When you move to more smaller farms, you need to manufacture many more combines and other farm equipment. You need to make more deliveries of feed and seed and other supplies to more remote locations, and then your yield decreases, so you commit more land to producing the same amount of food.

Economies of scale tend towards reduced cost, reduced duplication of effort, and most importantly for this discussion, reduced waste.

(The milk industry is also heavily subsidized, but I think that one is obvious.)

My problem with his opinion, though, is that he’s making assumptions that he’s trying to promote as fact. I won’t touch on anything about the production of pork, but he seems to be discussing taste and sustainability as if they’re equally important. The point behind buying local food isn’t because customers want the tastiest product- it’s because customers are becoming aware of the impact that unsustainable farming practices are making on the environment and their communities. In the comment thread, Heath brings up that he thinks the carbon footprint of a local farmer is larger than that of an operation that ships strawberries over 3,000 miles. That’s insane. No matter how many “32-mile” trips that farmer might make from his plantation to the city to sell his product, it simply doesn’t compare to the amount of environmental destruction that is made by a major corporation. This is especially true in the American pork industry.

As an aside, I’m surprised that Heath didn’t even bother to touch on the amount of federal subsidies that are provided to these major corporations, just to keep prices unnaturally low.

When it comes to purchasing local food from your community farmers market, or making sure that the almonds you’re buying haven’t traveled across an ocean when you could buy ones produced closer at a comparable price, your impact as a consumer is enormous. In our society, we vote with our money and if we, as consumers, are making educated decisions about what we buy, we’re actually performing some of the most important checks and balances that are needed for a capitalist society to function. Taste has nothing to do with it, the movement away from ignorance and into awareness is fundamentally key.

If anything, using the term “lazy” to describe an educated consumer is almost as offensive as people who just buy their bacon from wal-mart because it’s cheap and “nearby.” To think that buying locally-produced food is an overrated practice is to spit in the face of your neighbour. If someone claims that the taste of a local product is better than that of a superior, artisinal small farming operation that is 1,000 miles away, the purchaser might be wrong but the argument itself is unstable. Taste has nothing to do with it, local food is all about education, awareness, and sustainability.