Is it Really Local Food?

Local food: it's popular. It's so popular that chain stores now sport local produce and everyone is all about calculating the carbon footprint of transportation of this and that. There are detractors, of course: those who say that some food is best grown in a central location to aid in efficiency and scale and that food can be more sustainable this way. However, for the most part local food feels good to people. It connects people with their local farmers, it's fresh and tasty, and it has a touchy-feely environmental feel to it.

Banking on this feel, companies large and small have started to brand their produce and other products as local. But is all of this actually local produce?

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Is it purchased from a grocer in your community? Well, it's wonderful to support small grocers, and while that means that money goes directly into the pockets of grocery store owners and employees in your community, it doesn't mean that your bread was grown next door to the shop. That's local shopping, not local produce.

Is the company local? That's wonderful! It's good to support people in your community who are creating innovative products. However, if the company sources materials from China and integrates them into their products, the products are not totally local. That's not to say that they are bad or even unsustainable. They're just not local.

Does the produce go to be checked, washed and packaged at a centralized facility? Where is this central facility? If the produce is grown in California and the facility is in New York, all of those miles add up. Sure, it is local produce but it is local produce with a lot of air miles.

Does your food have to go on vacation to be processed? If the apples need to take a trip to Florida to get juiced, even though they grew in Washington, again their pedigree is somewhat mixed.

Now, none of this is to say that you should be a local food snob. It's just to clarify: when we talk about shopping for local food and local goods, what do we really mean? We need to consider the different levels of local, from locally-invented and purchased to food that is grown and processed in the community where it is sold.