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Jessica Shankleman, BusinessGreen, Friday 27 August 2010 at 00:15:00

Farmgen starts work on £30m anaerobic digestion project as Heathrow signs deal to turn food waste into fertiliser

The UK’s emerging anaerobic digestion (AD) industry was thrust into the limelight this week after two major new projects that promise to demonstrate the viability of the waste-to-energy technology were…

Incredible Edible Todmorden aims to increase the amount of local food grown and eaten in the town. Businesses, schools, farmers and the community are all involved. Vegetables and fruit are springing up everywhere. Public flower beds are being transformed into community herb gardens and vegetable patches.

“Eat local” has become such a commonly cited slogan that it’s starting to lose its punch. You know an idea is getting shop-worn when major food retailers commandeer it, bumper stickers champion it, and no one blinks an eye when you talk about being into it. Even characters in movies are chatting about local food. (The Kids Are All Right, anyone?)

Luckily, the moment when an idea is becoming so commonplace as to be scarcely controversial is also the moment when we can finally start talking about what the heck it all means. It might seem, from a quick perusal of Stephen Budiansky’s New York Times op ed and excellent set of rebuttals on Grist that I discussed in my last post, that the conversation, as James McWilliams put it, is one in which “we smugly embrace our favored positions while dismissing the enemy as either hippie/yuppie-elitists or corporate shills who do little more than build straw men.”

But it seems to me that the “sides” of this particular conversation aren’t engaged in a yelling match from diametrically opposed positions so much as they are each making important points that are necessary for a more comprehensive conversation to unfold. This dialogue, as lurching as it might be at these early stages, actually seems to me like great progress toward hashing out some of the most fundamental concerns about the question of local food.

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Yes, you can pack a healthy lunch for your kid, but the only way we are going to see a major shift in childhood obesity levels (currently at about 32 percent) is to change the way schools feed our kids. School lunches are packed with fat and sugar. Soda machines, a source of revenue for many schools, let kids get a sugar rush at the expense of their waistlines. Luckily, there are plenty of inventive ways to make sure our kids eat healthy at school.