The promise and limits of local food

EATING LOCAL is all the rage. As someone who dropped out to become a community farmer in the 1970s, and still farms, I am delighted. As someone who later dropped back into academia to become an environmental historian, I have my doubts about how much we can grow in New England. Watching some of my best students head down the same path, I feel I owe their parents an explanation.

The idea that we should grow all our own food locally is easy to dismiss. By 1800, with barely a million people, New England was already importing grain. More and more arrived from the Midwest in the following decades to help feed booming mill cities, even as three-quarters of New England was rapidly cleared for meat, milk, and wool. Local farmland was pressed past the ecological limit, and by the end of the 19th century much of it was returning to forest.

Today New England