[[Image:Marylebone Farmers Market
2005.jpg|thumb|Marylebone
Farmers'
market]]
Local food (also
regional
food or
food patriotism) or the
local food movement is a "collaborative effort to
build more locally based, self-reliant food economies - one in
which sustainable food production, processing, distribution, and
consumption is integrated to enhance the economic, environmental
and social health of a particular place" and is considered to be a
part of the broader
sustainability
movement. It is part of the concept of
local purchasing and
local economies, a preference to
buy locally produced goods and services. Those who prefer to eat
locally grown/produced food sometimes call themselves
locavores or
localvores.
Local food systems
Local food systems are an alternative to the global corporate
models where producers and consumers are separated through a chain
of processors/manufacturers, shippers and retailers. As the food
industry grows, the 'middle man' is increasingly able to control
the quality of food. Conversely, the local food system redevelops
these relationships and encourage a return of quality control to
the consumer and the producer respectively. These quality
characteristics are not only in the product but in the method of
producing.
Networks of local farmers and producers are now collaborating
together in the UK and US to provide an on-line farmers market to
customers. In this way, more consumers can now buy locally even
on-line when they cannot attend a local farmers market. This also
provides local farmers and producers another route to market and
keeps overheads low as website costs are shared. Examples of this
are Tastes of Anglia and www.Buy-Local.net in the UK and BALLE
(Business Alliance for Local Living Economies) in the US.
Defining a movement
During the early 20th century, the demise of the family farm and
the growth of
corporate farms was
experienced through much of the United States. In the late 1960s
and early '70s with the growth of the
back to the land movement there were
increasing numbers of small farms selling a variety of products to
local communities. Since the 1970s the increase of multinational
food companies has increased the size of not only farms but also
the overall food system. During this same time period, a slow and
steady movement of farmers and consumers building relationships and
changing purchasing habits occurred and is still occurring.
The concept is often related to the slogan "
Think globally,
actlocally, common in green politics.
Those supporting development of a local food economy
consider that since food is needed by everyone, everywhere, every
day, a small change in the way it is produced and marketed will
have a great effect on individual's health, the ecosystem and
preservation of cultural diversity.
Activists in the movement claim that shopping decisions
favoring local food consumption directly affects the well-being of people, improve local economies and
may be more ecologically sound.
Pioneering and influential work in the area of
local economies was completed by noted
economist
E. F. Schumacher.
Local food networks include
community gardens,
food co-op,
Community-Supported
Agriculture (CSA),
farmers'
markets, and
seed savers groups.
The principal distinction between these systems and other
agrifood systems is the spatial dimension. Local
food networks have been described as"community-based agriculture"
(e.g. Pimbert, et al., 2001), "direct agricultural markets", and
"localist agriculture" (Hines, et al., 2000). The terms "network"
and "system" are sometimes used interchangeably, but there appears
to be a preference for "network".
Definitions of "local"
The definition of "local" or "regional" is flexible and is
different depending on the person in question. Some local business
with specific retail and production focuses, such as cheese, may
take a larger view of what is 'local' while a local farm may see
the area with in a day's driving as local because it is a
reasonable distance to transport goods and services. Some see
"local" asbeing a very small area (typically, the size of a city
and its surroundings), others suggest the ecoregion or bioregion
size, while others refer to the borders of their nation or
state.
Some proponents of "local food" consider that the term "local" has
little to do with distance or with the size of a "local" area. For
example, some see the American state of Texas as being "local",
although it is much larger than some European countries. In this
case, transporting a food product across Texas could involve a
longer distance than that betweennorthern and southern European
countries. It is also argued that national borders should not be
used to define what is local. For
example, a cheese
produced in Alsace
(France) is
likely to be more "local" to German
people in
Frankfurt
, than to French people in Marseille
.
The concept of "local" is also seen in terms of
ecology, where food production is considered from
the perspective of a basic ecological unit defined by its climate,
soil,
watershed,
species and local
agrisystems, a unit also called an
ecoregion or a foodshed. The concept of the
foodshed is similar to that of a
watershed; it is an area where food is grown
and eaten. The size of the foodshed varies depending on the
availability of year round foods and the variety of foods grown and
processed. In a way, replacing the term 'water' with 'food'
reconnects food with nature. "The term "foodshed" thus becomes a
unifying and organizing metaphor for conceptual development that
starts from a premise of the unity of place and people, of nature
and society."
