“Eat Local” campaigns, which were initiated by farm groups not so long ago, have rapidly moved into the mainstream and are being enthusiastically embraced by consumers.  That’s good news for growers, but be aware that, like most things pertaining to food, it’s not without controversy.
    One of the biggest trends is the Eat Local Challenge. People who take the challenge for a day, week, month, or longer, try to eat nothing but foods from their own foodshed. They call themselves “locavores” or “localvores” and may define “local” in many ways. The San Francisco group considers local food to be grown within 100 miles; other groups may choose 250 miles as the distance they consider local.
    The obvious focus of the Eat Local movement is the farmers market, especially if the market is a producer-only market for local growers. At a good farmers’ market, throughout most of the year, there should be enough variety to satisfy any locavore. Especially in mid-summer, when fruits and vegetables are in abundance, eating local isn’t hard. Again, opinions vary about how close is local, and how much needs to come from within that defined area.
    In the July issue of Gourmet magazine, Barry Estabrook reveals that many restaurants he’s dined in lately aren’t living up to their local menu claims. “The worthy goal of serving ‘local, seasonal’ food has become a mantra for hip chefs all over the country. But is the slogan sincere, or just a come-on for gullible diners?” the article asks. He quotes Rich Pirog of the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture Iowa as saying the term local is being widely abused. “There is confusion, and we are at an important point, where large food companies are beginning to see the power that local has in themarketplace,” Pirog is quoted as saying.
    Bill McKibben, writing in the August issue of National Geographic, describes his own attempt to eat local: “Last winter I conducted an experiment: Could I get through the cold months in my northern valley eating just the food grown in my county? As it turned out, I didn’t simply survive; I thrived. There were plenty of potatoes and onions and beets and beef and cider and beer and wheat and eggs, and just enough tomatoes canned in the heat of summer, to see me through.”
    Much of the recent popularity of eating local stems from growing concerns about global warming and energy usage.  McKibben points out that growing and transporting a single calorie of iceberg lettuce from California to the East Coast takes 36 calories of energy. Food Routes, an organization that promotes local food, tells consumers that  only 10% of the fossil fuel energy used in the world’s food system is used in production; the other 90% goes into packaging, transportation and marketing. According to World Watch Institute, a regular meal uses 17 times the energy of a locally grown meal.
    Besides saving energy, there are many other reasons to eat local. Five years ago, I created a handout called “10 Reasons to Buy Local Food” and it’s still circulating among sustainable agriculture activists. (You can find it and use it yourself by going to the Follow Up page of www.growingformarket.com; select 2001 and scroll down to July 2001.)  Many other groups have created their own lists of reasons to buy local. Many grower groups have adopted the “Buy Fresh, Buy Local” materials created by Food Routes to encourage support for their own local farms.
    These early initiatives to promote local food were all started by farmers and farm support groups. But now they have moved into the realm of consumers who have also decided that eating local is a better choice. Go on the web and do a search for the terms “Hundred mile diet” or “Locavore” or “Eat Local Challenge” and you will find hundreds of web sites dedicated to the topic. Many of the bloggers you will read are fanatically dedicated to meeting the challenge. The time and expense they go to in order to eat all-local points up the flaws of the food system. When it’s easier and cheaper to eat food grown 5,000 miles away, you know there’s a big problem.
    With the help of these local food enthusiasts, we may start to see significant increases in demand. Our challenge remains what it has always been – to meet the demand with wholesome, high-quality food.