My friend Marie M. tried being a localvore for two weeks last year - with great success! Now she has a big garden in her backyard where she grows most of her own produce.
Once the purview of foodies and hippies, 'locavorism' is going mainstream
By Allison Linn
When Katherine Gray takes her kids to the grocery store, they can pick out as many apples and pears as their hearts desire. But bananas? Pineapples? Mangoes? Sorry kids, if they weren’t grown within 100 miles of Gray’s house in Portland, Ore., chances are they won’t make it into the grocery cart.
For years, the idea of eating only food grown locally and in season was reserved for upscale chefs like Alice Waters of Chez Panisse in Berkeley, Calif., or serious hippies living off the grid, while the rest of us didn’t think twice about gulping down blueberries from Chile or avocadoes from Mexico.
Recently, however, a small but devoted number of Americans have started to think a lot more about the origin of the food going into their grocery cart. Worried about the environmental impact of shipping food hundreds of miles, plus the dwindling fate of local farmers – and obsessed with the idea of eating really good food – these extreme eaters try to only buy food that is grown within a 100-mile radius of their own home.
“When we first started talking about it, at the beginning, people thought we were a little bit off our rockers, and now it’s become part of this mainstream discussion,” says Jennifer Maiser, one of a group of San Francisco “locavores” who pioneered an effort to eat locally a few years ago.
Around the same time, a couple in Vancouver, British Columbia, became alarmed after hearing about a study by the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture, which showed that the average distance a piece of produce travels from U.S. farms to households in the upper Midwest is 1,500 miles.
They made the decision to spend a year trying to live only on food grown within 100 miles of their Canada home.
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The movement has grown popular enough to spawn serious research into how much eating locally could reduce greenhouse gas emissions, with at least one researcher arguing that, other benefits aside, it may not be the environmental savior some are hoping for.
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These days, Baskerville-Burrows says she buys about 85 percent of her food from producers in the Syracuse, N.Y., area, where she lives. She also grows tomatoes, herbs and other vegetables at home, and this year she worked with church members to plant a garden on church grounds that they hope will eventually supply a local food pantry with fresh produce.
Among locavore proponents, one popular pastime is the “eat local challenge,” in which participants try, usually for one month, to eat only food that comes from within their community. The rest of the year, many locavores are more realistic about the limits of their devotion.
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“I’d rather spend my money putting good stuff in my body than worrying about what’s on it,” she says.
Locavores also report other, perhaps unexpected, benefits to eating food produced near their homes. Maiser said it gives you a better understanding not just of where food comes from, but when it is freshest.
“I would say the normal American who goes to Safeway or something like that doesn’t really have a good idea of when asparagus is in season,” she says.
Some find themselves making healthier eating choices because eating locally tends to mean eating more fruits and vegetables, rather than processed foods. Others, like Gray, aren’t sure they’ve made their diet any healthier, but they like the other benefits.
For example, once you’ve eaten food that was just picked from the farm, many say it’s hard to go back to the refrigerated, shipped variety. Baskerville-Burrows hated tomatoes until she had some fresh ones from a produce market in Berkeley, Calif., and realized what they really taste like.
Still, people who are trying to eat locally concede that it is easier if you live in an area, like San Francisco, where a wide variety of food is grown nearby and there are like-minded people. Also, the added time and money can make it harder for people who are juggling family and work responsibilities.
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Also, eating locally by actually growing your own food is a better environmental choice than buying food, for a variety of reasons. But, he says, just buying organic food from anywhere in the country does not do much to help reduce the threat of global warming, although some would argue there are other environmental benefits.
Finally, for a person like Weber, who describes himself as “somewhere between vegetarian and vegan,” eating locally could have a big proportional impact since he has already cut back on meat and dairy consumption.
Weber worries that he’s been misinterpreted.
“We’re not trying to say that eating local is bad,” he says. “Eating local is definitely good, and there’s a lot of good reasons to do it.”
It just may not save the planet.
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