LOCAL IS AS LOCAL DOES:

To know what local means, visit your farmers market

Local has come a long way since “locavore,” meaning a person who eats locally, was declared word of the year in 2007.

Almost a decade later, no-one is getting any closer to defining what it means.

As it becomes a major buzzword in food marketing, some people are getting fussy about how to define it.

Does it mean local to your town, your watershed, your state or province, your country, or what? Which definition qualifies for the label in a local store, or a stand at the local farmers market, or the grant from a local government or foundation, or the prize at the local country fair for best pumpkin pie?

I’m happy with that confusion.

I’m especially happy when I hear some people, like New Jersey’s assistant agriculture secretary Al Murray, say how they’d like to see the confusion resolved. He told the food sector magazine, The Packer, that the US Department of Agriculture in Washington should make a ruling.

That is a long way away from ever happening. People will want to solve this particular problem — dare I say it — more locally.

The less we define local, the nearer we get to understanding the reason why it resonates so deeply for so many people — the reason why the poet of localism, Wendell Berry, says “what I stand for is what I stand on.” Local gets very personal.

The thing about local — the same is true for other fighting words, such as liberal, conservative, food security (which has over 200 definitions), food sovereignty and sustainable diet — is that it is evocative, many-sided, layered, and generative. It calls up memories from the deep, and opens up a wide range of conversations about different choices that have very long tail of possible consequences.

If we’re smart, we’ll leave it at that, and appreciate local for that quality. Not many ideas are so powerful as to be evocative, many-sided, layered, and generative.

The people who like precision in their definitions are people who like to see problems being solved. That doesn’t sit well in the food sector.

Changing the food conversation

With food, the challenge is to manage opportunities, not solve problems. The real opportunity is to open up new and wider conversations about food that go beyond a highly competitive price point. That’s the tough nut to crack in discussions about changing foodways, and local food does it gently.

The opportunity with local is to stir the imagination and be tantalized by opportunities that take people far away from where they are in their everyday habits.

Can local food be about creating momentum in a circular economy — from creating jobs that happen when a local barber buys a local meal at the local restaurant that bought from a local farmer, who ends up getting a haircut from the local barber, who gets paid with the money he just spent?

Can it be about what Professor Lenore Newman in British Columbia, a localista stronghold, calls “food of locality” — specialties such as wine from France, cheese from Italy, baklava from Greece — that were not only grown in local dirt, but raised in the soil of a local “terroir” and culture?

Short supply chains

Can it speak to newcomers and immigrants, for whom the comfort foods they grew up with are distant memories, by providing locally-grown “world foods” adapted to their cultural preferences?

Two academic writers, Henk Renting and Terry Marsden, took a crack at redefining they key elements of what people mean when they express an interest in local food. In 2002, in a journal called Environment and Planning, they anticipate the rising interest in local food by foregrounding a “short supply chain.”

When food goes directly from a farmer to an eater, or from a farmer to one “middleman” distributor to an eater, it has travelled along a short supply chain.

A food supply chain can be equally short — be minimally processed, use minimal fossil fuels and packaging, be equally direct and meaningful in terms of human relationships between farmer and consumer — whether the food is a carrot from 50 miles away, or fair trade coffee beans from two thousand miles away.

The difference in distance is significant, but the energy required to grow and transport the different items isn’t. However short the distance, nearby carrots are annual plants that are weeded from tractors and carted to town in a relatively inefficient pickup truck, while distant fair trade coffee comes from perennial forest plants managed by hand labor, and are carted to town by relatively efficient boats and trains. Neither item comes through an impersonal or “distant” system where price is the only factor.

The ultimate test is that “local is as local does.”

The place to apply that test is at farmers markets.

The first thing you’ll notice is that they transform a place in your local neighborhood, turn a drab place into a lively place. Local food is about celebrating the food experience. A true market is not a fuel stop.

The second thing you’ll notice is that they transform the shopping experience. Instead of something you rush through, it’s someplace you meander through, as you bump into old friends and meet new ones, especially the farmers you talk to about how to cook that vegetable; farmers markets are the slow shopping phase of the slow food experience. Like the food, the shopping is up close and personal, not anonymous.

The third thing you’ll notice is that this isn’t your great-grandmother’s farmers market. There are lots of convenience foods here that you can take home and heat and eat, but the short supply chain from farm to cottage industry-style baking oven to you is so short and fresh that there’s no need for preservatives or adulterants.

The fourth thing you’ll notice is that it’s a happening. Kids are running around, playing tag, showing off painted faces. There’s a band playing. There are table and chairs to take a load off your feet. This is a community space in a public place, and you don’t have to be a paying customer to hang out.

The fifth thing you’ll notice is that the food is fresh-picked. I test for that when I forget about the lettuce I bought and find it by accident when I look through the greens section of the fridge, and feel it and taste it and it’s still fresh and perky. It’s so fresh, it lasts a little longer and saves you money that you normally spend to make food waste.

The sixth thing you’ll notice is that you didn’t bring home many things that are in a box or can or plastic bottle. Packaged food comes from anonymous providers, and is an example of the additional resources required to make a long distance and anonymous passing-through system work .

You’re not supposed to judge things by their packaging, but food is one sector where that rule doesn’t apply. The package tells a story of distance.

You may also note that you speak about what you just did differently. You didn’t “finish shopping” or “get the shopping done.” You “went” to the farmers market. You were “just at” the farmers market. It’s an experience you engaged in.

But was the food local, beyond the fact that everyone there got there after a fairly short drive?

When you come back from a farmers market, you’ll realize there are many layers to that word — was the food first domesticated locally; are the seeds local; were the farm inputs local; was the farm equipment local; were the farm workers local; was the farm delivery truck local; will the food scraps be reused locally; and on and on.

Only one layer of local truth has to do with the precise distance from the farm to the marketplace, or the farm to your plate.

That’s why local doesn’t need a precise definition right yet.

It’s a little up in the air. But we’re working on it.

This is a work in progress. So let’s be patient in our demands for exact definitions.