Swarms of homeless bees have terrified New Yorkers at restaurants and on sidewalks this spring. Experts say a warm winter created ideal conditions for breeding, but others say the bees were fleeing the poorly managed hives of novice beekeepers that have proliferated on rooftops, backyards and balconies since the city lifted a ban on raising honeybees two years ago.

The number of urban beekeepers has recently grown in cities like Paris, with hives above the Grand Palais and Louis Vuitton's Champs-Elysees store, and in London, where membership in the British Beekeeping Association doubled in three years to 20,000 - all in the name of local honey.

But is it worth supporting local just for the sake of being local?

On a rooftop in New York's Greenwich Village is an organic garden above the Italian restaurant Rosemary's. The chef uses ingredients that are picked on the roof. But on a post on Eater about the restaurant's recent opening, one commenter said: "I'd rather have my kitchen staff prepping food than watering plants." Another wrote: "Do you even WANT to eat stuff grown in this air? Wouldn't you prefer something grown out in the country, a little farther away from massive auto emissions?"

Maybe a little farther away is better.

In some cases, the local obsession may be hurting farmers, who say the number of markets has outstripped demand. Rick Wysk, a farmer in Massachusetts who has been selling to consumers for 13 years, believes his business has been hurt by new markets that lure away loyal customers and cut into profits. The number of markets in America jumped from 4,093 in 2005 to 7,175 in 2011.

"We have this mentality of, oh, we have a Starbucks on every corner," Brigitte Moran of Marin Markets in California, told The Times. "So why can't we have a farmers' market? The difference is these farmers actually have to grow it and drive it to the market."

Some of the world's most acclaimed chefs say that supporting local agriculture is too narrow a goal. The American chef Thomas Keller and Andoni Luis Aduriz, one of the leaders of Spain's cocina vanguardia, say the goal of haute cuisine is a fusion of pleasure and art, not a way to provide a livelihood for farmers near their restaurants.

"To align yourself entirely with the idea of sustainability makes chefs complacent and limited," Mr. Aduriz told The Times. Mr. Keller added: "I think about quality, not geography."

And perhaps that matters most after a new study that calculated the biomass of the world's adult population said it is 15 million metric tons overweight. What is the solution? Well, the French have looked far afield for theirs. Some have turned to the American weight-loss program Jenny Craig, which relies on individual microwaveable portions, "not an obvious easy sell in a food culture based on fresh food from the market and communal meals," reported The Times magazine.

For the American diet to work in France - where the obesity rate increased to 14.5 percent from 8.5 percent five years ago - Jenny Craig offers boeuf bourguignon and veloute de tomates. Erick Moreau of Jenny Craig in Europe told The Times: "We really wanted to avoid the idea that we imported U.S. solutions."

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(China Daily 07/01/2012 page19)