I better stop now before I go off on a rant about our state’s foresight, but needless to say, backlash by others is not a priority.

Ultimately, what an initiative is truly about and how it must interact with real world hurdles will often clash. But I still worry that the other side of this particular coin is too obvious not to invoke criticism from skeptical lawmakers, thereby ultimately hurting any longer term effort.

I’m not sure how Georgia Organics would feel about my criticism, but I’d hope they’d see it as constructive.

Who’s to say the movement today isn’t natural? It may not be driven currently by more expensive energy, but by people’s dissatisfaction with many of the products shipped long distances and produced with synthetic fertilizers.

And I personally would rather have a food system in place for when oil prices rise that can fare the storm, rather than have a scramble to feed the population. I suppose it depends on how fast it all happens.

Regarding the other paragraph, I whole-hardedly agree with your opinion that local food is great is some but not all cases. Wine – as you mentioned – and coffee, along with many other items are best when grown in other climates. But I don’t envision a world where everyone only eats local food. There are plenty of opportunities where we can grow, harvest and consume a food locally today, that we aren’t. That’s the stuff we should focus on. IF we ever get to a point where someone would be faced with giving up coffee, that will be a purely economic decision based on the cost of energy.

so there’s that much local produce that isn’t being sold, or how would they make that extra money? By producing more? And that’s determining that buying from Publix or Kroger pumps less money into the local economy (balancing out jobs, etc)? I’d hope the study explained all of that, since both reports I’d seen covering the study didn’t explain HOW it would generate more revenue.