A Food Revolution, revisited

I spent my spring break in the Bay area, seeing close friends in Oakland, Berkeley and San Francisco, Calif.

A friend there is involved in the local food movement, and everywhere I looked, it seemed as though they were indeed going local.

The people I stayed with had a large, well-maintained, beautiful garden behind their house.

It didn’t seem so extraordinary, except for the fact that it was in the middle of a city. The garden also merged with the gardens of three neighbors, forming a kind of vegetable, fruit and herb paradise amid the urban hustle and bustle.

Community garden projects seemed almost commonplace at some of the schools. I learned of one grant that is attempting to establish a relationship between a community garden and local schools in an effort to provide fresh, healthy, tasty ingredients for school lunches.

Everything about the places I visited gestured toward food revolution – a movement away from calorie-dense, chemical-laden, bland, processed products and toward simple, unadulterated ingredients and food.

Even The New York Times meditated this weekend on whether or not a food revolution was “in season.”

I admit that my own forays to the Bloomington Community Farmers’ Market (the 2009 season kicks off April 4, by the way) have been more sporadic than I’d like. And when I do go, food shopping yields quietly to people watching and listening to music.

But after a spring break full of eating fresh foods – eating in their house had been reconfigured around purposeful eating and natural ingredients, some of which they’d grown outside – my taste buds are finally, unequivocally hooked.

Therein lies two sorely underemphasized pieces to the whole argument for eating locally grown food: habit and taste.

We are creatures of habit. My mother has this thing she does whenever I go home: She’ll put grapes, sliced oranges, strawberries and other small, sweet pieces of fruit out on the kitchen table. Invariably, it’s all gone by the evening.

The reason? Ease of access.

Contrast that with my time in Bloomington, where the apples I picked up from the store sit unassumingly in some corner of the kitchen, where they’re forgotten until their smell becomes a reminder.

Shopping for fresh food, preparing it quickly, tastefully and healthfully and making it easily accessible all have to be a part of the conversation. And those are all things inextricable from lifestyle and the ways in which people think about food and food preparation.

Address food habits, especially those that dictate when and how people eat, and the “go local” movement could really gain momentum.

Taste often gets the backseat to questions of local economies and farm subsidies. It’s mentioned off hand.

The argument to go local is buttressed primarily by health concerns. While this can be effective, it can only go so far.

Getting people to buy their veggies and fruits from local farmers should also mean emphasizing the taste differential. Encouraging people to be more deliberate about the way they choose their food by saying it’s healthier won’t work across the board.

Telling them it tastes better might.