The 100 Mile Diet

In fact, as Wendell Berry has written, it's a form of un-freedom to be at the mercy of industrialized and globalized agriculture. If the transportation system breaks down, and you're not able to eat because your food can't be shipped in from halfway around the world, how free are you? About as free as the man who cannot get his food-from-nearby shipped to him because of a localized disaster or failure (which is much more common than a global breakdown of transportation).

Victor above beat me to the punch, but his point is exactly right. Local issues are much more likely than a global breakdown in transportation, and if that happens you will also have other problems besides just food. Growing up on a farm myself, I know the feast-or-famine routine of agriculture. Rainfall, storms and many other variables determine the difference between bumper crops and small or nonexistent harvests. Globalization has its problems, but expanding access to global foodstuffs has increased the consistency of finding adequate nutrition at a reasonable cost.

This would mean my wife and I would eat a lot of cheese from Sweet Home Farm, to which my reaction is Please, Br'er Fox, don't throw me in that brier patch.
No coffee is a deal-breaker, though.

Starrs my dear, wherever you live, whoever you are, if you want a good tomato you have to grow it yourself. The varieties grown commercially, even for farmers' markets, are bred for durability in transit, which is a nice way of saying that they taste like chipboard.
A really good, really tasty, really juicy tomato, the kind we all dream of on good nights, will not survive being thrown into some box which is then thrown into some truck, and the less said about hopper semis full of tomatoes the better. No, it will only survive that little walk from your garden to your kitchen.

Ah Starrs, the entire hippie (and its kid, crunchy-con) dilemma is hidden here, isn't it.
Do I eat pasteboard tomatoes shipped from Mars because that's all there is? Do I do without "tomatoes" until real ones are ripe? How much money/whatever will my neighbor ask before I get a real tomato, and am I willing/morally justified in providing that? Angels fear to tread.

To amplify something I left implicit in my shot at the Wendell Berry quote.
If a man who has to rely on others with whom he has no contact is a prisoner of chance -- and that seems to be Berry's real point -- issues like local-vs-global** here fade into insignificance. Berry's real problem is with the division of labor per se, the commodification of labor per se, the alienation of labor per se, and the end of the subsistence economy. (Since those Rubicons were crossed, the rise of global capitalism and all its associated ickiness is mere i-dotting and t-crossing.) ** Particularly when "local" is understood in terms of distances like 100 miles, unthinkable as "local" until the unnatural, polluting, industrializing, standardizing internal combustion vehicle.

Anonymous Also, Hi there. Your hypothesis would be...what? That the roadside stands you cite sell better quality produce cheaper, but that the customers are dummies? I have property in the country, and I like fresh corn. ("Like" is WAY too soft a word here.) I'd gladly pay twice the supermarket price for "corn" to get real corn. Really, how much money are we talking? The customers you cite are, on your showing, ready to pay more for the "corn" (aka cardboard) available at the supermarket, for which they have to, in addition to paying money, stand in long lines yadda yadda, than to stop at the roadside stand - quick, easy - for the better and cheaper product. And your hypothesis for this would be what? Mine is that the corn at the roadside stand is (a)overpriced, and/or (b) of poor quality. Being at a roadside stand does not confer some magical benefit. Apparently your customers are smarter than you think.

Victor,
People like that deserve to chomp down on cardboard, which is what they are doing. Score one for karma or something.

Hooray for technology, standardization, globalized agribusiness, Wal-Mart, strip malls, factory farms and all the rest!!! Now might be the time to reveal that I have seen Victor Morton standing in my kitchen once upon a time, eating chocolate-covered gelatinous objects smuggled in from Scotland, his old sod. They weren't half bad, I must say, but I thought Victor was going to levitate when he ate them.

Yum Starrs. When do you plant tomatoes? :)

There was an article about Turkish Delight published online in Slate, not too long after the movie The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe came out. I think the title of the article was The Lion, the Witch, and the Really Foul Candy. The upshot of the article is that a taste for Turkish Delight seems to be a generational thing in Britain. People who remember the war and post-war rationing remember it fondly, whereas younger people who don't remember times of privation think it's disgusting. As for British cuisine -- Steak and Kidney pie is near the top of my list of reasons for wanting to go to Britain! (But spare me the Marmite.)

Turkish delight is awesome ... but it was weird eating it covered in chocolate. Those coconut-covered haggis drops you brought were really disgusting, though.

Rawlins, that's true on the produce coming from Everywhere But Here. We had the same problem, until the local gardening club got involved, and they now run a farmer's market at the town square twice a month with smaller roadside stands around town during the growing season. All you do is take your stuff up there, and since this is an area where everybody knows everybody and what they're growing ;)), sell it, and you're done. The proceeds go back into the club for projects they do around the town and county. (And I forgot to put in my post earlier that I do not own a roadside stand. I think somehow it got implied that I did.
I don't.)

Yep ... that's title of the Slate article here. I do think that Turkish Delight is one of those things that you have to be surrounded by as a kid. I've never seen it sold over here in America, except in British specialty stores. And precisely for a reason Schillinger states. Its consistency is like no other food product, much less any candy, I know of -- somewhere betwen rubber and gelatin (though it really is great). Also "chocolate-covered" is the only way I've ever eaten Turkish Delight. The Slate article even gives the maker of the bars, which in Britain are as ubiquitous as Snickers are here, that I gave Rod and some other CS Lewis fans -- Fry's. When I gave a couple of the same Fry's bars that Rod sampled to Julia Duin, she told me that a Lewis-loving friend of hers with whom she shared the candy read back to her the description from LWW and how different the jelly-like Fry's chocolate bar was. My mother (born 1943; me 1966) later told me (this is the first time I'm hearing this BTW) that Turkish Delight was then sold in the form Lewis described -- in bite-size balls covered in confectioner's sugar.