It's a system. The interconnections are deep. A 3000 mile caesar salad benefits international shipping companies, foreign landholders, distribution centers, the tax districts through which it passes and the shareholders therein. A caesar salad grown up the valley with dressing from eggs down the street benefits your friends and neighbors. That's pretty much the lesson of the local movement - buy local, eat local, benefit local. Local is a lot less efficient, though. In many cases it increases fuel use, etc. Means it's going to be more expensive, and the externalities are going to be in your back yard. The fundamental shift has been in what we spend on food. Check this shit out: I can't profess that spending three times as much on food as we do now will solve anything, but let's take it as a goal post. Suppose some magic fix would end up with us spending three times as much on food as we do now. what would we have to get out of that to make it worthwhile? It ends up being the same problem as gas tax. Those are always harder to pass than sin taxes because most people need to drive somewhere. And the more essential something is, the more regressive the charges are to low-income families. Food is about as essential as it comes. So if you're poor in 2014 you're paying less than a third as much for food as you would if you were poor a hundred years ago. Your money goes elsewhere, though: ...it's almost like we've been running out of time: You wanna know where hipsters come from? Graphs like this. the more you look at the system, the more you recognize that it offers you less and less. Know what magazine has been growing the fastest for the past ten years?
