Coming from a lush and fertile state, where we can grow everything Friese can’t, I can identify with his frustration. The only restaurant in Miami to make an honest effort to buy sustainably (and not even necessarily locally), a fantastic place called Restaurant Brana, shut its doors a few months ago. People just didn’t care. Our farmer’s market is mostly made up of people selling bruised fruit they got cheaply from a wholesaler, or, by the looks of it sometimes, from the dumpster parked behind Publix. There are exceptions—people selling mangoes or mamey they picked off their own trees, or the glorious 30-acre Fruit & Spice Park in Homestead, the only tropical botanical garden in the United States, which grows 100 varieties of citrus and 65 varieties of bananas, among other triumphs. But it boggles the mind to see conglomerates monopolize the produce shelves when so much of what gets shipped over from Colombia or Ecuador or Mexico grows right in our backyards, or could.

Iowa City (pop. 60,000) now has fifteen restaurants buying locally. Miami has one restaurant where the food is served in bed, another where you can buy a “Beauty Pill” made of salmon, mango and broccoli sprouts, and yet another that took $25 million to build and still prompted our restaurant critic to proclaim that, given all that, it “ought to offer a much, much better dining experience.”  

Hmm. Maybe Friese should move to Miami next.