http://seanbickerton.com/2009/04/22/the-100-mile-challenge/ Life & Politics in Vancouver Tue, 01 May 2012 17:29:37 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.com/ http://seanbickerton.com/2009/04/22/the-100-mile-challenge/#comment-190 Tue, 17 Nov 2009 13:14:37 +0000 http://seanbickerton.com/?p=1767#comment-190 I’ve been having this argument with my wife for some time as to why she likes this show so I have been searching for some of the reasons behind the challenge. I was under the impression that the idea was to eat local for the sole purpose of reducing the carbon footprint involved with getting foods to market. I could offer any number of reasons why that is simply bad science thus my dismay at the whole concept. For example, the lady who drove to the ocean so she could boil water to make salt obviously produced a much larger carbon footprint than a person who simply went to her local supermarket – even when the transport and production of the store-bought salt is factored in. Still, you did surmise some novel concepts for the challenge that I had not considered – like families learning to prepare fresh food and strengthening local ties though I think you could do these latter things without restricting yourself to foods produced within a 100-mile radius. My other major concern is that the show (and your blog) perpetuates the ideology that buying locally is simply better than buying globally but I don’t necessarily agree. For example, when we are able to buy sustainable products from the rainforest, we provide incentive to the people from those regions to leave the rainforest intact which is a benefit to the entire world. If you were able to buy the same product grown locally, it’s not necessarily better for the world for you to do so. Often our actions have unintended consequences but, I think more often than not, it’s more that we simply haven’t thought things through thoroughly. While I fully support green initiatives, I’m very wary of “false initiatives” that waste time, resources and resolve.

]]>