All Your Green Blog

I was recently eating a meal prepared partially from ingredients in my backyard, and began musing about home-grown food. I'm a rookie when it comes to the art of growing food in a limited amount of space, but I have the advantage of ridiculously good soil and plenty of sun and water. You can grow food here by thinking about food and staring at a bare patch in my yard. I love northern California sometimes.

But I digress. I began to think about the increase in locally-grown food being used in restaurants in the area. With a little selective eaves-dropping, I discovered this migration to locally-grown food wasn't motivated by the eco-friendly reasons put on the menus. It turns out that gas prices are impacting food prices, and my favorite restaurants are starting to feel the squeeze. Their solution? They started using more and more locally grown supplies, which are far less affected by increases in fuel costs. If the lettuce only has to travel 10 miles, it quickly becomes cheaper than it's mass-produced long-range competition.

For years, I've thought about the great foods of the world. French, Italian, Greek, Mexican, Chinese, Japanese, and so on. They all derive their distinct flavors and accents from the ingredients available in the region. Italian food, for example, makes excellent use of olive oil because... olives grow well in the Mediterranean! Japanese food uses fish and rice in ways that can't be expected from British cuisine. You see what I mean.

So, what makes American food special? We're known for cheeseburgers, our version of pizza, and generally greasy and uninteresting fare. Why? My theory is that the ease of transportation of raw materials and ingredients has made the food here homogenous across a rather large country. We have little of the benefits of regional stratification of flavors. We have a few exceptions, but they are rare enough to be cliche: New England clam chowder, anything called "south western" etc. With increasing fuel prices impacting food prices, I believe that scarcity will encourage local agriculture and food cultivation. By definition, not all places can grow the same food, although most habitable regions can grow food. That's where this new diversity will come from.

In addition to any other benefits from eating locally grown and cultivated food, we may yet see high gas prices drive the American culinary spectrum in a fantastic and more colorful direction. Our relatively homogenous food may just splinter into dozens of regional styles. Yet another reason for nuts like me to root for the end of the Era of the Escalade at the hand of fuel prices.