Which way is local?
I try not to be cranky when working behind the cheese counter but more and more the phrase, “local is the new organic” is pushing my buttons. Increasing corporate hypocrisy and consumer misunderstanding around “buying local” is one of the most frustrating things I run into as a cheese buyer for a cooperative grocery store. Even though this would seem to be a more accessible and understandable issue than a lot of other food trends, many would-be locavores have just as much misunderstanding about the food system as the average non-rural American.
First off, I generally agree with local food politics as far as it goes. Issues of equity are not its focus, but I will go along with it on the main point: supporting regional agriculture is crucial to healthy local economies and preserving farmland. There are many reasons that supporting local farmers is an important thing to do. I do it myself on both a professional and personal level. I am overjoyed that this has become an issue that many people who make the food-buying decisions are taking into consideration.
However, the fact that many populated regions of the country (and world) are not conducive to food agriculture for part of their year (even if not perverted by agri-business monoculture) has always left me uncomfortable. As my West Texan sweetie often says, “What was I supposed to eat growing up? Cotton?” As a lived-pretty-much-my-whole-life-in-Northern California(n), I try to not be as myopic as many of my people and realize that being a locavore is a lot easier in some places than in others.
That I can live with though. I understand that supporting local agriculture is a process, and people can do what they can.
What I can’t live with is certain people’s definition of “local”. Recently, through the wonders of facebook, I saw a cheese buyer at a large, natural foods grocery chain tell people about a new cheese they were carrying. It has always been a French cheese, but the huge French dairy conglomerate that owned the brand had opened a factory in the state where that employee worked. “… (F)eel good because you know you’re supporting local!” that cheesemonger exalted!
Is purchasing a cheese made by a European-owned company from a Texas-based company “buying local” even if the store is right down the street? Most people would say no. But what about if you buy your local, heirloom, family-farmed tomato at a huge grocery chain… are you still buying local?
Of course not.
You may be buying more local than if you were buying a tomato from Chile or Mexico, but really it’s the “buying local” equivalent of supporting artisan food producers by eating the “artisan ciabatta bread” meals at your local Jack in the Box.
I’m a guilt-free kind of shopping person. I don’t believe — since wealth is not distributed equally and since many forces limit consumer choices — that one’s buying decisions are the greatest indicator of one’s politics. I believe that consumer identity politics being so prevalent on the left is one of the reasons the left alienates so many people, especially working people. But, that doesn’t mean I want to watch corporations drain out the amount of political meaning that those ideas do have.
The flip side of “supporting” local agriculture for locally owned stores like the one I work at is that it should go both ways. One might not find supporting urban, living wage jobs as compelling as preserving farmland, and that’s understandable, I suppose, since once farmland is gone, it’s pretty much gone for good. But – let’s just say it here – some small, local producers have no intention of staying small or local or supporting local businesses if a large chain suddenly shows interest.
Recently, we were buying about 500 lbs of cheese per week from a local cheese company. Suddenly, they started shorting us product. After a little investigation, I found that they had gotten their cheese in the regional outlets of both a national restaurant and a national grocery chain. Happy to push the “buy local” angle at store buyers and through farmer’s markets, whom did they support when push came to shove? The big national players.
True, the volume that large chains buy can provide more financial security, at least in the short term. The long term is, of course, less clear. Many folks find that out the hard way after taking out loans to expand operations only to have a big box (or, theoretically, a large eco-friendly-and-made-of-recycled-material box) store come back after a contract expires and offer them less money than the previous year.
But that’s not even the point to me. While some businesses are committed to being part of a local community, working in a local economy and providing living-wage local jobs, it’s hard to tell, — when buying local — whether one is supporting the “new organic” or the “new ”Phillip Morris”.
Gordon Edgar has been a cheesemonger at a large, worker-owned, cooperative, natural foods store in San Francisco since 1994 but is speaking for himself here. He is author of Cheesemonger: A life on the Wedge (Chelsea Green, 2010) and a sporadic contributor to Fair Food Fight. Edgar’s Internet home is www.gordonzola.net
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Gordon, you didn’t even head where I was expecting you to on this. As a former cheesemonger for that Texas-based chain (I started around when you did and put in five years before showing people where the fresh mozz was for the 37th time each day took a serious toll on my sanity), I would advance that a cheese counter that stocked only “local” products would be a sad sight indeed.
And I’ve shopped at farmers/farmer’s/farmers’ (I find all three constructions defensible) markets in NYC, the D.C. area, Kalamazoo, MI, Fresno, CA, and Washington, PA, and all those areas have their advantages and their drawbacks as far as eating “local” goes. The eastern markets are pretty uniform – just differences in when they begin and end, and when certain crops start showing up and disapear. Fresno, though, is a weird one. Because it’s 100 degrees, plus or minus five degrees, from May until October, at some point in midsummer, when all those eastern cities are at their tomato-and-corn production peak, there’s hardly anything to buy in Fresno. (Local stone fruit is the exception.) The plants just lay down and die in the heat. Even tomatoes won’t set fruit over 92 degrees. But in the winter, when it’s 50 degrees most days and while the markets in the East are all shuttered, the Fresno market is a super-fresh supermarket’s worth of produce. (Current photos for April are on their site.) You can get almost anything you could possibly want at the Fresno market in the winter. Is that enough of a tradeoff for the six months of the year that Fresno is a broiling hellscape? I don’t live there any more, so I’d say no.
