Live Close to Home

I recently pick up a new book, "Live Close to Home" by Peter Denton (http://www.rmbooks.com/book_details.php?isbn_upc=9781771601825). Unfortunately I have not been able to read the book completely yet, there have been a number of things that have stood out for me.

Peter Denton is from Winnipeg and the book is about sustainability and how globalization of everything has impacted the us locally and globally. The first chapter is titled food and two paragraphs sum up my experience and thoughts so far.

"It tastes just like pickerel!" my son said. He had sampled some fish at our local grocery store and persuaded his mother to take home a package of the frozen fillets. When handed me the package to put in away a cook sometime in the future, I found it hard to believe that something frozen would taste so good. Pickerel, a freshwater fish found about 50 miles away in Lake Winnipeg and other northern waters, is a delicacy.

When I pulled it out of my freezer, I discovered to my chagrin that it was a wild fish called a Cape Capensis, caught off the coasts of South Africa and frozen a full year before. Much heavier and denser than pickerel, it was tasty, but it illustrated the problem with long-distance food today. Rather than bringing fish thousands of miles to eat that tasted "just like pickerel," we could have had frozen fish from 50 miles away that, well, was pickerel. (p.25)

Now my question is, why are we doing this to ourselves? Is globalization a good thing?