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It’s getting difficult to ignore the fact that the oil is running out. Most politics is based around the concept. It’s even creeping into popular culture now: a movie came out this week which I shall not spoiler for you, but about which there’s shortly going to be a rant on my personal blog. At the very least, we’re going to have to stop expecting to get cheap stuff packaged for us in Asia. What does this mean for food?

It’s odd how times change. I remember when locally-sourced food was a luxury item. Soon it’s going to be your only option.

Worse, and I’m showing my age now, I remember the organic fad. That was a laugh. They’d give you a tiny, withered, black carrot and charge you four times the price of the regular, healthy-looking, orange carrot right next to it. Somebody in Marketing took home a fat bonus for that idea. Over time, organic production methods improved, I presume. Either that or they just conveniently redefined the word “organic” to encompass “stuff that looks like real food even when you’ve washed the mud off it”. Either way, I like pesticides. Pesticides keep pests off things.

We latched onto locally-sourced food for all the wrong reasons, too. It’s local food for local people. It means we don’t have to give any money to those BLOODY FOREIGNERS. And some misguided bullshit about “Food Miles”, which we’re going to cover in an upcoming episode. It’s little wonder that the local-food movement is so strongly associated with the middle-class, Home Counties, Chelsea tractor-driving mentality that every Englishman I know tries to avoid. It’s parochial and insular: these are not qualities to trumpet, especially not if you live in the Home Counties and drive a Chelsea Tractor.

It’s a bloody good job for somebody that the food turned out to be so damn good. That’s a good enough reason on its own to champion local sourcing, and it means that it’s possible to do it without being a terrible human being. There’s also an argument that one should be proud of products of local origin, whether it’s food, or steel, or ideologies—but the problem, as ever, comes when you go too far and start excluding everything else. Sometimes I see people talking about locally-sourced produce and I wish they’d get off my side, because they’re making me look bad.

But the food is good. There are a lot of things I’m not looking forward to about the upcoming Malthusian catastrophe, but the bacon is going to be fantastic.