Extreme Eating

By Joel Stein

I knew the farm-to-table movement was out of control when Chris Dodd mentioned it at a presidential campaign event in Muscatine, Iowa. Eating food grown within 100 miles was, he argued, an important part of the new American dream. It was clear to me why a Northeastern liberal would never be President. I expected him to propose reducing poverty with rebates on iPhones.

Dodd was basically telling the Iowans that every night they should decide whether to accompany their pork with creamed corn, corn on the cob, corn fritters or corn bread. For dessert, they could have any flavor they wanted of fake ice cream made from soy, provided that flavor was corn.

I can get off on a local heirloom tomato as much as anyone else. Or a fresh California date, crispy with tart honey that I can get only for a few weeks in Southern California. Or breaded sauteed abalone when I'm in Monterey. But the idea that this is the best way to eat, that most of our food should really come from within 100 miles, that farm-to-table produces a superior diet, is antiglobalization idiocy.

Eating in the 21st century is part travel, part cultural mash-up. Sure, there are towns in Italy and France that eat only the limited dishes they've perfected over centuries: carbonara or cassoulet. And it's amazing to eat in those towns, or to down tapas at a stall in the middle of the Bouqueria farmers' market in Barcelona. But those villagers are just luckier versions of people who eat at their local McDonald's every day. I want the world to come to me, to see it shrink so small it fits on my plate. I want Maine lobster in broth flavored with Spanish saffron. I want Alaskan salmon, truffles from Europe, a bottle of Beaujolais, a damn pineapple. And I want them much more than I want that carrot you grew in your garden. Because I know you're going to talk to me for 20 minutes about your carrot.

To prove how wrong the farm-to-table movement is, I cooked a dinner purely of farm-to-airplane food. Nothing I made was grown within 3,000 miles of where I live in Los Angeles. And to completely give the finger to the locavores, I bought the entire meal in the local-food movement's most treasured supermarket, the one that has huge locally grown signs next to the fruits and vegetables: Whole Foods.

This, it turned out, was not an easy task. Farmers in Southern California, it seems, can grow anything. Still, appetizers weren't hard: Marcona almonds from Spain that were so much softer, sweeter and nuttier than any I can get here; Greek olives; Brie from France; smoked salmon from Scotland. I thought about getting a rack of lamb from New Zealand, but I couldn't resist asking the guy behind the seafood counter for the fish with the most frequent-flyer miles. I was going to get the opah from Fiji, but then I spotted the Chilean sea bass from South Georgia island, southeast of Argentina--more than 7,000 miles of travel just to get eaten for a magazine article. Already feeling like some sort of insane European king, I added some asparagus from Peru to my shopping cart and, for dessert, threw in a pineapple from Hawaii (which was cheating, it turned out, at just 2,500 miles, but it looked so good and my sense of geography is so bad) and a young coconut from Thailand. When I got home and started to cook, I was thrilled to find that my olive oil was from Italy, my salt was from France and the smoked paprika I doused the fish in was from Spain. And since I felt like red wine, and America can barely make a white that won't overpower fish, I had that Beaujolais.

My distavore meal was more a smorgasbord than a smart fusion of cultures, but I still ate the way only a very rich person could have dined just 15 years ago. The local-food movement is deeply Luddite, part of the green lobby that measures improvement by self-denial more than by actual impact--considering shipping food in containers is often more energy-efficient than a local farmer trucking small amounts that are then purchased on a separate weekend farmers'-market trip you take in your SUV. So I'm going to keep buying food from my foreign neighbors. Because it's the only way we Americans learn about other countries, other than by bombing them.