk to unwind.

Subsidy soaked...for sure. No doubt. That giveaway has GOT to end, but it is apparently some sort of political zombie with endless lives. But subsidies were not the primary argument of this open letter to the president. The main, unspoken point, was that somehow government needs to do something to fix the industry. As usual, the special interests have invented a crisis that the government must act upon immediately, or else we will all be sorry. Here are my issues:<br><br>(1) I'm having a hard time identifying the supposed crisis and problems that need to be fixed. Our food is cheap and plentiful and remarkably safe. What else do you want from your food supply?<br><br>(2) There is a fundamental belief that somehow government has the ability to fix things and make them better. They do not have that ability. In fact, I really strain to think of any instances at all where government involvement has actually solved a crisis. In fact, I would like to point out that the epicenter of the milk crisis happened in a country that has the heaviest gov't regulation of them all: China. Is this not evidence that gov't regulation creates problems, and doesn't solve them?