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Local Food Movements Won’t Save the World

February 8, 2021

Why Local and Equitable are not Synonymous

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Over the last few decades, local food movements in the West have become popularized, bringing with them the promise of reshaping the food system in a positive way. We’ve all heard their rallying cry: eat local, buy local, support local. And it makes sense — buying local food might mean that we shop more seasonally, the food might be fresher, we get to develop relationships with the people who grow our food, and we get to support smaller producers — rather than the agribusiness conglomerates who put most of the food on supermarket shelves after it travels for hundreds, if not thousands, of miles to reach us. There’s no denying that creating local food systems that run in parallel to the dominant, corporate food system can have many positive effects.

But we must examine local food movements in the West with more scrutiny if we truly wish to change the food system.

What is the ‘Local’ in Local Food Movements?

A local food system is a “collaborative network that integrates sustainable food production, processing, distribution, consumption, and waste management in order to enhance the environmental, economic, and social health of a particular area.” In essence, it is a smaller food system that often operates outside of the conventional system to have its own growers, markets, and consumers. But what does ‘local’ mean in this context?

In its simplest form, ‘local’ is just a scale — it could be a recognized border, a neighborhood, a region, or another set of boundaries drawn to demarcate who is part of the system and who is not. To do this, someone needs to define what ‘local’ means…

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My Take on the Local Food Movement

June 18, 2016

The farm-to-table/local food movement is very popular right now. It has expanded beyond high-end restaurants to more casual cafes, bars and coffee shops. Even in restaurants that don’t have a specific farm-to-table mission, you  can still often find a local coffee brand on the menu or cheese from a local dairy included in your sandwich. The local food movement is growing and expanding, along with the healthy food movements and the organic food movement. Budget grocery stores now carry organic produce. McDonald’s offers “healthy” options. My own chain grocery store proudly marks all the local produce they sell…

Incorporating a higher percentage of locally-produced food from small-scale farms into our lives is important in the way that shopping at local businesses is important: because it keeps money in the community and it diversifies our economy. Local farms not only benefit the people who own them, but also tend to pay higher wages than huge agribusinesses, and they often treat land and crops in a more sustainable manner.

On a purely pleasure-based level, I also believe in the value of good local food. Family traditions and celebrations so often happen around the table. I want everyone to be able to enjoy local strawberries in a pie and realize how much better they taste than the commercially-plumped up ones we get in cartons at the store. I want everyone to understand where eggs and butter come from, and that those foods might even be produced a few dozen miles from your home. But how feasible is this vision?

IS AN ALL-LOCAL DIET EVEN POSSIBLE?

On the Strong Towns Strength Test we ask, “If you wanted to eat only locally-produced food for a month, could you?” I have a hunch that almost every town would answer “no” to this.

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Food Safety Modernization Act – An Assault on Sustainable Agriculture?

December 4, 2014

Food Safety Modernization Act – An Assault on Sustainable Agriculture?.

The sustainable agriculture movement, and its complementary local food movement have become, over the past several years, one of the fastest growing and most concrete demonstrations of a cultural challenge to American values of consumerism, corporate power, and the belief that complex technology is always better than simple.
Concerned over a possible threat to their dominance, and to the broader challenge to consumerism that this movement represented, the corporate (pseudo) food industry has responded with every strategy in its book, including greenwashing, coopting the local image, and legal and regulatory assault on the movement rising in opposition.
The Food Safety Modernization Act, overhauled supervision of food safety under the FDA for the first time in 70 years, and arose in part out of public concern over the repeated examples of widespread food borne illnesses. These illnesses, which included a number of deaths, were usually the result of contamination of vegetables or meat with fecal bacteria in factory operations, and were hard to trace and control because of the national distribution of produce and hamburger. These outbreaks helped the food movement, since it made eminent sense to many people to know where their food came from, to insure its quality.
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Olduvai IV: Courage
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