In 1937, anthropologist Thor Heyerdahl and his wife travelled to the small South Pacific island of Fatu-Hiva in the Marquesas. In his memoir Green Was the Earth on the Seventh Day, he relates this story:
"On one of his rare visits Tioti brought us a big chunk of freshly caught swordfish, and news of new problems in the village. Willy's store had run out of rice and flour. Unless some schooner called soon with a new supply, people would starve. They were now accustomed to eating imported grains. They depended on the schooner as much as the schooner depended on them. Coconuts were not bread to them any more, but money. It filled sacks, waiting for a schooner. Stinking sacks of sun-dried copra were piling up outside Willy's house, filling the damp breeze with a nauseatingly sweet smell, penetrating far into the valley."
Copra is dried coconut meat, obtained by the simple method of hacking open a ripe coconut, draining the milk and leaving it out in the sun to dry. Humans can't eat copra-- it's too hard-- but it can be machine-pressed into valuable (and easy-to-transport) coconut oil or used to fatten livestock. The Fatu-Hivans, with the help of European traders, had discovered that copra was a prized commodity outside the islands and could be harvested as a "cash crop"-- just grow more coconuts than anyone on the island could eat, dry it into copra, and export it in trade for delicious exotic foods like rice and wheat flour.
This-- in a (literal) nutshell-- is how an industrial food system works. And it works marvelously... right up until there's a transportation glitch, and you're stuck on an island (actual or figurative) with no viable food supply.
In 1937, the boat never came, and the Fatu-Hivan villagers had foolishly harvested all of the nearby coconut trees for copra, which rotted on the docks while the people starved. Monsoon rains prevented them from going farther afield to gather more. Eventually, 11 islanders-- along with the Heyerdahls-- were forced to make a dangerous deep-ocean crossing in a patched-together lifeboat in order to secure food.1
Think Western culture is more advanced? Try biting into an ear of field corn sometime.
I should know; I grew up outside a small town in Michigan, across the road from a corn field. My friends and I would use ripe, golden kernels of No. 2 dent corn as ammunition for our slingshots, due to its rock-like texture. I assure you that it is quite inedible. Field corn is the #1 agricultural product of the USA, and humans cannot eat it, unless it is milled (into low-grade flour) or chemically treated with lye (creating hominy). Like copra, it is mainly grown to feed cattle or to be pressed into oil-- or high fructose corn syrup or dextrose or polylactic acid or ethanol or...
A "locavore" is a person who eats only food grown within 100 miles of their home. It's a funny-sounding word and an interesting commentary on our modern diet. Westerners have had to invent and define a term which, a couple hundreds years ago, would've been unnecessary. In 1808, everyone on Earth was a "locavore".2
I don't consider myself a locavore-- I enjoy Hawaiian pineapples and Brazilian chocolate as much as the next guy-- but I do buy local first. As a second-generation hippie, I see the merits of a "100-mile diet" to be pretty self-evident. But I'll spell them out nonetheless:
- Local farmers are accountable.
- Local food is usually fresh and yummy.
- Buying local keeps your money in the local economy.
- Eating local keeps you more deeply connected to the community.
- Supporting a polyculture of local crops improves the health of your entire ecosystem.
Nor do I particularly agree with the notion that a 100% local diet is somehow "far-fetched" or "misguided". Remember that small town in Michigan where I grew up (Metamora)-- the one with the cows and cornfields and whatnot? It's only 50 miles due north of downtown Detroit. Detroit has an enormous local food supply. Ditto Chicago, Columbus, Minneapolis and Madison. Every city in the Midwest is surrounded by vast areas of supporting farm land. (The same is true for cities out here on the West Coast.) Remember too that every city that's older than a few hundred years was built by necessity on a landbase that could support its population. Beijing, Rome, Tokyo, Athens, Paris, even New York: they were all built by locavores.
Thanks to the Industrial Revolution, some cities now have populations much larger than the local farmland can support, and rely to some extent on imported food to survive. Places like Phoenix, Arizona-- a booming city where millions now live in an arid, unfarmable desert eating a 99% imported diet-- are a particularly egregious example of this. If that's the case where you are right now, then-- well, let me lay it on you plainly. Your hometown is not a place where I would want to live. Thanks to peak oil, your imported food is about to get a lot more expensive.
In the final analysis let's not forget that Manhattan, like Fatu-Hiva, is an island. If you tie your food supply to your transport system, you'd just better be damned sure that your ships keep coming in.
1 This experience later became one of Heyerdahl's inspirations for his famous Kon-Tiki expedition.
2This is not entirely true. People have been trading food and spices throughout history. Hunter-gatherers were doing it even before the rise of agriculture. But only since the mid-20th century have ordinary peasants (like you and me) started eating a diet made up primarily of imported foods.