The summary is that the over-all carbon footprint of eating distantly-grown produce is less that eating locally-grown meat. So if you cut meat out of your diet, but still eating that Australian orange, you’re doing your planet-mates less harm than if you eat locally produced bovine flesh.

I also wholeheartedly agree with Harl Delos on the relative merits of sex and fresh, home-grown tomatoes.

I have a less draconian legal solution than Gordon Ramsey’s though: I would like to see more requirements that all food purveyors make readily available, and even post on signs, details on the place of origin of said food product, chemicals used, date of harvest if it’s purported to be “fresh”, and ideally the percent of it’s price that goes to pay off-farm transportation costs, and on-farm production labor costs. Educated consumers are far more powerful than other forms of social engineering.

As for Gordy, the boys at London Food and Drink aptly demonstrate his hypocrisy: http://londonfood.typepad.com/stuff/2008/05/two-gordons-tal.html

Or, is the problem that other folks are buying food said food?

Huh? Why couldn’t UK farmers keep the hunt off their land?

If land owners can’t exclude folks who they don’t like, you’ve got bigger problems than fox hunts, problems that banning fox hunts doesn’t address.

Besides, if we don’t cut down on flying there might not be any strawberries or asparagus in years to come, what with climate change.

Besides, I’m sure “Mexican strawberry farmers and Chilean asparagus farmers” can find people locally to sell to. Using the argument that a practice should not be curtailed or banned because people will lose their jobs could justify keeping hunting foxes in the UK, and indeed is used by the pro-hunt lobby, even though many farmers are sick of the hunt trampling their land.

Or maybe there’s a message here: support poor migrant workers even if it’s a really bad idea. Well, he did say he was liberal.

I was beginning to think that there were a whole bunch of good reasons to do this other than to make me feel good. Like not screwing up the planet for my children. Thanks for helping me to clear my priorities. Those rubber strawberries will taste so much better without all of the guilt.

On labor day, a tomato picked in your garden, still warm from the sun, will be better than sex. And after decades of experimenting with a number of partners in a wide varieties of activities, I know sex can be pretty damn good.

A tomato ought not be crunchy, Jeff.

If you could pick a tomato in Panama this afternoon, and get it to me tomorrow, it might be red. It might be juicy. It might be tasty. And pigs might fly. The fact is, they pick the tomatoes when they’re just breaking yellow, ship them hard, and gas them to turn them somewhat red before the sell them in the stores here. And they aren’t really tomatoes. You might as well argue that Velveeta is cheese. It’s not. It’s a cheese substitute, and they are tomato substitutes.

I feel no compulsion to employ stoop laborers, draymen, longshoremen and sailors in Honduras just so I can have something that looks like a tomato on my plate. It’s May. I should be eating locally-grown broccoli, and locally-grown asparagus, not because I think the people who live 20 miles down the road are more important than the people who live halfway around the world, but because I care about my taste buds.

Bananas? They don’t grow in Pennsylvania. We take what we can get, and as the world’s most popular fruit, the average person in Pennsylvania eats about 27 pounds of bananas annually. That’s up 55% from 20 years ago, while the number of apples - which ARE grown in Pennsylvania - has deadlined at 19 pounds per person. Maybe that’s because growers are pushing Red Delicious, which is a pretty apple that is as hard as, and as tasteless as, wood.

There are lots of varieties of apples which have wonderful flavor and texture. MacIntosh, Jonathon and Winesap are wonderful eating, out of hand, June Transparent makes wonderful apple jelly, Grimes makes a wonderful pie apple. Are apple orchardists dense or something?

Gordon Ramsey is an abusive jerk, a banana that turned ripe a month ago.. If you’re listening to him for advice, you have far more serious problems to deal with than climate change presents. You don’t want to visit his restaurants during ANY season.