We all need food to live. However, the extravagance and variety of food we consume has expanded beyond our regional reach over the last few decades. But a shift toward supporting local food sources over national or international ones is afoot.
A new movement is sweeping across the United States and the European Union. Restaurants and consumers are leading agricultural consumption in a fresh direction. In fact, from corporations down to college students, going local is gaining some traction.
It might just be time to welcome the locavores to the dinner table.
The locavore movement manifests itself as a commitment to buying raw or cooked foods that were grown or produced locally and often via sustainable methods. Locavorism is a relatively new member of the pop culture lexicon, but eating local differs in some ways from eating organic.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture regulates the official organic label, which entails specific standards for food production, retail sale and everything in between. So, what does the locavore movement have to do with anything that you might see out in the real world?
Well, the average college student has probably been to Chipotle at some point in his or her life. Did you know that the company has a whole campaign behind its ingredients?
Chipotle prides itself on making “Food with Integrity,” according to the company’s website. The ingredients that make up a scrumptious burrito at any of the company’s restaurants typically come from local and organic sources. Even by eating at Chipotle, you might be voting with your feet for the locavore movement.
It is a principled lifestyle. Agriculture is as much a part of our lives as clean drinking water. Neither production process is particularly visible in urban areas, but both still matter.
It takes energy, often in the form of fossil fuels, to get food from the farm onto your dinner table. That’s inevitable; but going straight to the source might reduce your carbon footprint.
Instead of waiting for a bag of oranges to make the journey from Florida to Arizona, you could carpool north of ASU to a citrus farm and play a little role in cutting down on some of the emissions along the way. Who knows? You also might fall in love with the fresh countryside air.
Besides concerns about the environment, why would thousands of people be drawn to care about the location from where their food is coming? It’s most likely a combination of the declining number of local farms to the recent documentaries on the fast food industry.
In our country today, around 1 million people claim farming as their occupation according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Ag 101 webpage. By purchasing produce from nearby farms, locavores help preserve the agrarian way of life. For some consumers, something tastes different, in a good way, about a fresh apple from a local farm when compared to eating one from the supermarket. Perhaps, they’re biting into a piece of the economic vibrancy of their community.
Perhaps an even bigger push driving people to eat local is coming from investigative journalism. “Food, Inc.” is a popular 2008 documentary that highlights large-scale farming operations that fuel grocery stores and restaurants alike across the U.S.
No investigative report can possibly explore every angle of an issue, but “Food, Inc.” revealed certain aspects of corporate farming and food production that raised some eyebrows. I’m sure that many corporate farms operate with high ethical standards, but a few clips of meat packing plants and sound bytes from news reports on spinach laced with E.coli in grocery stores definitely led some consumers to reconsider how they were getting their food.
In that sense, awareness makes a big difference in the locavore movement. If you value the agrarian way of life or relish the experience of shopping at a farmers market, then you’re probably going to gravitate toward the locavore movement. But one little thing might be holding you back.
The dollars and cents of buying locally grown and produced food don’t add up in quite the same way as a 99-cent bean burrito from a fast food shop. At first glance, going local is probably a little easier if you have a moderate level of disposable income.
Even if you’re operating on a tight budget, you still have options for buying local produce. Joining the locavore movement can start with planting a small vegetable garden in the backyard of the house you’re renting and shopping at any number of farmers markets across the Valley offering a competitive price scale. So price shopping can come into play with local food, too.
Buying local produce is not just a fad. Buying peaches from John Doe’s farm is nothing new. In an urban metropolis, going to a local roadside farm to pick up tomatoes might be rare, but it was certainly a way of life before the age of skyscrapers.
Being a locavore could be a good thing, depending on how you define the latter. But, it’s not all or nothing. Sometimes eating local produce isn’t accessible financially or with time constraints.
And maybe you don’t really care if your food comes from Mega Farmtron or Jane Apple. Either side of the coin, what you eat is up to you.
Send locavore tips to Isaiah at isaiah.mccoy@asu.edu
