Just Food: Where Locavores Get It Wrong and How We Can Truly Eat Responsibly

do not take into account a variety of external factors such as location, type of grass, and the amount of feed added to the aquaponics operation.

Monocropping, excessive applications of nitrogen fertilizer, addiction to insecticides, rainforest depletion, land degradation, topsoil runoff, declining water supplies, even global warming—all these problems would be considerably less severe if global consumers treated meat like they treat caviar,

GM varieties have the potential to feed more people—mostly poor people—with less land expansion and reduced pesticide application.

if the world’s growing population decided to eat the same amount of meat that the world’s affluent now consume, we would need 67 percent more land than the earth has.

we have a personal responsibility to lay the foundation for culinary and agricultural literacy,

aquaponics—the growing of plants and animals in a recirculating environment—was

local consumption required three shopping trips (farmers’ market, orchard, and grocery store), whereas nonlocal shopping demanded just one visit to the grocery store. The differences proved to be significant: 10 versus 38 miles driven, 1.08 versus 2.42 hours consumed, and .56 instead of 2.11 gallons of gas guzzled.

But for now we can work to develop renewable energy sources to power the energy-hogging phases of large-scale food production (for instance, using solar energy rather than natural gas to make fertilizer), food

Do you really want a local cannery?