ArrrGGGGgggggRRRRhhhhh....

I had left a certain particular channel on (which shall remain nameless but which I will say is one that has gone dangerously off-topic in the past couple years, replacing their normal useful reporting with speculative stories that Could Happen Tomorrow and having extremely nannying programming on how we must change our lives to save the planet).

I was working on something I couldn't immediately get up from to find the remote, when the nannying program came on.

And dammit, my head nearly exploded. It featured a Famous Author, who has apparently made it a Project to eat locally - in fact, to only eat food (with three exceptions; I'll refer back to that later) that she and her family grew.

And of course, there's so much of the self-congratulatory patting-on-the-back I wanted to vomit. How healthy we all are! So much better than ALL THE OTHER AMERICANS who eat their McSlop or the stuff in cartoony boxes from the grocery store! How enlightened we are! We now know where eggs come from! We are just full of goodness and health!

Well, you're full of SOMETHING.

Look. I have no problem with people choosing to do this. But all too often, they get so caught up in it (There is no zealot like a convert, the old saying goes) that they begin to believe that:

a. They can save the world, if they just convince enough people to do as they do. And then everyone will love them!

b. Everyone SHOULD do as they do, even if it means forcing them through taxes or other coercive measures.

Look, Author Lady. I am happy that you were able to raise your own chickens and turkeys and grow your own produce. But you are also Rich Author Lady who can devote many hours a day to tending gardens and poults and do not need to work 5-6 days of the week for 7 to 8 hours most of those days.

Those of us mere mortals, who must do that - there's no way in hell we can raise our own food. I know; I've tried growing tomatoes, beans, beets, and other things. The beans were moderately successful; the tomatoes, either they get eaten by possums, or it's too dry out (and I don't have time to be home watering during the optimal hours of the day) or they get blossom-end rot or something.

And Famous Author Lady? Know what I'm doing in my job that requires me to use the (apparently) Gaia-raping grocery store? I'm helping prepare the NEXT FREAKING GENERATION OF DOCTORS AND NURSES, among other things. So when some of your disciples who live in less amenable climates than you apparently do wind up coming down with scurvy or beriberi or some damn thing because all they have to eat all winter that is locally-grown are a few shriveled turnips and the remains of the hogs they butchered in the fall, there'll be someone out there who can save their sorry asses.

(Seriously, that is something I wonder about with the really hard-core "eat local" folks - will they wind up developing some of the vitamin deficiencies that we haven't seen in 80 years because of the wider availability of produce year-round? Just like the people who refuse to vaccinate their special snowflake of a child against polio - because vaccines are BAD and they know it because Jenny McCarthy told them so - have never, ever seen an actual case of infant paralysis, and would be hieing their kid to the doctor for the needle if they had - this seems to me to be a case of people not knowing history, not knowing what the "bad old days" really were like).

The other thing is - apparently Famous Author lives in some watered valley in New Mexico or somewhere that is apparently a virtual Garden of Eden, where almost anything will grow. As I said, I've tried beans, tomatoes, beets, watermelons, and squash where I lived. The beans were pretty good. The tomatoes, some years they produce, some years the tomatoes wither on the vines, some years animals get them. The beets died. (I can't get the hang of when to plant things here). Both the melons and the squash were taken down by borers. There is some member of the animal kingdom that will kill and eat almost any garden food you try to grow. So for me, honestly? It is more cost-effective to go to the "evil" supermarket and buy my produce pre-grown. (Or go to the apparently less-evil Farmer's Market, though I have it on good authority that some of their food is "imported" from a produce agent - and therefore, not locally grown).

We just do NOT have good growing conditions where I live. We can raise peanuts, I guess, and cattle, and hogs, and we used to grow cotton, before cotton was deemed an Evil Crop (high pesticide requirement). I can't live on peanut-butter covered bacon or steak with a side of boiled peanuts.

And yeah, yeah, by her lights, maybe people shouldn't live here. But we do, and this is where my job is, and I'm unwilling to chuck it to live in a yurt and brew my own yogurt.

Oh, the "three exceptions" to eating local? They didn't mention two of them but one was coffee. And this was brought up just after a big point was made about how the kids weren't able to go and get McDonald's French Fries any more. And I thought, "Nice. They make "exceptions" but they're for stuff the parents eat; the kids remain deprived." (Then again, I don't even like coffee).

The other thing - this was an entire family. The kids, the husband (you didn't see much of him; maybe he wasn't as down with the project as his wife) were available to help out. For people like me, with only me to depend on - I'd starve. Or I'd be shipped off to some kind of communal-living situation where I'd wind up curled up in the fetal position on the dining room floor, quietly sobbing and eating my hair, because I really canNOT stand to live in close quarters with other people I don't know well, to listen to their endless braying conversations, to be subjected to their own personal soapbox issues, to have someone eat my secret smuggled-in stash of chocolate because it's "contraband" (not being "local").

I think one of my biggest frustrations is with people who think because something works for THEM, it will work for EVERYONE - and what's more, everyone should adopt what they are doing, whether they want to or not. And this is usually coupled with a strong evangelistic vigor for whatever-it-is and a sense of their being a "voice crying in the wilderness" - that they are here to drag others, kicking and screaming if need be, into the enlightenment they have found, so that EVERYONE can be as superior a person as they now are.

(Actually, I wonder about that last. Some of the people with this attitude ("I lost weight! You can too!" "I ditched my television and I feel so much better now!" "I stopped buying anything but the bare necessities!") seem to have a need to feel superior to others - and so, when everyone has converted, they may need to find some new cause to follow so they can once again distinguish themselves from the pack.

I know, I know - this person is probably just a harmless idiot and I shouldn't get so overwrought at what she's saying. But it really rubs me the wrong way to hear someone who has more money and free time than I do preaching at me about how I should go to (what would amount for me to) an extreme and time-consuming effort to only eat food grown within 200 miles or whatever the proposed limit is of where I live. (And then have them sit back, smile, and sip their imported coffee while I agonize how I will live in a World Without Orange Juice.)