Food Jargon of the Day: The Life Cycle of Food and Distavores

the life cycle of food
The total amount of energy that goes into the production of a food item over the course of its entire life cycle (from farm-to-fork). Food miles - how far food travels to get to your table - may not be the best standard when judging the environmental impact of food.

distavore
A farm-to-plane dinner created from items culled from faraway sites. Coined by Joel Stein in a snarky Time Magazine article entitled Extreme Eating, that aims to critique locavore eating habits.

Food Jargon Watch: Lazy Locavores and Urban Farmers

Lazy Locavore
City dwellers who insist on eating food grown close to home, but have no inclination to get their hands dirty. Culled from Kim Severson's July 22nd NY Times article, "A Locally Grown Diet With Fuss but No Muss." Lazy locavores hire personal gardeners to plant, weed, and harvest their backyard veggie plots, invest in animal shares at local farms, and employ personal chefs to deliver fully cooked "local" meals, right to their doors.

Severson's article has sparked a lively discussion on the comfood listserv as well as a great op ed piece by Josh Friedland, at The Food Section.

Urban Farmers
City dwellers who have a small space next to their homes for growing food for themselves and/or small-scale city-based farmers, who produce crops for sale. Distinguished from lazy locavores by their desire to actually get their hands dirty. For more info on urban farming visit CityFarmer.org or read this May 2008 NY Times article.

2007 Word of the Year: Locavore

The New Oxford American Dictionary 2007 word of the year is....locavore. Locavore - coined by four women in San Francisco who proposed that residents should try to eat only food grown or produced within a 100-mile radius - won out over such other 2007 key phrases as "colony collapse disorder," "cougar," "mumblecore," "previvor," and "upcycling"