Does Locavorism Keep it Too Simple?

I care deeply about food, and I care even more deeply about the environment. Indeed, I spent a couple of very earnest years riding the locavore bandwagon myself. My conversion to being an emotional and intellectual locavore was the only activist decision I’d made in my life. As my passion started to stir, I could be found haunting local farmers’ markets around my hometown, Austin, Texas, bashing “big industrial” and “Frankenfood” at every opportunity, investigating like a Checkpoint Charlie the groceries that cross the threshold of my kitchen… I had found my cause: saving the environment through the way I ate. Empowerment! Turns out I wasn’t much of an acolyte… Something about the “eat local” ethic, heady as it was, began to hit me as not only pragmatically unachievable but simplistically smug. ¹