By Katherine Dalton for FRONT PORCH REPUBLIC










The criticism of food miles as simplistic has merit, and I will listen to it, but I also wince when I hear the word “efficiency.” Efficiency is a word better suited to machines than to living things, and so often it is the idol of faceless markets that tend to treat meat as if it were a widget, and not a sentinent animal, and soil and energy as though they were bottomless resources. Nor are efficiencies perfectly efficient, either; they always have a trade-off. And we typically use them to argue for big solutions, when I am convinced what we need are a myriad of small solutions.

The real question we have to ask about our food is: What kind of inefficiencies are we willing to tolerate? Do we let a field lie fallow or fertilize it? Do we grow tomatoes farther apart and save water, or closer together and save ground and weeding? Do we finish calves in a giant lot that saves sourcing time, transport costs and space, or on multiple farms that spare us waste lagoons, overused antibiotics and animal misery? One kind of gain here generally creates a loss over there.

The fact is that a viable, safe and stress-resistant food economy requires the inefficiencies we are least likely to tolerate, these days–in seasonal availability, say, or time, and probably amount (though much of our farmland is underfarmed). Certainly any retailer will tell you it’s easier and more efficient to source all your eggs from one big basket. But then anyone who’s run his own business will tell you to diversify your clients and your sources–because you never know.

Maybe we will not live to see the energy boom fall, but surely we should give some thought to worst cases. If the time-and-space efficiencies of large-scale farming become harder to maintain in the years ahead, then a local patchwork of season-bound farmers may be necessary to our ability not just to eat well, but to eat. In the meantime, these farmers are feeding their neighbors, with all the relationships and recycling of local dollars and pure pleasure of eating that can involve.

Many factors go into our decisions about food, among them cost, availability, tradition, taste and more. People have to make their own calls given their own situations. But I want to eat in such a way as promotes the health, resilience, community ties and economy of what’s nearest by—my family and friends and neighbors first, my state and region next, my country after that, the world last. I wish Mexican farmers and New Zealand herders all good things, but I not only feel but ethically I have more responsibility towards Mr. Jackson in Indiana. The concentric rings of moral responsibility Thomas Fleming writes about in The Politics of Human Nature apply to eating as much as to any other act. And they enable us to sit down to dinner without agonizing.

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