Because I'm in a contrarian mood, I feel like linking to people who are questioning a lot of the overblown rhetoric about modern lifestyle. Buy local! Handmade is best! Return to the good old days! The Internet brings people together, creates opportunities, and fosters democracy! The old days sucked!

I have morphed into a grouchy old man today, and you'll just have to deal with it. And get off my porch! 

Mark Bittman tweeted a link to a blog post written by a farmer in upstate New York. While he's committed to ethnical farming, he is questioning the idea that all food should be produced locally on a small scale just as it was in the past. Because he says that there was no magical time in the past.

I discovered that the history we were telling ourselves in the local farm and food systems movement was a myth. It was, in fact, a complete fabrication with no historical basis at all. We had simply wiped G. W. Swift clean from history. We had written away Sinclair’s jungle (and his socialism!). In our tale, Chicago, New York, Philadelphia were fed by local, or maybe even regional, farms. In our tale, Grandma, bought local meat from her neighborhood butcher.

My old books say different. My old books say that we wrote away the perfection of Swift’s refrigerated rail car by 1880, making it possible to slaughter hundreds of thousands of cows, millions of pigs, and millions of lambs in Chicago and ship them to the major population centers of the east.  In other words, we wrote out of existence the great stockyards of Chicago where millions upon millions upon millions of animals from the Western range lands were slaughtered after being fattened on mountains and mountains of corn, which has also been wiped clean from our history.

UPDATE: More from Megan.