I joined a small crowd in the seedy basement of a Lower East Side bar last night where the focus was not drinking but debating. The question: "Should we eat locally?" For the past four years, Todd Seavey has hosted the monthly "Debates at Lolita Bar" on 266 Broome St. Past debates have addressed topics ranging from, "Did the government know in advance about 9/11?" and "Should we loosen term limits?" to "Does Christian rock suck?" and "Is it more painful to get dumped or do the dumping?"
In the dimly lit basement where onlookers leaned against wood-paneled walls and sipped drinks from the bar, Saifedean Ammous and Jesse Anttila-Hughes, both PhD students in Sustainable Development at Columbia, argued their sides in a traditional debate format.
"There's an inherent value in not eating something that's traveled halfway across the globe," said Anttila-Hughes, who told a horror story about soy sauce in China that had been made from human hair in his opening remarks to enforce his points about why knowing exactly where your food comes from makes so much sense.
"It's only because of advanced ways of producing and shipping food that we can think of food in these 'cute' ways," retorted Ammous later, whose main point was that local food is not bad, just not necessarily better than food from around the globe. "If people in New York City think they're 'doing good' by eating locally, they're either wrong or deluded."
Michel Evanchik, who moderated the debate, asked the room to vote for either side after the closing remarks. By a 14-9 show of hands, not eating locally won.
"This is the first time I've heard this argued not between a stupid hippie and a stupid redneck," Evanchik said after thanking the participants.
