Topic: Does Bicycle Commuting Affect Cuisine?

Davis, a university town in the Sacramento Valley Hills culinary region of California, is one of the most bicycle-friendly towns in the state.  This attracts a lot of bicycle commuters.  The question I want to address is: do bicycle commuting trends affect cuisine?

It absolutely does.  For one thing, it helps support the popularity of local foods.  When people are hungry, often what comes to mind is "comfort food".  But what is "comfort food", exactly?  If all of you reading this blog post answered that question with the name of only one food, your answers would be widely varied.  It's usually the type of food a person sees all around them in the region they call home, and it also has to be a food that person likes.

Bicycle commuters usually can't go as far as people who commute to work in a car.  What they see around them is more constrained, localizing what they see.  This includes food.  One effect of this localization of food is that many local foods that an individual likes become comfort foods to them.  The end result is that people crave them, and local foods are more popular in the given region.  This doesn't work as much for areas with less local foods already there.  Davis, with an already-established abundance of local food in the area, is a prime example of when bike commuting does work for an area to accelerate the localization of food.

Bicycles at UC Davis (Photo credit).

Photo credit:
 
1. By Shea (Bike City) [CC-BY-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.