Yes, you can buy tomatoes in the supermarket in January, or any other month of the year, but what you get isn’t much of a tomato. That’s because it comes from who-knows-where, having been picked while green and hard as a rock, then sprayed with ethylene gas to make it turn red in color, even though it’s nowhere near ripe. Then it’s shipped half-way around the world to food wholesalers, who sell the produce to your supermarkets, having first sold all the better-quality stuff to high-end greengrocers and restaurants.
That’s all going to come to an end within the next twenty years or so, as Al Gore’s inconvenient truths come home to roost. The spectacle of the supermarket produce section will simply evaporate as it becomes prohibitively expensive to manage perishable foods the way we have for the last 60-75 years or so. We’ll be back to buying tomatoes only in season, in vastly reduced quantities, and probably only from very local sources. Which, quite honestly, is not entirely a bad thing when you think about it. The unfortunate part is that those of us who have learned to enjoy fresh foods that simply can’t be produced in a given geography will have to unlearn those tastes or else secure significant fortunes to be able to buy them.
Of course, most of us already have access to farm stands and other local growers, and anyone who knows better already takes advantage of those opportunities to enjoy locally-grown fresh foods. As we are forced to shift back to relying on those providers, though, they won’t be entirely able to meet the demand. Nor is everyone likely to chuck their jobs and go back to being farmers themselves. So this is a good time to be finding a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program near you. CSAs range in scope from community gardens to whole farms and produce all sorts of food, keeping some for personal use and selling some in the marketplace. Many urban dwellers in the Boston area already take advantage of CSAs to get fresh local produce, but the time has come for public awareness about CSAs to grown exponentially and for people to begin thinking about where their food is going to come from a few years down the line. The Local Harvest website linked previously has this locator page that can help you find a CSA in your area. Many CSAs are already popular and you sometimes have to sign up well before spring if you want to be able to get the produce, so this is a good time to have a look if you’re at all interested.
Dear Harvey, Pete, Barry, Kevin, and every other weathermonkey on Boston-area TV: Enough is enough. The fucking blizzard was THIRTY-TWO YEARS AGO. It’s time to stop trotting out the same blurry videotape of cars stuck on Rt. 128 that is older than some of the people who are actually on your broadcast, just so we [...]
It’s going to be a long two months waiting for the iPad to actually ship so that all the tech bloggers and their hangers-on will stop writing so much speculative bullshit about iT and turn their attention iNstead to some other thing that’s going to Change Life As We Know iT. Since you cannot click [...]
Please, please, PUH-LEEZE stop talking about “What do we call the last decade?” Nobody could come up with an acceptable choice ten years ago, and nobody’s going to come up with one now. “Aughties” and “Naughties” are contrived and stupid, and so is the very idea that anything wraps up all nice and neatly into [...]
Our most local CSA’s were wiped out in the early December floods and because the floods carried toxic materials, it will take years for the ground to rehabilitate back into organic quality soil. It’s a sad thing for all of us who benefited from such a service.
Man, that sucks.
As the eventual reliance on locally-produced agriculture re-emerges as the dominant model of how people are fed, problems like that are going to be more than temporarily inconvenient.
I will welcome a time when we eat in season and eat locally. Think how wonderful it would be to taste a pineapple once in a while instead of whenever we have a hankering for one. Same goes for all foods: tomatoes, watermelon, bananas, etc. I just read the Omnivore’s Dilemma, which talks about this at length.
It’s going to be a difficult transition, I think. Most of us have absolutely no idea where our food comes from and will likely be stunned beyond belief when things we take for granted now revert to their pre-modern rarity status.