A recent New York Times article has me thinking — again — about how much misinformation there is about local foods, and how hard it can be to counter it. As with the Caitlin Flanagan article that got me steamed last month, this one — by business writer Damon Darlin — relies on minimal research to bolster some inflammatory rhetoric.

Darlin doesn’t appear to know much of substance about what he dubs “so-called locavores.” He sneers at the idea that eating locally could be a “national movement,” chides locavores for their “inconsistency” in eating local greens but drinking wine from France, and goes so far as to link local eating to the famine that followed Mao’s Great Leap Forward.

He’s wrong on the first count, if just the booming number of CSAs and farmers markets are any indication. (And Kurt Friese, of Slow Food Iowa, has a good rebuttal here on the subject.) The second is a perennially popular straw man. Eating from local sources is a guiding principle not some unforgiving code — there’s no locavore “rule book” forbidding French wines and Swiss chocolates! And the third is just … well, kind of nuts.

There was more here to get my goat — don’t get me started on his claim that farmers’ markets are marked by  ”inflated prices that put fresh food out of the reach of the poor.” But mostly I’m just baffled. Why did the NYT publish this ill-informed, dismissive piece by a writer who usually writes about the latest personal communication gadgets?

It may just go to show how powerful and universal issues of food and eating can be; if Michael Pollan got even Damon Darlin thinking about this, how many others are asking similar questions? My goodness, you’d think it was almost a national movement or something.