Of course not everything works well locally. Some things (canned foods, presumably) work better large scale. That doesn’t invalidate local food in any way, it just means you’ve got to keep thinking.

By the way “Northern California” is not local. My country is much smaller than northern California, and I try to get food that is really from my area, and not the other side of the country. (Though from the other side of the country is still better than the other side of the world. If it’s non-industrial, at least.)

Of course, we already *have* all that space, but we call it “the rest of Illinois” which is not “local” to Chicago per your definition.  And incidentally, this seems to be the position taken by the authors of this book.

And this math problem isn’t unique to Chicago: it’s worse in New York or Boston, with significantly less available empty space around the cities ripe for growing crops because that space is currently occupied by *other towns*.  But there’s already a solution to those problems: non-local food sources.

And “but what about the outlying communities” doesn’t wash either. By your numbers, Illinois (population 13M) could be fed by 5.2M acres out of its 37M acres (14% of its land).

Where are we going to find all the people to work those 5M acres?  Well, Illinois has a half million unemployed people right now.  That’s not too far afield of the numbers you need.

The same farm that is bordered on one side by a failing development project. The same farm where our travelling supplies salesman told us he was losing a farm per week off his delivery route as people sold out and in most cases walked away with a million or more. The same farm where we’ve seen our neighbours go “organic,” and then watched the pesticide truck roll onto the fields.

But hey, I’m glad we have you to explain how things REALLY are. And full points to the farmer you buy from: She clearly knows exactly what story will get the most money out of idiots like you.

I think something is wrong with your perspective. I think you meant to say Living in Minnesota, year round, is not sustainable. Just like having a ridiculous oasis in the deserts of Nevada is not sustainable (I’m look at you, Vegas).

I try not to think too hard about Los Angeles, same as everyone else. It’s astonishing to me how much infrastructure it takes for people to live there.

Eating local is really about where we choose to live. Arguments about the value of a mobile labor force run in direct contradiction to the locavore message.

All of which is just another way of asking,  do people exist to serve the economy, or is it the other way around?

How’bout the E. coli spinach recall of 2006? 26 states with illness cases. Failures at large facilities are more rare in absolute terms, but the comparison is nonsensical. First of all, there simply isn’t room for too many such massive producers and second, each of these large-scale failures has the potential to impact far, *far* more people than any small farm ever could.I’ve run into this attitude in food safety before: No, smallholder farms won’t have the sophisticated lab facilities or foolproof access control procedures in place — but in many cases, having such makes no sense whatsoever a small operation. Do you think a farm with a total of 8 employees really requires keycards and managerial sign-offs on chemical storage?

Your local farmer *might* be taking care of the land for the long-term. Or might be trying to maximize short-term profits, and sell the farm to a developer five years down the road. You know enough to tell the difference?

 - Nothing you argue pertains uniquely to food, firstly in the sense that all of your stated points are reasons to prefer locally buying any possible products. I can’t see any reason to arbitrarily limit their scope, other than an unwillingness to follow through past a certain point in terms of lifestyle and comfort. Moreover, you ignored the problems with food localism that are actually specific to food  – the ones that all boil down to the threat of starvation. Sedentary life without an industrial food surplus is really not that fun, especially when probably-unstoppable climate shift and global freshwater scarcity will make seasonal variations and weather patterns wildly unreliable – in many or most regions, not just Bangladesh and the Sahel.

These are concrete, salient issues, not blue-sky “put your white paper in that stack with the others” abstract arguments. At this point in history, the stakes are too high, imminent, and universal for any of us to settle for thinking inside a stable comfort zone.

Okay, so that’s kind of hard to fix (there’s probably a lot going for Minnesota), but I think on some level it’s responsible for a lot of the wrongs we do to the environment. Communities, in some cases, are allowed to thrive that are completely detached from their local ecosystems. They get all their food from other places (or through highly industrial farming operations), or they develop a monoculture with one plant that’s especially profitable. They end up squandering their own local resources. It’s easy to do that when you don’t depend on them.

It isn’t just bad for the environment. Economic collapse with that kind of arrangement actually seriously leads to people starving to death.

By all means, eat food from far away. It’s fun, you can get lots of variety (though I’d argue that fruits and veggies are more fun when you have the really good ones that are in season), and certainly society has made it to the point where we can move things around fairly easily. Staples like flour, and foods that are cheap to transport, are obviously kind of exempt from this worrying. Of course there’s always stuff that’s easier to grow somewhere else. But when you’re eating odd things like out of season tomatoes, take a moment to think “hey, I’m eating a tomato in the winter!”, because that’s pretty damn cool.

And if you happen to live in a place that is unable to grow food for its population, I think it’s a good idea to ask why. Outside of a desert, there is no reason that should be allowed to happen.

A small farmer is going to make ethical decisions balanced by his income.  He might be able to make a couple hundred (or thousand) dollars a year extra by switching to a process that might be harmful to his customers (his friends, his neighbors, maybe even his family, etc).  Assuming he currently makes a decent living, he’s probably not going to put profits above people.

A manager or CEO of a mega-corp might be looking at hundreds of thousands, millions, or even billions of dollars in additional profits by switching to a process that might be harmful to his customers.  His customers are strangers.  He’ll probably get a raise and high-fives from his coworkers/peers for bringing in that extra profit. It’s a lot harder for him to make the ethical decision in that scenario.

That is why I prefer to do business locally in general; local food is simply an extension of that.