Buffet at Excalibur Hotel and Casino, Las Vegas, NV

We were sitting at the buffet in the Excalibur Hotel and Casino and I had to marvel at the wide variety of food available in the middle of the desert.  It is virtually guaranteed that none of the food we ate came from within several hundred miles of Las Vegas.  And the price was reasonable as well at about $70 for the two of us for the entire day, as many times as we wanted to go in.  Granted, this was not the highest quality food we could have found, but it was tasty and there were lots of nutritious choices, no matter what your preference on diet is.

I had first started thinking about the food system a few years ago when I was first reading and following a paleo type diet.  (As you can see from the pictures below of our meals at the buffet, I don’t follow this diet any longer, at least not on vacation.)  You read and hear a lot about local and seasonal, and sometimes “organic” food and how that is supposedly better for you than a more modern diet.

Living in northern Vermont as I do, you almost immediately have to question the wisdom of this approach.  Where I live the growing season is limited to about 100 days, from early June to mid-September.  Before and after those dates we often have a hard frost which kills a good share of the plants.  Even within that 100 days, we are lucky to have a few weeks to a month of harvest, though different foods ripen at different times.  While it is possible to extend these, growing season and harvest, it takes a much higher investment in time, money, and space to do so.  (Building a greenhouse, starting plants indoors to transplant outside when the weather is appropriate, succession planting suitable crops to get a longer harvest and  etc.)  So at best, you have a couple of months where fresh local produce is available.

No one would argue that fresh, local produce tastes better and is  more nutritious, but this is due more to its freshness than to its nearby origin.  It is hard to imagine that home canned or frozen vegetables, assuming you even have the time to do this, are more nutritious than fresh vegetables that may have traveled several days from warmer parts of the world.  I know there is no contest between say California and Vermont strawberries in January, the later being non-existent.

Over and above the limited time that fresh local produce is available, there is the simple fact that a lot of foods just cannot be grown here, at least not economically.  Many types of fruits, citrus especially, cannot be grown here due to the short growing season and cold winters.  Even many types of vegetables can be difficult if not impossible to grow here without spending the extra time and/or money to extend the growing season.  For example sweet potatoes, a “paleo” favorite, take a lot of extra work to be grown successfully.  An article from Mother Earth News describes the temperatures needed to grow sweet potatoes.  For comparison, average soil temperatures in Vermont in July run about 75 degrees.

Growing temperature is the only environmental factor that can’t be ignored — sweet potatoes like it hot! There are several critical temperatures for sweet potatoes, and I keep these temperatures straight by likening them to an old-fashioned report card. Because of chilling injury, a soil temperature below 50 degrees (50 percent) is a failure, and 50 to 55 degrees is dangerously close to the failure mark. Sixty percent, give or take a few percentage points, is an acceptable mark for a student not planning for higher education — and at about 60 degrees, the metabolism of the sweet potato slows to near zero, meaning it won’t grow. Temperatures above 70 degrees, as with grades, are conditions that allow growth: slow at 70 degrees, good at 80 degrees, very good at 90 degrees and excellent at 100 degrees.

Between a limited season when fresh foods are available and the limits on what can actually be grown here it is apparent that it is not possible to eat “fresh, local” food all year and even during the time it is possible, your diet would be much more limited than it would be otherwise.

In Part 2: Cost and hopefully some other points.

The four meals we ate at the Excalibur buffet.