I think more places could have more local food in the winter with intensive row covers and greenhouses, but that’s too much outlay of capital for what the returns would be. So I, in Pennsylvania, look sadly at how brown the butts of the lettuce we get are and remember how great Fresno was. Well, half of the year.
oh I agree 100%. My point wasn’t that one should only buy local (no way I’m giving up Parmigiano Reggiano), but that some folks with vested interests are trying to sell a “local” that doesn’t really fit the real definition.
That’s why I mentioned my from-West-Texas Sweetie. “Cotton for dinner again?”
Cotton does make it into foodstuffs, though. Think of all the processed foods that include cottonseed oil. I don’t know if this is Actually True or just one of those things that has gotten passed along through the whole food community, but I have heard that the pesticides that are approved for cotton include some that are not approved for food.
I stand corrected. “Cotton and Mayo sandwiches for dinner again?”
But yes, our store (and most natural foods stores) won’t carry anything with cottonseed oil for that reason.
Some good points. As a chef and buyer of wholesale food products I’ve run up against many of the same conundrums. And as ‘local’ gets cache from the large more industrial scale producers and corporations and is co-opted into green-washing, we do have to be careful.
But as an entrepreneur, trying to connect a small-business to a series of farms spread out over a large area, for example I’m in NYC and our farms are all outside of the city, inherently leads and perhaps necessitates the involvement of big players in distributing these terrific truly local goods to local buyers.
Here we have the non-too-small-scale problem of how can small farmers and small businesses compete with behemoths like Walmart, Amazon, Fresh Direct, Whole Foods, Etc.? Increasingly, my feelings are we need to band together and build a distribution network AND partner with these large entities as they work towards greater transparency in their operational structure.
More and more businesses, will have to shift towards ‘sustainable’ and ‘green’ means of production simply due to the limitations of supply and demand and the exponential projected population growth from here on. I’ve been reading ‘The Responsibility Revolution:How the next generation of Businesses will win’ by Jeffrey Hollender (co-founder & chairman of Seventh Generation) & Bill Breen. Within there are some exciting case studies and suggestions pertinent to this very issue.
Fight on!
Yours,
@angrywayne https://twitter.com/#!/angrywayne
Interesting thoughts. I wish I could believe that those large entities *are* working towards greater transparency. Sometimes I think that may be possible and sometimes I think they they are just getting more adept at marketing and high-profile token efforts.
But yes, our cheese case and store shelves would be a lot emptier without big players involved somewhere down the line.
Oh, in follow up. I just saw this via @plovgh http://plovghyourfood.tumblr.com/post/4070950900/lately-brands-seem-to-be-casually-tossing-around
Some businesses never learn.
ha!
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Interesting conversation… “Local” for me cannot be a substitution for quality and that’s where I draw the line. That the peaches grown in Palisade are amongst the best I’ve tasted is the reason I work with them just as the Satsumas and Page Mandarins from CA or the wild blueberries from Maine are like nothing else I’ve eaten… There’s cause and reason for diversity and I’d rather support and feel more akin to the farmer in Maine carefully tending his “time and place” than to the blueberries grown “locally” which taste of nothing… Yes, I’m a locavore but not at the expense of quality or of truly local expression.
Interesting take. No question in my mind that the term ‘local’ will be exploited by big business – until some new descriptor becomes more profitable to exploit.
Mmmmm, I’m hungry for some local, artisan ciabatta bread from Jack in the Box!
I had always thought the “local” trend wasn’t so much about supporting the local economy as it was not buying food that had spent hours and gallons of diesel being transported here. While supporting your “local” branch of whichever corporate megastore is ill-informed at best, it still seems useful to purchase local products there if you can because they aren’t transported across the world to arrive on your table.
And of course, if everyone ate locally, small rural areas would never survive, as we produce WAY more food than the local population can consume.
WE HAVE to sell our products to people who live over 200 miles away. Otherwise we’d be swimming in milk and beef.
And what about fish?
Seriously, you should read that book. He talks about transparency through authenticity and it’s really got me thinking in a deeper way about how as a little guy I can influence the bigger ones. Will businesses move fast enough towards responsible industry to head off more serious environmental damage, I doubt it myself sometimes, but unless I do believe we can change things I would find it hard to put in the effort to try everyday. I’m not giving up.
“Local” is for the rich elite.
By buying food coming from Chile, Mexico, etc., I’m supporting people who are a lot poorer than farmers in the US.
Tough to say what’s local. I’m a dairy farmer in the Northeast, where as of 2011, we had 13,000 dairy farmers averaging 100 cows. Roughly 40% of the milk produced by these 13,000 farmers stays “local”, that is, right in the Northeast “milkshed” to be consumed as fluid milk. The rest is made into products including cheeses and powder. These can ship far more easily around the US and even globally.
For the 40 or so years that I have been farming, I’ve thought of myself as “local”. A NY farmer producing largely for NY consumers in terms of fluid milk and the soft cheeses produced where some our farm milk goes to. However, in trying to talk with the people who think of themselves as “local local”, they tell me that dairy farmers are not local because most milk goes through the mega-processors like Dean Foods who control all. The thought seems to be that a farmer can only be “local” if they market through their own little bottling plant or small cooperative that has processing capability.
As I enter my old age and having spent my whole life producing milk for NY’ers, would someone please tell me how I can be part of the “local foods” movement?
By the way, Walmart says it is now going to buy local. It has a long track record of buying “local” NY produced milk. Be verrrrry verrrry careful if you think Walmart is going to do any “local farmers” a favor in the long run. Testimony at dairy antitrust hearings by top dairy leaders was that powerful chain stores have hugely concentrated buying power that enables them to even knock Dean Foods around.