What is a "Foodshed"?!

Here's a great report on the San Francisco Foodshed. Oh, what is a "foodshed" and why should you care?

Just like a regional watershed, a city/county/region has a "foodshed" from which it may eat. 100 years ago, the foodshed comprised nearly everything that individuals ate. With the advent of modern food processing systems, food moves around the country and the world as so much raw material being processed into an "incognito" state. The movement of the food requires the burning of fossil fuels. The processing of the food requires burning fossil fuels. The movement of the processed food to yet another region requires burning of fossil fuels. You get the idea.

This doesn't even touch upon problems created by irrigation (clean water), fertilizers (fossil fuels) and pesticides (petro-chemicals), but that discussion must wait for another day.

By bringing the notion of a foodshed into the public's conscience, this movement hopes to create awareness of a food's provenance - it's history. Who grew it? How did it reach your local market? Your refrigerator? Your restuarant? Are you eating food hidden behind a vast processing system or are you eating something grown within your region?

Is this a rally cry against the Big Corporations? No, although it may seem so at first glance. Really, this is the suggestion that the true cost of food production (fuel and preservatives) may not be reflected in the price of the food we are consuming. Furthermore, that calorie for calorie local food may be better than distributed food for both a healthy planet and healthy populace.

Should we only eat locally grown food? I'm an everything in moderation kind of guy. I think it's OK to eat strawberries from South America in February. Perhaps, however, I shouldn't eat them everyday, or maybe I should make some strawberry jam during the summer and save it for my wintertime cravings. Maybe one day, if we all work at this hard enough, that tanker bringing in the strawberries will run on biodiesel produced from non-food vegetable material and solar electric power, thereby alleviating my guilt.

Can you be Green and not eat locally? Sounds like that's a little food for thought. ;)