Picking up on the
theme of meat as murder, has anyone else read Adam Gopnik's story in the latest
New Yorker about his experience as a locavore? It's called "
New York Local; Eating the fruits of the five boroughs." I highly recommend it. Here's a taste:
The point of localism is to encourage sustainable agriculture by eating things that nearby friends and farmers grow or raise and that don’t have to be shipped halfway around the world, guzzling fossil fuel, to get to your table. The rules generally involve eating within a radius of a hundred or sometimes three hundred miles, and are undertaken in places, like Berkeley and the Pacific Northwest, that have a lot of nice produce and plump animals within their circles.
You go local in Berkeley, you’re gonna eat. I had been curious to see what might happen if you tried to squeeze food out of what looked mostly like bricks and steel girders and shoes in trees.
4 Comments:
Hey, we have shoes in trees here in Berkeley as well. Good eating too -- if you cook 'em right.
And for the opposite of locavorism, read John McPhee's piece about eating everything from sauteed bull testicles to boiled puffins.
McPhee at his best, I'd say, but guaranteed to turn the stomachs and tweak the sensibilities of vegans, vegetarians, environmentalists and dyspeptics everywhere. In addition to puffin, the deacon of American non-fiction also cops to having eaten whale and porpoise. I wonder how many angry letters will flood the New Yorker office after that little piece of exposition?
My own "life list" includes tapir, which I ate while staying in Cofan indian village in the Ecuadorian Amazon. Have to confess, it was delicious. Other items of note include guinea pig in Peru, alligator in Louisiana and camel (and camel's milk) in Mauritania. When in Rome...
I read it and enjoyed it. There was a piece a few weeks ago from Elizabeth Kolbert on bees that was also fantastic, and that highlighted some of the problems with modern agriculture (or whatever beekeeping is).
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/08/06/070806fa_fact_kolbert
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