Radical Noesis - Thinking outside the box

Think about it, though. I'm reading Eat Here, by Brian Halweil, which is a book advocating local food. Decentralization is the main idea behind the local food and slow food movements, but not just because it means that the community has more control over and knowledge of their food supplies. It also means the food will be more fresh and therefore more tasty. It will be cheaper, because it won't have to travel as far or go through customs. Oh, and of course, less oil will be used to get it to your plate, which means that if oil prices spike, the cost of the food won't explode so badly. Also, less travel means less pollution.

Of course, there's even another good, albeit paranoid reason to support decentralization: terrorism. As mentioned in Eat Here and other publications, a terrorist attack on our food infrastructure, energy distribution, or political structure would seriously harm us. Just think if someone were to disrupt the routes that your food takes (1,500 miles average) from its source to your plate. Just think if, all of a sudden, someone nuked the oil wells in Saudi Arabia. Just think what would happen if, god forbid, someone destroyed D.C. We'd be in big trouble, no?

Well, if power is decentralized, that's not an issue. No one can disrupt the entire energy infrastructure if it consists of neighborhood power plants running on solar or wind energy. No one can disrupt the national food infrastructure if most of our food comes from less than 50 or 100 miles away. Sure, some parts of the country would still need to import their food or energy (Las Vegas isn't exactly a great place to farm, I'm sure), but for the most part, the U.S. has alot of great farmland. Right now, much of it is being used for corn (not the edible kind, the pig feed and corn syrup kind) and soybeans.