Granted, it was a nice change to open up the food section and get a reprieve from the millions of Eat Local (registration required) articles that have been showing up in the newspaper lately.
But, it still might have been a tiny bit environmentally unsound of Oregonian produce writer Pete Petersen to choose this week to highlight Granny Smith apples. From New Zealand. Despite the fact that Oregon and Washington are where the best apples in the United States come from. To further add insult to injury, he himself notes that:
Thanks to advanced storage techniques, local fall apples and pear crops are now available into summer.
Granny Smiths can wait until fall. In the meantime, try to eat your fill of this.
Kudos to Pete Peterson for disregarding the tyranny of extreme locavorism. While it’s great to enjoy locally produced, seasonal foods when available, it is unrealistic to expect a population of 300 million to eat that way all the time. Columns like Peterson’s remind us of the bounty made possible by a global economy and modern transportation and food storage technologies.
I’m with Silverbear. I love the idea of eating locally, but not every state grows apples. People in those states should never eat apples? Hell, if that’s the case, then I’ll never again get to eat citrus, since I live in Maryland. That’s just stupid. And you can forget about those fancy Indian mangoes in the previous blog post.
Eating locally is nice — but it’s certainly limiting.