Where local food is determined by the distance it has traveled, the
wholesale distribution system can confuse the calculations. Fresh
food that is grown very near to where it will be purchased, may
still travel hundreds of miles out of the area through the
industrial system before arriving back at a local store. This is
seen as a labeling issue by local food advocates, who suggest that,
at least in the case of fresh food, consumers should be able to see
exactly how far each food item has traveled.
Often, products are grown in one area and processed in another,
which may cause complications in the purchasing of local foods. In
the international wine industry, much "bulk wine" is shipped to
other regions or continents, to be blended with wine from other
locales. It may even be marketed quite misleadingly as a product of
the bottling country. This is in direct opposition to both the
concept of "local food" and the concept of
terroir.
Locavore
A
locavore is someone who eats food grown or
produced locally or within a certain radius such as 50, 100, or .
The locavore movement encourages consumers to buy from farmers’
markets or even to produce their own food, with some arguing that
fresh, local products are more nutritious and taste better. Locally
grown food is an environmentally friendly means of obtaining food,
since supermarkets that import their food use more fossil fuels and
non-renewable resources.
"Locavore"
was coined by Jessica Prentice from the San Francisco
Bay Area on the occasion of World Environment Day 2005 to describe
and promote the practice of eating a diet consisting of food
harvested from within an area most commonly bound by a
radius. "Localvore" is sometimes also used.
The New Oxford American Dictionary chose locavore, a person who
seeks out locally produced food, as its word of the year 2007. The
local foods movement is gaining momentum as many people prefer the
taste and more environmentally sound effects of foods that are
fresh, seasonal, and grown close to home. Some locavores draw
inspiration from the
The 100-Mile
Diet or from advocates of local eating like
Barbara Kingsolver whose book
Animal, Vegetable,
Miracle chronicles her family's attempts to eat locally.
Others just follow their taste buds to farmers' markets, community
supported agriculture programs, and community gardens.
A study in the 2007 Dewey Health Review revealed that a locavore
diet (study included 100 individuals ages 18–55 eating local food
grown within an radius) resulted in a 19% increase in sturdiness of
bowel movement and an overall drop in sleep apnea and night
terrors.
Labelling
Local food is, by definition, food produced locally.
Whether the seed - an integral part of the "food" - was grown or
procured locally as well is usually left out of this definition,
leading to even greater ambiguity as to its meaning. Many local
food proponents tend to equate it with food produced by local
independent
farmers, while equating non-local
food with food produced and transformed by large
agribusiness. They may support resisting
globalization of food by pressing for
policy changes and choosing to buy local food. They may also follow
the practice of the boycott or
buycott.
Non-local food is often seen as a result of
corporate management
policies, heavy subsidies, poor
animal welfare, lack of care for the
environment, and poor working
conditions. This limited interpretation is likely due to the fact
that the
organic movement is
largely responsible for renewed public interest in local and
regional markets. Those subscribing to this interpretation often
insist on buying food directly from local
family farms, through direct channels such as
farmers' markets,
food cooperative and
community-supported
agriculture plans. For many, local food is interpreted as
unprocessed food, to be transformed
by the consumer or local shop rather than by the food industry. As
such, local food (as opposed to
global
food) reduces or eliminates the costs of
transport, processing, packaging, and
advertising.
As large corporations and
supermarket
distribution increasingly dominate the
organic food market, the concept of local food,
and sometimes '
sustainable food', is
increasingly being used by independent farmers, food activists, and
aware consumers to refine the definition of organic food and
organic agriculture. By this measure, food that is
certified organic but not grown
locally is viewed as possibly "less organic" or not of the same
overall quality or benefit, as locally grown organic products.Some
consumers see the general advantages of "organic" as also invested
in "locally grown", therefore local food
not grown
"organically" may trump generically "organic" in purchase
decisions. Also, because local food tends to be fresh (or minimally
processed, such as cheese and milk), as opposed to
processed food, the bias against processed
food is often at least implicit in the local food argument. The
marketing phrase,
fresh, local, organic, summarizes these
arguments.
