Friday, May 29, 2009

Herbivore? Omnivore? Locavore?

There's a lot of emphasis these days on how we eat. First, we were concerned about fat content and nutrients. Then we started worrying about how things were grown and started looking for organic foods. And now the buzz is all about "local eating," and its proponents call themselves locavores. Locavores argue that eating foods produced locally instead of those shipped from thousands of miles away (like most supermarket foods) will cut down on the risk of contamination (remember all the recent salmonella outbreaks?) and on the millions of gallons of fuel used weekly to ship those products to us. A number of recently published books tackle the issue of local eating. Here are a few that the MTSU library carries.

Animal, vegetable, miracle : a year of food life / Barbara Kingsolver
The omnivore’s dilemma : a natural history of four meals / Michael Pollan.
(also on audiobook)
Farewell, my Subaru : an epic adventure in local living [sound recording] / by Doug Fine
From the farm to the table : what all Americans need to know about agriculture / Gary Holthaus.

Feel free to recommend additional books, whether we have them or not, in the comments.

A soon-to-be released book called Just Food: Where Locavores Get It Wrong and How We Can Truly Eat Responsibly by James E. McWilliams takes local eating proponents to task for some of their claims.

If you're interested in buying food locally from farmers markets or directly from farms, find listings at http://picktnproducts.org/ or find a CSA to join at http://www.localharvest.org/csa/.

And don't forget the MTSU Farmer's Market, open each Friday through the summer.