The ‘Locavore movement’ is an interesting set of socio-environmental principles which focus on eating only food that is locally produced. This means eating food in home gardens of food grown locally by groups or communities.

A rough definition is food that is grown within a distance of 100 miles from where you live although others apply greater or lesser leeway to this. The goal here is to minimize the ecological footprint of growing and shipping food long distances.

It’s not an easy way to live as a man in Brooklyn, New York discovered. In a fascinating article in NY Mag, a man decides to see how far he can go with the locavore movement by following its principles exactly for a few days. Here is his conclusion:

In three weeks of eating nothing but Farm-fresh food, I lost 29 pounds, down from my pre-Farm weight of 234. Abs: That’s the upside of only two meals a day. The downside is the expense. Not counting my own labor, which was unending, I spent about $11,000 to produce what, all told, is barely enough to feed one grown man for a month. But I did learn something about food: Unless you really know what you’re doing, raising it is miserable, soul-crushing work. Eating food fresh from the farm, on the other hand, is delightful.

Eating local is expensive and time-consuming, which is why this consumerist movement will not easily trickle down into mass society. It requires a willful abstinence from convenience and plenty, a core promise of the modern world. Our bountiful era is predicated on the division of labor: We don’t sew our own clothes, we don’t build our own houses—and we certainly don’t farm—because we’re too busy doing whatever it is we do for everyone else.

But locavores also preach the importance of valuing all the time and energy and care that go into producing good food, and there I’m with them. So, too, in the end, is Lisa. As I joined her and the kids for supper one night, after finishing my own, Lisa remarked that after seeing how hard I’d worked to put a simple plate of chicken on the table, she’d never shop the same way again. It wasn’t just a matter of buying regionally, or seasonally, or organically—the important thing was to consume responsibly. “I’ll never be as wasteful,” she said. “We throw away more food than we eat.”

A short but interesting opinion piece likens consumerism to religion. It’s certainly not the first time this comparison has been made…after all it seems that consumer and the woman of faith have the same goals: to seek happiness, contentment and true freedom.

The subtext of cultural change in the past 30 years has been the way the market has seeped into every sector of life and come to define how we think of who we are and what we do. We are consumers, feeding the great insatiable maw of the consumer economy.

Is it too much to suggest that consumerism has become a kind of alternative faith, a religion of sorts? Religions are characterized by some vision of a good life, by their rituals and by a particular language. Consumerism seems to be developing all three apace.

Consumerism is a greedy society’s religion