Impacts of local food systems
Food quality
Another effect is the increase in
food
quality and
taste. Locally grown fresh
food is consumed almost immediately after
harvest, so it is sold fresher and usually riper
(e.g. picked at peak maturity, as it would be from a home
garden). Also, the need for chemical preservatives
and
irradiation to artificially
extend
shelf-life is reduced or
eliminated.
Gastronomy
Additionally, preserving or renewing regional
foodways, including unique localized production
practices, indigenous knowledge, agricultural landscapes, and
local/regional
landraces of crops or
livestock that may be rare or otherwise endangered. It is
increasingly being tied to the movement to preserve
farmland in areas where
development pressures threaten these
landscapes.
Polyculture and sustainable farming
A major impact of local food systems is to encourage
multiple cropping, i.e. growing multiple
species and a wide variety of crops at the same time and same
place, as opposed to the prevalent commercial practice of
large-scale, single-crop
monoculture.
With a higher demand for a variety of agricultural products,
farmers are more likely to diversify their production, thereby
making it easier to farm in a
sustainable way. For example, winter
intercropping (e.g. coverage of
leguminous crops during winter) and
crop rotation reduces
pest pressure, and also the use of
pesticides. Also, in an animal/crop multiculture
system, the on-farm byproducts like
manure
and
crop residues are used to replace
chemical
fertilizers, while on-farm
produced
silage and leguminous crops feed the
cattle instead of imported
soya. Manure and residues being considered as
by-products rather than
waste, will
havereduced effects on the environment, and reduction in soya
import is likely to be economically interesting for the farmer, as
well as more secure (because of a decrease of market dependence on
outside inputs).
In a polycultural agroecosystem, there is usually a more efficient
use of labour as each crop has a different cycle of culture, hence
different time of intensive care, minimization of risk (lesser
effect of
extreme weather as one
crop can compensate for another), reduction of
insect and
disease incidence
(diseases are usually crop specific), maximization of results with
low levels of
technology (intensive
monoculture cropping often involves very high-technology material
and sometimes the use of
genetically modified seed).
Multiculture also seeks to preserve indigenous
biodiversity.
Cost to consumer
Critics of the movement often say that local food tends to be more
expensive to the
consumer than food bought
without regard to
provenance and could
never provide the variety currently available (such as having
summer vegetables available in winter, or having kinds of food
available which can not be locally produced due to soil,climate or
labor conditions).
The actual cost of local food versus non-local food is still being
debated, since costs can vary depending on the region. Generally
there is a consensus that local food can be more expensive, though
Community-Supported
Agriculture (CSA) can make eating local food more affordable
and accessible to the local community.
Local food proponents point out that the lower price of
commodified food (which is sometimes called
cheap food) is often due to a
variety of governmental
subsidies, including
direct subsidies such as price supports,direct payments or
tax breaks, and indirect approaches such as
subsidiesfor trucking via road infrastructure investment, and often
does nottake into account the
true
cost of theproduct. As a result, organic and sustainably grown
food will continue to cost more until policy changes are made. Some
suggest that it is acceptable to favor local foods when available,
rather than limit oneself to strictly local foods. They also point
out that local foods often represent
more variety, not
less, as obscure local delicacies (including
wild foods) are rediscovered and more types of
produce (varieties or indeed species) are grown in the garden or
allotment. These types that would not be acceptable in the
supermarket-driven food chain.
It is often found suggested that the difference in price between
subsidized “cheap” food and organically or sustainably grown food
makes it inaccessible to many people.
Michael Pollan, New York Times bestselling
author of
The Omnivore's
Dilemma A Natural History of Four Meals, writes that
Americans spend only about a tenth of their income on food, down
from about a fifth in the 1950’s. He questions whether our
unwillingness to pay more for food as a society is a matter of
affordability, or priority, noting that more than half of Americans
have found upwards of fifty dollars a month to pay for a cell phone
in recent years.
In contrast, a study published in the May, 2008 issue of the
American Journal of Agricultural Economics, suggests that the
average supermarket shopper is willing to pay a premium price for
locally produced foods. The study also showed that shoppers at farm
markets are willing to pay almost twice as much extra as retail
grocery shoppers for the same locally produced foods. In 2005, the
researchers surveyed shoppers at 17 Midwestern locations, including
seven retail grocery stores, six on-site farm markets and four
farmers’ markets hosting sellers from multiple farms. The
researchers used data from 477 surveys.
