By Any Seeds

摘要

SOMEONE ONCE TOLD ME YOU COULD survive on just peanut butter sandwiches and oranges. I have no idea if that's true, but the advice suggested a tasty lunch for a road trip. It was a freezing, foggy day last December, and I was preparing to drive from my home in Klamath Falls, Oregon, to California's Central Valley, the great agricultural heartland of a state that produces a third of the country's vegetables and two-thirds of its fruits and nuts. As I spread my peanut butter, I read the packages on my counter. My nine-grain bread promised, vaguely, that it was "made with natural ingredients." My oranges were "locally grown." My peanut butter jar assured me twice, once on each side, that the spread was "NON GMO." It was even "CERTIFIED NON GMO." The inspection must have been a rather cursory affair, given that there are no genetically modified peanuts on the market. The grocery aisle is a testament to our attachment to "natural" as a signifier for all that is good. And as many consumers become increasingly concerned about global warming, there's a tendency to assume that these same labels also mean a product is good for the planet. But unfortunately, the packages on my counter and elsewhere in my kitchen, like my fancy organic sauerkraut ("Our passion for healthy, natural living is reflected in all our products"), told me very little that was relevant to climate change. My bag of local (that is, California) oranges presumably required less fossil fuel to get to my store than if they'd been from Mexico or Spain. But beyond that, I knew nothing.