Eat Local?

[Javamama]

While I like to buy local, I wouldn't try to do it 100%. I like my imports too much. I like bananas and citrus fruit. I like cinnamon and other spices. I like coffee. That's just a small sampling. If I had to live on local, I could. But I would really miss lemons.

 

[Wifezilla]

Was gas made here first or IMPORTED for the use in that first car?

Early cars ran on alcohol. Farmers used to make their own fuel.

 

[patandchickens]

The earliest automobiles and tractors ran on things like steam, or hydrogen, or electricity. (Ironically enough, considering that the last two are all cutting-edge today ) Wasn't too long before the first gasoline engines were developed, however, and AFAIK gasoline-powered autos had become the standard type by the early part of the century, certainly well before WWI. Not to say that farmers didn't run some tractors off different fuels of course, alcohol etc being readily homemade.

Petroleum has been, er, what do you call it, extracted?, in the US and distilled into various petroleum products (initially 'patent medicines' and kerosene, but soon branching out into other stuff like gasoline) since the first commercial oil well in Pennsylvania in the 1850s. (Trivia I ran across while fact-checking this post: John Wilkes Booth lost a small fortune he'd briefly made on an oil well, just before deciding to assassinate Lincoln. Coincidence? You decide ). By the turn of the century, Rockefeller, with Standard Oil, had already made a large fortune off oil refining and distributing, all across the US.

I can't (easily lazily) find any online citations for early US gas-powered vehicles running on domestically produced gasoline, but given that gasoline was among the petroleum products being made here, I am really pretty certain that it *was* domestically produced.

Pat

 

[DrakeMaiden]

I seem to recall hearing that the first Ford engines were built to run on alcohol . . . but I can't remember why they switched over to gasoline. Didn't they switch over before mass production?

 

[Wifezilla]

"Gasoline is a refinerys toxic waste; alcohol fuel is liquid sunshine. Henry Fords early cars were all flex-fuel. It wasnt until gasoline magnate John D. Rockefeller funded Prohibition that alcohol fuel companies were driven out of business."
http://www.alcoholcanbeagas.com/book_menu/360/518

 

[Lady Henevere]

Another reason to eat local food is because it's easier to keep an eye on what's going on in my own backyard, so to speak. I know more about how something is produced when state and federal laws apply (workers' pay, child labor, chemicals in food, chemicals in the environment, overfishing, etc.). And I know even more if I chat with the farmer at the market each week. I don't know what kinds of practices are allowed in some of the countries where goods are produced. (Were those grapes picked by an eight-year-old working a 12-hour day in a field full of pesticides? If so, I don't want them.)

I recently finished Plenty, the book in which a couple did a "100-mile diet" for a year. It inspired me to look at a map of where I live -- what's within 100 miles of me? Not much -- I have cities to the south, a polluted ocean to the west, and desert to the east. The north probably has some farm land in there somewhere. As someone mentioned earlier, however, picking a radius like that is pretty random; what's to say 100 miles is good but 200 is not? If 100 is good is 50 better? Who knows.

Does eating or buying locally make the world a better place? In my opinion, probably yes. Not just because eating locally, in and of itself, makes things better (although it does cut down on transportation-related pollution, gives you better-tasting food, lets you help your local economy, etc.). But the local food movement has also inspired people to pay attention to where their food comes from, learn about why some things are cheap and others aren't, and ask what the true cost of a cheap product is. That's a major value in my mind. If it makes us better and smarter consumers and voters to be asking such questions, then it's a good thing even if we don't stick to a local diet.

 

[Farmfresh]

I try hard to eat as local as possible.

One reason I try to eat locally, other than the better quality of the food I eat is my local economy.

I far prefer to buy my pork from the lady, a few towns over, that raises one for her own freezer and two or three to sell. I help her pay for her own pork as well as the feed and time spent for mine. I get a better quality product. The animals get better treatment. The lady gets free meat and some money to spend on things that she needs, thus boosting our local economy.

You all mention spices.

When I look in MY spice rack the only things that I have purchased are pepper, mustard, cinnamon and ginger. I HAVE grown ginger root in the past ... in a flower pot in the house and I have also grown mustard for seed. I would most miss pepper, but I could substitute hot peppers if I had to.

I eat bananas and citrus. I love chocolate as well as vanilla, both definite imports. And I have to be a rice eater, since I am Celiac.

Since I tend to buy cheap sugar it is probably made with sugar from beets and not cane. I have tried growing mangles (sugar beets) in the past but it was not a success - perhaps just a bad year. Truthfully we would all be better off with less sugar anyway.

 

[Iceblink]

Lady H - I have read Plenty, and loved it. I especially like the point James makes about how eating locally INCREASED the VARIETY in their diet. He talks about (if I remember this correctly) how there were 30,000 plant food products, and how relying soley on a grocery store causes people to miss out on so much great food.

The majority of our food is locally purchased. That includes animal food too. The chocolate, tea, spices ect, I eat without guilt. I consume them in small quantities, they are light to ship, they aren't perishable, and there isn't a local alternative.

I give up one non-local food item per school semester. At the end of the semester I give myself the option of putting it back into my diet. Sometimes I do, but most of the time I have found a local alternative, or other foods have filled that niche.

 

[Lady Henevere]

I thought Plenty was pretty good. I liked that they discovered so many new things and met the people who lived and worked near them -- beekeepers and farmers and chicken owners and fishermen who they would never have met shopping at the typical grocery store. I was also surprised at how well the book was written. (I'm a sucker for good writing!) I loved this, for example, when James first learns that honeys can have different flavors depending on what's in bloom when the bees make it: "I had the sensation that a window had opened, expanding the world....The epiphany felt urgent, a gentler version of that first adolescent kiss that tells you there's something good you've been missing out on your whole life. I wanted to know these honeys. I wanted to live in this world where I had opinions on the harvests of bees." Good stuff.

 

[FarmerChick]

Was gas made here first or IMPORTED for the use in that first car?

Early cars ran on alcohol. Farmers used to make their own fuel.

I guess the moonshine was good for 2 things:/
I guess that was the first DUI also...