Feb 20 2008

The latest junk food marketing gimmick: food miles

You have to hand it to the British for thinking this one up: locally grown potato chips. If low-fat labels on food products encourage people to eat more calories (as they apparently do), will locally grown have the same effect?

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I’m positive it will have the same (or at least, similar) effect. I know people who are striving to get up to 90% of their food purchases from local sources, and have been all but crawling out of their skin wanting potato chips. When one of them found some local to her, she nearly threw a party.

Myself? This seems weird to me. I mean, the locavore movement is not particularly concerned with nutrition as such (although it’s often a tangental goal), so it’s not really at odds to be looking for locally made prepared or processed foods. But all the same, I don’t see what’s so hard about taking a peeler to a potato, shaving off bunches of chips, heating up some oil and going to town with your local/homegrown potatoes. And, thanks to doing it yourself (which is at least a minor pain in the butt–moreso than just cracking open a bag) you’ll appreciate them more and not eat them as often. Meh.

  • Fentry
  • February 21, 2008
  • 3:33 pm

I am partial to local chips. I was astounded and upset when I went away to college and realized that Crab chips were only a Chesapeake thing (they have Old Bay on them–no crab). A couple times a year I do buy them and like that we have local businesses and local delicacies–

But they are exactly that: delicacies–not a staple.

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