When a trend gets big enough, there is an almost inevitable backlash. It should come as no surprise that the growth of the local eating movement has sparked an "anti-locavore" movement of sorts.

According to James McWilliams, author of the forthcoming "Just Food," eating local may be an unrealistic enterprise for many areas of the country (he offers Phoenix as an example) that cannot support enough food to satiate the local-eating populace.
As a guest columnist for the New York Times’ Freakonomics blog, McWilliams writes, "the argument that we must relocalize the nation’s distribution networks to accommodate small growers ultimately runs into a really inconvenient question: should every region even have a local food system?
He argues that switching to a local food system would require dramatic shifts in the way food is processed. Consumers may be less than willing to survive without fresh fruits in the winter or to have a food processing plant in their local eating area, he writes.
In a Time piece called “Extreme Eating,” author Joel Klein offers his extreme response to local eating by producing a meal from Whole Foods made only with foods grown further than 3,000 miles away from Los Angeles. He calls the locavore movement “deeply Luddite” and blames it for focusing more on self-denial than actual impact. He ends with, “So I'm going to keep buying food from my foreign neighbors. Because it's the only way we Americans learn about other countries, other than by bombing them.”
As for me, I have never been one for extremism. This morning I decided to add salt to my eggs for the first time since Wednesday even though it was not produced in New Mexico’s very own salt lakes. I realized I already was eating salt that had been added to my cheese and pistachios.
For me, the point is to see what is available here, not to deny myself. Pretty much all I have really denied myself is processed food, and I think most people would argue this is probably a healthier approach, anyway.
In criticizing the most extreme elements of a movement, Klein misses a few fundamental points. Eating local foods doesn’t have to mean losing all ethnic cuisine, although it may mean getting more creative in figuring out how to incorporate green chile into a favorite Thai recipe. He also discounts the many different international cuisines that factor into “local” eating in places like New Mexico.
He also forgets about what, for me, is a crucial part of my interest in local eating – supporting local people. In theory, supporting sustainable local farmers, ranchers and the people who they employ keeps jobs in the state and keeps tax money in our state coffers.
These are big issues with no easy answers, and I hope to revisit them over the next few days.
Feel free to weigh in on the debate. Is eating local self-indulgent? Is it a Luddite’s attempt at self-denial?