“Food Miles, Local Eating, and CSA” touches on a lot of important parts of where the food we eat comes from. I was wondering how at the beginning of the paper, how anyone was able to even estimate how far the average food item travels in miles because of how complex of a question that is. I was both glad to see that I was right and upset at how much disinformation had been spread about the answer to such an impossible question. I think the only answer that matters in that the produce you get from your grocery store unless specified otherwise has traveled much too far. It is also important to note that it doesn’t matter if your food was grown locally if it isn’t possible to naturally grow where you are and in the season you are because at that point you're causing the same amount of environmental damage that eating locally is supposed to stop. The best way to eat if you care about the impact the sourcing of your food has on the world is to eat locally from what's currently in season around you, and a great way to do this is through CSA.
I found “Avoiding the Local Food Trap” to not be specific enough of an article for me to fully understand. I get that just eating locally produced food doesn’t guarantee that it's better for the environment and that it can’t guarantee that nothing will go wrong with the production. But I believe that this is a problem that almost every system has. It is always important to know that corruption can occur anywhere along with people abusing a system. This is why even when eating locally you have to do your due diligence and research the potential consequences if you're trying to do a good thing for either yourself, the environment, or the economy.
“The Case of the Neem Tree” was an upsetting read. I do not know a lot about law especially when it comes to creating and enforcing patents but I think there needs to be some type of stipulation when it comes to stealing ideas from other people or communities. If something like the versatile use of the neem trees is already widely known and used people shouldn’t be allowed to come in and steal those ideas and resources to make money off of.