The Locavore's Dilemma Read Online Free PDF

2009–2010 academic year that Pierre and I packed our bags and hit the American interstate highway system en route from Toronto to Bozeman, Montana, where we would stay for several months before moving on to Durham, North Carolina, for a semester. This was my first time crossing “fly-over” country at ground level. Over the next several months we would travel more than 35,000 miles, and I would get to experience some of America’s commercial landscapes, national parks, villages, small towns, and cities.
    Life in a beautiful small college town in Montana was a completely new experience for me, a born and bred city girl. I enjoyed some juicy bison burgers at Ted’s Montana Grill (a chain owned by media mogul Ted Turner) and a few other local delicacies, although for someone used to the diversity of Toronto’s foodscape and a sushi purist, it proved a bit challenging at times. Fortunately, the globalized food supply chain had already worked its magic. Many once “exotic” food items were in ready supply at the local grocery store: tofu, good quality soy sauce, bean sprouts—I even discovered Vietnamese rice paper at Wal-Mart!
    Traversing the middle part of the United States, I got the opportunity to visit once thriving Native American settlements (Mesa Verde, Chaco Canyon, and the Cahokia Mounds) where the local inhabitants had obviously belonged to wider trading and cultural networks. I experienced a wide array of agricultural landscapes: pasturelands in the Shenandoah Valley and Wyoming; apple orchards in Virginia; dairy
farms in Wisconsin; wheat fields in Montana; cotton fields in Georgia; abandoned tobacco fields in North Carolina that had reverted to forests; and many other agricultural landscapes. Most impressive, though, was the sea of corn that surrounded us from Ohio to North Dakota. To locavores and food activists this is probably the most despicable part of America, but I couldn’t help but think how much worse off we would all be without it—and be thoroughly impressed by how much of an agricultural powerhouse the United States is.
    Americans seem to take their extraordinary agricultural sector for granted and, in my experience, are typically unable to imagine that sometimes things can go horribly wrong. I never experienced hunger myself, but my parents did. My father was born in Tokyo in 1936 and my mother in Kyushu in 1941. They both suffered through the deprivations of the Second World War and its aftermath. As a child, my father, like many others, was sent away to the Japanese countryside in order to escape the firebombing of his city. To this day he can’t stand kabocha squashes and sweet potatoes, as these were the only foods available to him—and even then, he was not fed the sweet potato itself but the vines. My mother told me more times than I care to remember that one of her dreams as a child was to get the opportunity to eat a full bowl of rice. She was the youngest of ten children, only five of whom made it to the age of 20. One of my surviving aunts, severely malnourished as a child, suffered significant rheumatism and osteoporosis for the rest of her life as a result.
    True, many other people have had it worse than the Japanese and the members of my family. Yet, it seems that one of the main lessons to be learned from my native country’s experience over the last century and a half is that pushes towards autarkic food policies can only result in disaster. As we wrote in the book—and as many other people have said before us—if goods don’t cross borders, armies eventually will. My parent’s generation is living proof that what militaristic people thought they could only achieve by force can be accomplished much more effectively and successfully through free trade and peace. And, just as important,
globalization affords people all kinds of possibilities. About half a century ago, my parents never imagined how abundant and affordable