my head hurts

There was an article in the NYT today explaining to us proles why we should be happy now that food's more expensive.

Supposedly, it will lead to more "local" food and a greater quality of food.

I don't see that happening in my reality. Maybe they live on Planet Sparklepants. I'd like to live on Planet Sparklepants, too, but instead I'm just going to wind up paying $5 for a gallon of the same old milk just like everyone else stuck on Earth.

Well, it could be worse. They could have proposed that high food prices were the solution to the obesity crisis...."Well, all we gotta do is starve out some of these fatties and our problems will be solved!"

Well, I suppose the one way it COULD lead to more local food is more people trying to plant the 21st century version of a Victory Garden. The problem is - for a garden to really work, it's almost a full-time job, weeding and removing pests and tending the plants. My mother had a huge, successful garden when I was a kid but she was a stay-at-home mom with two mercenary children (who would pick potato beetles, bean beetles, and cabbage moth larvae off plants for a penny a piece).

I have kind of a half-assed garden that produces a few tomatoes which are probably more expensive in the long run than tomatoes from the "farmer's" market here (I swear that they bring in produce from a distributor, though - I've seen the cartons).

I don't know, though. There's something that feels deeply wrong about being told to rejoice because you're paying more money for something because it means better days ahead where things are going to get better even though we're still paying a lot...

(I also have issues with the whole Locavore Evangelism movement. Yeah, yeah, I'm really happy that you're content to munch squash and cabbage all winter and that you are proud that you don't eat anything that was grown more than 200 miles from the place where you live...but where *I* live that's not always a possibility. I'd probably starve in the winter (or have to eat nothing but beef from the semi-local ranches) if I tried to do that. It's like a lot of things - I get very weary when people in ONE set of circumstances begin prescribing what people in ANOTHER set of circumstances "should" do. Like "Don't shop at wal-mart!" but "Don't drive, save gas!" Dear person, I cannot do BOTH of those things. I can purchase my food at "evil" wal-mart, or I can be "evil" and drive an hour's round trip (and I would add, that's an hour out of my life I'd rather spend doing something else) to go to the marginally-less-evil-by-your-lights grocery store in the next town over

Also? Eating only local food? Would mean I'd never be able to have chocolate or real tea again, and both of those thoughts make me profoundly sad. And no, don't suggest herbal tea from herbs grown in my own garden; my experience with herb tea is that most of them taste like ass).