...you think eating squirrels is good for the environment.
One growing element of environmental culture is the rise of the "locavore" movement – people who strive to eat only local food. Some take this quite seriously. In Portland a dispute over local food at a pig cook off ended in "at least two head buttings and a fist-fight" that sent "a renowned chef and the event's organizer to jail after one had been pepper-sprayed and the other shot with a taser."
In Seattle, it has gotten even worse. Especially for squirrels.
The Seattle Times reports today that a former "environmental analyst" living in Seattle is trapping squirrels in her front yard to eat because she "is serious about eating locally." She told the Times she "is just trying to quiet her conscience," and that while she likes prime rib, "she can't eat it without a bad case of guilt." The reporter, however, doesn't explain what guilt she has. Clearly the guilt isn't the vegetarian-type of guilt from eating an animal.
The only thing I can figure is that the desire to eat locally has driven her to eat rodents.
Much has been written about the fact that eating locally is, frequently, actually worse for the environment than eating food produced elsewhere. We have addressed the inaccuracy of "food miles" as a surrogate for environmental impact several times. Energy used in transportation represents a very small part of the resources used to grow food, and it makes more sense to grow food where it is appropriate and ship it than grow much less food in an inhospitable climate. Focusing only on the final distance traveled ignores 90 percent of the resource use.
Some locavores, however, seem to think that the best option is to eat only what grows within a small radius (goodbye Starbucks! Hello scurvy!). In our previous blog post on the issue of food miles, one commenter summed it up:
The only setback is that if you like potatoes in an area that is best suited for apples, you aren't going to find many to eat. I suggest you get used to the taste of apples.
Or squirrel. Of course, if nothing grows particularly well in your area, spending a lot of time and resources to grow a little, rather than using fewer resources to grow a lot and transport it, doesn't make a lot of sense for your taste buds or the environment.
If, however, you don't want to trap and clean your own squirrels, you can get them from the home of squirrel-related cuisine: Tennessee. One company in the state claims to offer organic, free-range squirrel meat. But that would defeat the goal of buying local, I suppose.
Ultimately, it shouldn't be a surprise that an ideology that drives people to fistfights and squirrel eating might not be grounded in sound science and economics.
