The Consort had a field day at his CUNY gig comparing the price of Time magazine by subscription with a Starbucks — you can now get five copies for one cup. Even that might be too cheap, though, given the bizarre Organic v Supermarket piece it ran. Just consider: When it came to beef, organic was not even an option, but a friend snared yet another plug for his feedlot stuff. And the presentation was all Organic Fail when the results were nuanced. I guess something had to wrap around the ad for the the anti-fat drug du jour. But even that was not as bad as the wildly ill-timed op-ed the hometown paper ran against locavorism. Right in the middle of a huge recall of industrial eggs is not the best moment to throw up some lies, damn lies and statistics. Right at peak tomato season is not the best month to compare hothouse tomatoes and California hardballs. Right when everyone has moved beyond food miles to the bigger picture is not the savviest hour to engage in fuzzy math. Smarter people than I, particularly at Grist, seized on the hugest problem with the piece, though. Those of us who choose to buy as much local food as we can aren’t doing it for only one reason. Just to name one, we’re dabbling in real estate. Every perfect $5 heirloom tomato could help keep a farm in business and a Gekko out of a trophy house on the Hudson.