Sunday afternoons at the Putnam Ave. Whole Foods can be a harrowing experience. Mostly because of the many fast-moving city types who congregate there at precisely the same time, each of them anticipating a hungry week or two, plus a natural disaster, and behaving very recklessly in the aisles. And today, sodden with summer and stupid with its loves, the crowd was even more fanatical. They were also hell-bent on buying summery produce (cobbed corn! peaches! strawbs!) even though it was produce that was trucked in from a place where the summer is slightly accelerated, like Texas.

<please step back, everyone, and make a little room for my soapbox>

Par example, I saw a lot people carrying watermelons: $7.99 EACH. Darry insists that watermelons are always pricey. But I have fond memories of visiting a farmstand (with Darry, ahem!) in NH last year, and buying them for $1. One dollar. It was in September — when watermelons are typically harvested in New England — and we were on our way home from a job I was doing in VT. They were perfect, ripe and really lovely to look forward to.

Now please please please, I know this is a cliche crooned by many a proponent of local eating, but it truly is a sound argument: It is far, far better thing to wait for fresh fruit + veggies, a far, far better eating experience than you have ever known to consume produce that tastes like it was picked that day, because it actually was.

Of course it is also a zillion times better for the world, and it makes more sense, economically. Gas is what, like $13 a gallon now? Those $7.99 watermelons were harvested probably sometime in the last week in California and Texas (the sign said both) and shipped here. Surely part of what we, the consumers, are paying is the giant carbon footprint left by the watermelon company’s truck or plane. And who profits from this scenario? Big giant watermelon companies (that often thrive by paying migrant workers very little money) and the oil execs who have somehow convinced us gas needs to cost $13 a gallon.

But it’s a hot day in June! And we have soldiers dying on the other side of the world so we can have watermelon right now, from Texas, and not three months from now, from the farm in Worcester County.

…Last week Darry and I had a lovely chat with Willow Blish, she of Slow Food Boston. And she told us about how the sort of #1 objective of Slow Food (an international organization that started, btw, when a few badass, enraged Italian farmers pelted a McDonald’s in Rome with tomatoes + garlic) — is to get people to thoroughly appreciate the eating experience. Which means thoroughly thinking about eating and eating intuitively — so your food should be relative to climate, geography and season. That makes sense.

I know it’s sultry and bright and beautiful and that our bellies ache for the goods like watermelon. That also makes sense. But eating watermelon that traveled across the country, at the unnecessary expense of so many things, doesn’t quite.

Of course it is bad, it is very bad indeed that we’re on the cusp of a worldwide agricultural collapse, that people far away from here are rioting over the price of grains and that Sam’s Club has even declared customers can buy no more than four 20 lb bags of rice on a single shopping trip. But still I am confused.

Reports on the global food crisis tell me the price of oil (plus a little Al Gore weather) is making it very hard for Great Big Farms to produce the same yields and sell them at the same low price; they charge more, people can’t pay more, people get very disappointed, they kill each other and the ones that live go hungry.

There seems to be a rift in that linear understanding, though, or just a massive, accidentally misplaced hole. How are we on the verge of starving when the airtight ambient hmmm of thousands of Grocery Stores promise us a very different reality. I think there must be something about about smallish, diversified farms, producing staple foods for people who live nearby, that is being overlooked.

Bee Wilson has an article in this week’s New Yorker that does not miss this point. It’s a review, actually, of a book by Paul Roberts, “End of Food,” which is apparently spreading the good word.

“Roberts depicts the global food market as a lumbering beast, organized on such a monolithic scale that it cannot adapt to the consequences of its own distortions. In a flexible, responsive market, producers ought to be able to react to a surplus of one thing by switching to making another thing. Industrial agriculture doesn’t work like this. Too many years—and, in the West, too many subsidies—are invested in the setup of big single-crop farms to let producers abandon them when the going gets tough.”