Two reports from the globalization front.

First, I’ve just finished Sasha Issenberg’s book The Sushi Economy. Unlike Trevor Corson’s book The Zen of Fish, which is about sushi history, Issenberg writes about the global economy, with sushi as exemplar.

But there were some fun historical bits. This was my favorite:

> “Okay, are you ready for the recipe for rice sandwiches?” _Los Angeles Times_ personalities columnist Gene Sherman asked his readers in 1958. A year earlier, that newspaper’s travel pages had advised, “If you’re a sandwich fancier, try sushi when you visit Japan.” But Sherman wasn’t dispensing vacation tips as much as foresight: “According to Senkichi Fujihara, they are very big with tourists in Japan and may supplant the hot dog here,” he wrote. “Recipe: Roll shrimp, eel, egg slices, and assorted white fish into a ball of rice; place between sheets of sun-baked seaweed, dip in soy sauce spiked with pickled ginger root. On second thought, but with the utmost politeness, I’ll take a hot dog.”

I think Sherman was talking about _onigiri_, not sushi, but close enough. Are there other foods that were roundly mocked before becoming a permanent part of the American mainstream? Did people make fun of pizza?

Then, in today’s New York Times, was a great op-ed by James McWilliams: Food That Travels Well:

> Incorporating these measurements into their assessments, scientists reached surprising conclusions. Most notably, they found that lamb raised on New Zealand’s clover-choked pastures and shipped 11,000 miles by boat to Britain produced 1,520 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions per ton while British lamb produced 6,280 pounds of carbon dioxide per ton, in part because poorer British pastures force farmers to use feed. In other words, it is four times more energy-efficient for Londoners to buy lamb imported from the other side of the world than to buy it from a producer in their backyard.

There are plenty of other good reasons to buy local food, of course, and McWilliams says so. But I was reminded of a letter I read by a reader of a piece by Michael Pollan about Joel Salatin’s Polyface Farm. The article began like this:

> I might never have found my way to Polyface Farm if Joel Salatin hadn’t refused to FedEx me one of his chickens. …

> This man was serious. He went on to explain that Polyface does not ship long distance, does not sell to supermarkets, and does not wholesale its food. All of the meat and eggs that Polyface produces is eaten within a few dozen miles or, at the most, half a day’s drive of the farm—within the farm’s “foodshed.”

In fact, Pollan himself ends up driving to the farm and working there for a week, paid in chicken. The letter writer, Mary Tyler of Newport News, VA, asked:

> Why is it somehow more sustainable to have a thousand people drive ten to a hundred miles to pick up chickens than it is to have one truck deliver said chickens to a central location? I’m all for sustainable farming, organic food, and an end to monoculture, but it seems very cockeyed to leave out the energy expended by nonlocal customers to buy local food.

Indeed, Salatin, a committed ruralist, seems more interested in restoring small face-to-face economies than in environmentalism.

I am more interested in industrial solutions to industrial problems, like the guy in Issenberg’s book who catches tuna pirates using Google Maps. The world view embodied in books like The Omnivore’s Dilemma and Plenty (which I also just read) is disturbingly provincial–literally, in the sense of _Plenty_, since it’s about eating from within a 100-mile radius that falls mostly within British Columbia.

Perhaps we will be forced back to local economies by an oil crisis. I hope not. In the present, however, I think we should all continue to eat chocolate.