Foodies, locovores, fishing poles and sychronicity

I've had an odd series of experiences in the general area of "local food", etc., recently.

It started off when I was listening to a podcast from the National Sport Shooting Association. They're pretty short, and sometimes interesting, sometimes very interesting, and occasionally not. What this one noted was the phenomenon of "localvores" in the green movement.

The "local food" movement is  a philosophy of food, more or less, that encourages a person to eat foods that are all local.  The gist of it is that the food is better, and better for the environment.  It has quite a bit of appeal in some localities.

"Insights", the above referenced podcast, amusingly noted that hunters are unsung localvores, and I guess that's really right.  Most hunters hunt locally and they're eating their harvests.  The meat they're taking is in the really healthy category, being really lean (if rabbit, it's beyond lean), it's all FDA Organic, and it's "free range" in the true sense.  I depend on wild game for a fair amount of our family's food, and this line of thinking had somewhat occurred to me, but not in that fully developed sense.  So, I suppose, a shout out to hunters is in order. Green thumbs up!

Indeed, by this definition, I've been an accidental semi-localvore for years, and when I was a college student I was about as localvore as anyone in this state can be, due to the huge garden my father planted.  For awhile, when my kids were young, this was also true, as for meat we went with one of our own cattle, and the garden, which I took over for awhile, produced enough of some things, namely onions and potatoes, to make it nearly through an entire year.  Now, we still rely on wild game and one of our cows for meat, but I no longer plant the garden.  Just didn't have the time.

There's something generally appealing about this notion, but I don't know what it is.  Some people, in other locations, are fanatics about it, and I think perhaps the reason that people here are less so is that you can look out at the terrain and imagine what a limited died it would mean, and must have meant fairly recently.  Foodstuffs that cross the continent, or even beyond that, is a recent phenomenon.  If it was 1912, rather than 2012, when I am writing this, many common items, like fresh vegetables, let alone fruit, would have been a seasonal thing.  Some foodstuffs keep well of course, such as potatoes and onions, but most folks are used to a more varied diet than those a truly local diet would mean here, and did mean at one time.

Which brings me to the next odd item of synchronicity here.  I also heard a podcast by the the Freakanomics folks regarding eating local, and, in economic terms, they report that it almost no beneficial impact in ecological terms at all, as food transportation is an infinitesimally small percentage of greenhouse gases.  A person could probably debate this to some extent, but the number are what they are, so it would have to be a fairly sophisticated debate.  I don't know that the economic analysis is completely correct here, and even listening to it, I could see what I perceive as holes in it, but it us undoubtedly the case that  the diet in the Western World has never been so varied and cheap as it is now.

Which brings me to my last, odd point of synchronicity again.  As noted, I, and a lot of  people around here, have always used the local fauna for part of our diet.  I think sometimes those who are not hunters or rural fisherman fail to appreciate this fact, particularly because so much of what they believe about these activities is skewed by the sporting press that focuses on trophies, which most hunters and fishermen, quite frankly, are not.  I've discussed hunting here already, but in regards to fishing, when I was a kid most men around here seemed to be fishermen, and my father was.  We ate the fish we caught, unless they were so small they weren't worth bothering with.  I still find catch and release to be strange.  Anyhow, I happened to be in a shop selling high end fly-fishing poles  recently and was amazed to see a pole that was priced at $750.00.  Maybe there were a lot of them priced like that, but that so stunned me that I didn't get past it. I'm still using my father's poles, and probably will for the rest of my life.  At $750.00 I'd have to catch a blue whale, in order to make it pay off in my mind.  I'm not saying people shouldn't buy poles like that.  I just didn't realize they existed.