Locavore. Have you heard the term? It’s used to describe a movement that encourages people to buy and eat food that is produced locally, most times within 100 miles of your home. As an indication of the movement’s rise in popularity in the culture, “Locavore” was proclaimed the word of the year for 2007 by the Oxford American Dictionary.In an era of $100 per barrel oil, more and more people seem determined to get the “oil” out of their diet. That’s not easy considering most of our food now travels an average of 1,500 miles before ending up on our plates. The globalization of the food supply affects the environment, our health, and quite predictably, our ability to discern how fresh food should taste.
One of the casualties of this centralized food system is that we can no longer trace our food to its origins. A bag containing lettuce, even lettuce that is labeled “organic” for instance, is processed in a large facility far from the consumer; its contents could have been grown in any number of places even farther still. This becomes a problem when contamination enters the picture. Recall the E coli outbreak in fresh spinach in late 2006 that spanned 26 states. The source of that contamination never was discovered and so who’s to say it can’t happen again and again? It already has. According to the U.S Centers for Disease Control, between July and December 2007, there were nine recalls of suspected E coli in processed food products. There have been four such recalls so far in 2008.
Here’s a test for you. Walk into your kitchen in the next few days, pull a packaged food item out of your cupboard or freezer and try to figure out where it came from. You know, originally. Maybe your pork chops came from Iowa or maybe they came from Canada. Does it matter? That’s up to you. Your answer might hinge on whether the item ends up making you or someone you love sick. Then it will matter. But even then, you won’t be able to find out where your food came from. That’s how the system is set up, to keep you out.
What drives the Locavore movement is a desire to have a “relationship” with a food source. When you buy locally, from a local farmer, a farmer’s market or farmers participating in Community Supported Agriculture, you break apart the anonymity of the industrialized food system. Eating becomes more personal, even sustainable.
Of course, eating locally really means eating seasonally. Eating locally means eating asparagus in spring, not in August. Eating locally means waiting for June or July to enjoy the tastes of summer. Eating locally means the vegetables you enjoy all winter spent their summers underground. It's this requirement to wait for food, which may prevent the Locavore movement from catching on.
There is a deeply-embedded American expectation that all foods should be available all the time. Few people think twice when they see a fresh tomato or cantaloupe for sale in the market in February. But it wasn’t always this way; food companies starting moving food to new markets during the 1950s and 1960s, when fuel was cheap. Well, those days are over.
Sure, you can buy tomatoes and melons in Minnesota grocery stores in February, but should you? If, like me, you remember what a locally grown tomato or melon tastes like when you picked one up at the farmer’s market last summer, your decision to buy the same in February is likely to be based more on taste than on the price of oil. Does that mean I’m a Locavore? Maybe. Or maybe I just like the taste of summer and am willing to wait for it.