Effect on exporting countries
Some critics argue that by convincing
consumers in
developed
nations not to buy food produced in the
third world, the local food movement damages the
economy of third world
nations, which often rely heavily on food
exports and
cash crops.
Proponents may argue that this allows them to sell their products
inside the country and to neighbouring countries, where their
products do not have to compete as strongly with heavily subsidized
western products.
Environmental impact
Critics of the local food movement point out that transport is only
one component of the total environmental impact of food production
and consumption. In fact, any environmental assessment of food that
consumers buy needs to take into account how the food has been
produced and what energy is used in its production. For example, it
is likely to be more environmentally friendly for tomatoes to be
grown in Spain and transported to the UK than for the same tomatoes
to be grown in greenhouses in the UK requiring electricity to light
and heat them. The solutions to this though would be either using
low impact energy sources on the greenhouses, such a solar,
geothermal or wind, or to switch to eating seasonally.
A study by
Lincoln
University
of Christchurch, New Zealand
challenges claims about food miles by comparing
total energy used in food production in Europe and New Zealand,
taking into account energy used to ship the food to Europe for
consumers
New Zealand has greater production efficiency in many
food commodities compared to the UK.
For example New Zealand agriculture tends to apply less
fertilizers (which require large amounts of energy to produce and
cause significant
CO2 emissions) and animals are able to graze year round outside
eating grass instead large quantities of brought-in feed such as
concentrates. In the case of dairy and sheep meat production NZ is
by far more energy efficient even including the transport cost than
the UK, twice as efficient in the case of dairy, and four times as
efficient in case of sheep meat. In the case of apples NZ is more
energy efficient even though the energy embodied in capital items
and other inputs data was not available for the UK.
An August 6, 2007 article in
The
New York Times gave examples of how eating locally grown
food sometimes causes an increase, instead of a decrease, in the
carbon footprint. As one example, the article stated, "... lamb
raised on New Zealand’s clover-choked pastures and shipped by boat
to Britain produced 1,520 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions per
ton while British lamb produced 6,280 pounds of carbon dioxide per
ton, in part because poorer British pastures force farmers to use
feed. In other words, it is four times more energy-efficient for
Londoners to buy lamb imported from the other side of the world
than to buy it from a producer in their backyard."
According to a study by engineers Christopher Weber and H.
Scott
Matthews of Carnegie Mellon University
, of all the greenhouse gases emitted by the food
industry, only 4% comes from transporting the food from producers
to retailers. The study also concluded that adopting a
vegetarian diet, even if the
vegetarian food is transported over very long distances, does far
more to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, than does eating a locally
grown diet.
See also
References
- Feenstra, G. (2002) Creating space for sustainable food
systems: lessons from the field. Agriculture and Human
Values. 19(2). 99-106.
- Roosevelt, M. (2006) The Lure of the 100-Mile Diet. Time
Magazine. Sunday June 11, 2006. Accessed at
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1200783,00.html on
Nov 1, 2007 at 10:35 am PDT).
- Sonnino, R. & Marsden, T. (2006) Beyond the Divide:
rethinking relationships between alternative and conventional food
networks in Europe. Economic Journal of Geography. pp.
181-199.
- Hinrichs, C.C. (2000) Embeddedness and local food systems:
notes on two types of direct agricultural markets. Journal of
Rural Studies, 16 (3), 295-303.
- Coming Into the Foodshed. Agriculture and Human
Values 13:3 (Summer): 33-42, 1996. Accessed on Nov 5, at
10:42pm CST
- Time: Eating Better Than Organic Retrieved
November 18, 2009.
- Time: Eating Better Than Organic Retrieved on
November 18, 2009.
- MSN Money: The cost of eating green Retrieved
on Nov 18, 2009.
- Pollan, Michael. 2006. The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Penguin Books:
New York, NY.
- Newswise: Shoppers Willing to Pay Premium for Locally
Grown Food Retrieved on June 15, 2008.
- "why long-haul food may be greener than local food with low
air-miles." Richard Woods. 2/3/2008
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article3294448.ece
- Food Miles: Comparative Energy/Emissions
Performance of New Zealand’s Agriculture Industry
- Food That Travels Well, The New York Times,
August 6, 2007
- Food miles are less important to environment than
food choices, study concludes, Jane Liaw, special to
mongabay.com June 2, 2008
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