Local Adaptation

"Think Global. Eat Local."

I am obviously not the first one to say this and won’t be the last one either.  There is too much to say about this topic / philosophy.  Here, let me share something personal and not so personal on it and focus on the “Eat Local”.

You probably know that my favorite food and thing is bread.  How does bread come into this picture of local adaptation when we talk about “Eat Local”?  First of all, what is the main ingredient of bread? No doubt. It is flour. Where does flour come from? It depends on the type of the four, and the flour people most of the time use in baking is milled from wheat. One of the most famous brands of flour (easily accessible from our local supermarkets) claims that their flour is all made from Canadian wheat.  This is no surprise since Canada is one of the leading producers of wheat in the world.  Is this local enough?

Have you ever thought of growing wheat in your backyard and making your own bread out of it?  Even if you knew how, it will take a lot of time and effort and it will be more expensive than simply go buy a loaf of bread from a bakery close by.  Thus, it is not really practical or realistic.  However, it’s never a bad idea to make this into a project for educational purpose or experience learning.  In fact, one of the elementary schools in UK put such a thought into an experiment where students grew wheat from seeds, harvested and milled it into flour which they used to make foccacia bread^[1].  I think this is a great way of teaching the ideas of sustainable living and reducing food miles, etc, not to mention it’s put into action.  It does incur quite a lot of costs to pull off a project like this. However, the social benefits in the long run is not to be neglected, as the culture and the mindsets of people are among the key elements in dealing with environmental issues.