The Truth About ‘local Food In US Supermarkets: ‘Its A Marketing Gimmick
When you walk into a Whole Foods store in Oakland and pick up a container of dairy-free yogurt that says "Local," you'll be surprised to learn that even though the company is based near San Francisco, its main dish is where the yogurt comes from. It is done. but more than 12,000 km from Vietnam or Ivory Coast, about 7,300 km in the opposite direction.
Made with ingredients from around the world, this yogurt highlights the ambiguity of what is now called local food; while shoppers like the term, nearly two-thirds consider local food to be more environmentally friendly, experts say. it may not always mean what you think.
"It's a lot of crap," said Errol Schweitzer of Austin, Texas, who ran supermarkets for Whole Foods from 2009 to 2016. “Every retailer has a different definition of [local]. Even retailers themselves will have different definitions of location, and the original purpose of localization is completely lost.”
Local food first became popular in globalized supply chains when American shoppers learned to eat quinoa grown in Bolivia or Norwegian salmon. Pointing to the publication of Michael Pollan's book, The Omnivore's Dilemma, Schweitzer says that in the early 2000s, the intellectual reaction to the growing dominance of grocery stores and the proliferation of highly processed foods became a selling point.
Advocates like Pollan argued that buying local means fresher, healthier food with a lower carbon footprint. What followed, says Schweitzer, was "a mad rush to figure out how to move supply chains" that had been decimated by the rise of national supermarket chains in the 20th century and offshored to efficiency.
However, there has never been a clear consensus on what the term actually means. According to Food Tank founder Daniel Kidney, "local" usually means food grown within 100 miles (160 km) of where it is sold and eaten, an idea reinforced by books such as Alice Smith and J. B. Mackinnon's "100 Mile Diet". is supported. But the USDA's definition of "local" in the 2008 Farm Bill includes food grown in the same state or within 400 miles (640 km) of where it will eventually be sold, and even that definition is generally not regulated. A z-like label that says it's "organic."
This has led to a lack of clarity and consistency in the use of the term in supermarkets across the country, as each grocer defines the label themselves. For example, in HarvestTime's Chicago vegetable aisle, microgreens classified as local are grown on a farm in Carpentersville, Illinois, about 45 miles away. At Brooklyn's Union Market, the "local eggs" category includes boxes from farms within 158 miles (250 km) in Pennsylvania, farms within 17 miles (27 km) in New Jersey and others within 270 miles (430 km). miles). away. A farm in upstate New York.
Meanwhile, at Central Market near Dallas, signs with an outline of Texas indicate "local flavors" and sometimes refer to products grown in the state, such as wine from Frio Canyon Vineyards, 340 miles away. In other cases, the same sign appears to be associated with the headquarters of a food company, such as Lamme's Candies, located more than 200 miles (320 km) away in Austin. Lamme's uses Texas heavily in its branding, but sources its chocolate from Guittard in California, which in turn sources cacao from Ecuador (about 2,500 miles or 4,000 km) and West Africa (about 6,000 miles or 10,000 km). You should know that you cannot study without surfing the Internet.
Whole Foods, HarvestsTime, Union Market and Central Market did not respond to requests for comment.
The term's popularity in grocery stores is partly due to the fact that, without a strict definition, "local food" was originally used as a kind of shorthand for foods that refer to disrupted food systems. That perception was wrong from the start, says Alicia Kennedy of San Juan, Puerto Rico, author of the forthcoming book No Meat Required.
"When we talk about the concept of local food as an idea or a movement, a lot of people in the United States think it's a middle-class attitude," Kennedy says. "In the American context, the idea of local food is not enough to say what can be done about poverty or white supremacy when it comes to how people get their food."
Many of the most prominent voices that helped popularize the idea, people like Pollan, Alice Waters, and Mark Bittman, are white.
Also, based on his experience at Whole Foods, Schweitzer says local products are often more expensive in the U.S. because they go through supply chains that are less efficient than their national or international counterparts. These factors make talking about local food out of reach for many.
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Also, Schweitzer adds, the discussion about local food "hasn't rebuilt the infrastructure of the big local supply chain—production, processing, storage, etc.—and that's the only way you can really do anything legitimate or authentic."
Nor is it a panacea to visit farmers markets or participate in a community-supported agriculture (CSA) program, which are often considered more authentically local alternatives to chain supermarkets. First, Schweitzer notes that while these direct-to-consumer routes get a lot of attention, they make up a small percentage of the industry; by comparison, direct sales and farmers' markets account for $3bn (£2.4bn). He says the food industry generates $850bn (£680bn) a year. Even at the farmer's market, the term "local" isn't easy. For example, Vermont farmworker and floral designer Amber Tam has witnessed farmers market booths being shipped in from other locations. He remembers being assigned to sell local produce, even though some of them knew he was not from the farm he was going to represent. "They knew that customers wanted to hear that," he says.
According to Schweitzer, "local" "used to be associated with climate change and the development of strong supply chains and regional food systems." Now it's actually a marketing ploy."
Today, local food has "lost its place as a monolithic concept," adds Kennedy. That doesn't mean he doesn't care about where our food comes from, just that he thinks we need to ask more questions than ditch our cabbage farms to fix our food system. For Tamm, that means focusing on local produce in his products, but intentionally buying imports to support "farmers of the world."
Kennedy says it makes more sense to think about where food comes from, including the environmental impact of growing it and other consequences of where it comes from. There are many other factors to consider when thinking about restructuring food systems, from access and affordability to race, class, government subsidies and international trade agreements, and of course the distance over which they are packed or shipped.
In other words, the "local" label at your local grocery store may not mean much. But perhaps you see this less as a reason to give up and more as an invitation to dig deeper into what it takes to create a food system that works for everyone.
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