One of the updates to Ugly Attention noted the fondness of activists for factoids, preferably alarmist factoids but any old factoid will do if it helps make a spurious point. Other posts have poked fun at food and agriculture poseur Michael Pollan, and the enviro-exploitation zine Grist. A recent interview of Pollan provides a useful example of factoid abuse.

Most of the produce on the East Coast comes from the Central Valley of California. We're taking organic lettuce, grown with great care, terrific cultural practices, and we put it on a truck and we keep it cold from the moment we pick it, 36-degree cold chain all the way across the country for three to five days, and that takes 56 calories of fossil-fuel energy to get one calorie of organic lettuce. . .

So if you're motivated by environmental considerations, you may find -- and I'm not telling anybody what to do, I'm just trying to give them information so they can make their own decisions -- you may find that more of your values are supported by buying local than organic.

Lettuce is exceedingly low in calories. It's 90% water. No one eats lettuce hoping for a stick-to-your-ribs meal. No matter where or how it is grown it takes more energy to get it onto your salad plate than it yields. It's more sensible to think of lettuce as a spice than a food in that it is there for other reasons than food energy.

The bizarre bit is that you see this factoid, with variations, all over the net. Some say 95 calories rather than 56 to produce a lettuce calorie. Some advocate switching to spinach or cabbage which both have more oomph than lettuce. This old factoid has now been recycled as an argument for local production and consumption. There will be no lettuce in Chicago in December apparently.

This isn't a persuasive argument for those with an IQ above 80 and rudimentary thinking skills. There are good arguments for buying local foods, but this isn't one of them. This argument is so silly that it discredits the idea of local production and consumption, indeed it has been used by opponents in just that way.

By this convoluted logic of calories things like coffee and black pepper would be right off the menu. Forget bananas and most fruits, you'll have to make do with preserves and the odd moldy apple from the root cellar. Probably exotic foods like rice are out too.

Buying local is not about calories. It's not about the calories used to get the food produced and on your plate, and it's not about your waistline or rear baggage compartment. It's about dining rather than feeding, a more intimate relationship with food achieved through mindfulness and ritual.

There can be environmental benefits but only if you insist, only if that's part of your selection criteria. There's nothing inherently beneficial to the environment in local production. Part of Pollan's thesis that this spurious factoid was used to support is that organic food is not necessarily of any intrinsic worth, that there are higher objectives beyond organic and that adherence to the letter of the standard can be achieved while engaging in environmentally destructive agronomic practices.

The problem is that urbans have little idea about which agronomic practices are beneficial. They've been hustled and spun by so many grifters and ideologues for so long that they have no clues. From the bureaucrats at the USDA and FDA to the school nurse they have been given junk science dietary and agronomic advice. Food fetishes and eating disorders are common. It seems rare that a person has a robust and sophisticated relationship with food, a tragedy in a sense in that it is central to life, even more so than sex. Junk food, junk sex and eating disorders seem to be byproducts of high density living in modern confined animal feeding operations, i.e. cities. People factories.

It could be different. There are congested urban cultures that are reported to have maintained some of the older and more satisfying food traditions. The Italians come to mind but the Japanese do too. It isn't a euro thing. There are still many places in the US that are comfortable with food too, they just aren't of great interest to journalists. It's a dog bites man story and won't often see print (or pixels).