I had the good fortune this past month to be invited to an event at the Culinary Institute of America sponsored by Brewery Ommegang and a coalition of students groups at the CIA entitled "Three Philosophers Symposium on Food, Beer, and Culture." While "symposium" might be overstating the academic character of the event, the evening featured brief lectures by three speakers—Raymond Boisvert, professor of Philosophy at Sienna College; Garrett Oliver, brewmaster at the Brooklyn Brewery; and Bill McKibben, the widely read author of books on the environment—and judicious pairings of Ommegang's ales with tidbits of food in a theater packed with CIA students. (For those not familiar with Ommegang: It's a microbrewery operating on a hop farm outside Cooperstown that produces five scrumptious Belgian-style ales.)

Here are some interesting facts I picked up at the Three Philosophers Symposium, some more pertinent than others:

· Transporting food accounts for 40 percent of truck traffic in the US.
· Before it ends up on your fork, a bite of food in the US has traveled, on average, 1,500 miles.
· There are more prison inmates in the US than full-time farmers.
· If Wal-Mart were a country, it would be China's eighth-largest trading partner.
· Wal-Mart is the biggest food retailer on the planet.
· During hurricanes, the top two items bought at supermarkets are beer and Pop Tarts.

While Boisvert, Oliver, and McKibben approached the symposium's themes in different ways—from the anthropological, historical, and scientific points of view, respectively—all three men saw fit to trot out the idea of localism as an antidote to the corporate homogenization of our culture. By "localism," they meant not an exclusionary idea, some latter-day foodie Know-Nothing party platform wherein all the French wine and Belgian chocolate are catapulted back across the sea and all the cookbooks of foreign cuisines are burned in a heap in favor of "real [insert locality here] food and cooking." Localism seeks to satisfy two main objectives: to build self-referencing, self-sustaining local economies whenever possible, and, as a by-product of those strong local economies, to create webs of interaction that thereby creates stronger communities. Localism is an acknowledgment that trucking our food 1,500 miles just doesn't make sense—in a sustainable and socially just world, or any other. Brooklyn Brewery's Oliver noted that it is especially galling to think that processed foods like Wonder bread and cheese in an aerosol can are trucked from one side of the country to the other while delicious and sustainable local alternatives exist yet are not widely available.

One example of localism in action McKibben offered is that of The Farmers Diner in Barre, Vermont, near his home in the Champlain Valley. The Farmers Diner is in many ways a typical downscale restaurant—it serves a bottomless cup of coffee, as well as eggs and bacon, a Reuben, burgers and fries, meatloaf, pies, and so on. What makes it exceptional is that the Farmers Diner buy 65 percent of its food from farmers and small-scale food producers who live and work within 70 miles of the restaurant. And it doesn't serve animals that have been injected with hormones and antibiotics, or lack access to pasture—something most diners cannot tell their customers as they tuck into a plate of biscuits and sausage gravy. Since opening in 1999, the Farmers Diner has been a success and is now seeking to create a national network of Farmers Diners, serving typical diner food sourced from local farmers and producers and furthering the cause of sustainable local economies.

Beer works in the same way with regard to local economies. By 1980, the beer industry, following its consolidation from hundreds of robust regional breweries at the beginning of the 20th century to a market controlled by a handful of megaconglomerates had become focused more on moving millions of product units rather than crafting a delicious product. The rise of the craft-beer movement in the '80s and '90s, starting with West Coast breweries like Sierra Nevada and Anchor Steam, has helped transform the brewing industry, which now boasts 1,500 mostly local and regional producers. And let's be honest here, does Budweiser really taste better than Kingston's Keegan Ale or Hyde Park Brewing Company's Big Easy Blonde?

A few days after the Three Philosophers event, I made my usual thrice-weekly grocery-store visit, picking up the essentials of the next few days' lunches and dinners for myself and Lee Anne. Passing through the produce aisle, I spotted a bin full of shiny green Granny Smith apples, making me long for their tart goodness. It was only after I had half a dozen already in the bag that I saw the sticker on the apples that read "Chile" that gave me the howling fantods. I put the apples back, thinking I'd wait for the fall picking season. Localism begins at home—eat local!

—Brian K. Mahoney