Cow Pooling, Son of Grass Transit, or, Livin’ La Vida Locavore

Peter DaSilva for The New York Times

Trevor Paque at work in San Francisco in a garden his company planted in a client’s backyard.

A Locally Grown Diet With Fuss but No Muss

“A new business serves those who want to eat food grown close to home but do not want to get their hands dirty.”

Locally grown food, even fully cooked meals, can be delivered to your door. A share in a cow raised in a nearby field can be brought to you, ready for the freezer — a phenomenon dubbed cow pooling. There is pork pooling as well.*

* Come now, Sherman – surely you’re familiar with “pooled pork sandwiches!”

At Sugar Mountain Farm in Vermont, the demand for a half or whole rare-breed pig is so great that people will not be seeing pork until the late fall.

Although a completely local diet is out of reach for even the most dedicated, the shift toward it is being driven by the increasingly popular view that fast food is the enemy and that local food tastes better. Depending on the season, local produce can cost an additional $1 a pound or more. But long-distance food, with its attendant petroleum consumption and cheap wages, is harming the planet and does nothing to help build communities, locavores believe.

As a result of interest in local food and rising grocery bills, backyard gardens have been enjoying a renaissance across the country, but what might be called the remote-control backyard garden — no planting, no weeding, no dirt under the fingernails — is a twist. “They want to have a garden, they don’t want to garden,”** said the cookbook author Deborah Madison, who lives in Santa Fe, N.M.

** A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.

Mark Twain, Speech in New York, Nov. 20, 1900