A growing hunger for farm-fresh food is driving the burgeoning local foods movement. 
By Laura Ten Eyck

No longer strictly the domain of gourmet food lovers, the trend of eating local has surged into the mainstream in recent years. Unprecedented numbers of consumers are returning to their hunter-gatherer roots, flocking to farmers’ markets and farm stands and buying into “CSA” farms. They are seeking out everything from locally produced beef and salad greens to staple items like flour and butter.

Whether the shoppers are concerned moms, young couples striving to eat food grown within 100 miles of their homes, or seniors harkening back to the days of home-grown food, people have started going straight to the source to put food on their tables. As farmers are in the fields sowing this year’s crops, many in the local foods movement are looking to the future and wondering what’s next.

In the past, our nation’s colossal, centralized food system has made it harder than it should be for consumers to buy local, but that is starting to change. “The local foods movement is shaking up our perception of what is ‘normal’ when it comes to food,” says Vermont author Bill McKibben, whose latest book Deep Economy makes the case for why local communities should produce more of their own food. “Suddenly we’re questioning whether we really want every bite we eat traveling 1,500 miles, andwhat the myriad costs of that might be. That kind of questioning is new.”

Farmers riding the wave of consumer interest in local foods would like to see eating local become a way of life for their customers. Ken Migliorelli of Migliorelli Farm in Rhinebeck, New York, sells fruits and vegetables at 15 farmers’ markets in New York City and 10 outside of the city. He also operates a farm stand and does some wholesale. “My markets both in and out of the city were up between 25 and 30 percent last year,” Migliorelli says. “The local foods movement has helped keep my business viable. I have high hopes of this demand staying strong.”

Reliable consumer demand provides farmers with some stability and helps them get down to the business of sustainable farming. “What is incumbent upon us now is to transcend trendiness and leverage this heightened consumer awareness to build systems that allow farmers to raise a family on their land,” says Stacy Miller of the Iowa-based Farmers Market Coalition.

Some advocates see the local foods movement as a path to sustainable economic development. “We get lots of inquiries from communities that want to protect their independence and their economic viability,” says Ann Bartz of the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies in San Francisco, California. “People want to save their withering downtowns and rebuild their local food systems.”

“Farmers’ markets are the fastest growing element of the food economy,” says McKibben. “And the great food has gotten people tasting again which is a great thing.” If urban consumers support farmers’ markets, it is conceivable that their purchases alone can protect farms simply by keeping them in business.

But commerce is not enough in the face of development pressure. “A tremendous amount of food was once produced for the New York City market in the outlying regions,” says Chef Peter Hoffman, owner of Savoy, a SoHo restaurant known for its seasonal menu featuring fresh, locally produced foods. “This still can be true. But more and more people want to live in suburbia and the farmland is being subdivided for development,” which leads to the loss of the landscape and to the region’s food production capacity.

Since 1992, the United States has developed more than one million acres of farmland each year. Of greater concern than the amount of land lost is that most of the development has occurred on the nation’s highest quality farmland and in areas with the best consumer markets. Land with the best soils—prime farmland—were converted 30 percent faster than any other land. Our food increasingly is in the path of that development: 86 percent of our fruits and vegetables and 63 percent of our dairy products.

“You can’t have the option of local food unless you have farmland in proximity to local food markets,” says Julia Freedgood, director of technical assistance for American Farmland Trust. “Unfortunately a lot of the land being devoured by sprawl is our best farmland. That’s why it is so essential that community efforts to develop local food systems also connect to the land that grows the food.” 

According to Migliorelli, educated consumers are beginning to understand this and are spending money at their community farmers’ markets with this goal in mind. “Some of the more savvy customers in the city understand that when they go to a farmers’ market, they are supporting open space,” he says. “They know that when they buy produce directly from a farmer, that dollar is a strong dollar for agriculture.”

Migliorelli and other neighboring farmers got involved with the land conservation group Scenic Hudson in the 1980s and placed seven farms under protection from development for a total of 1,000 acres. “I am a big proponent of farmland protection,” he says. “My farm is 400 acres, 350 of which are protected. I was able to get into fruit farming because I was able to afford to buy a nearby fruit farm with an agricultural easement on it.” Without the easement the Hudson Valley farm would have been sold at a high price for development.

Twenty-seven states, many local municipalities and the federal government now have programs that permanently protect farmland from development, and a few states are starting to link public programs that protect farmland with efforts to enhance agricultural viability. Massachusetts’ Farm Viability Program, for instance, helps keep farmers on the land while strengthening their business skills.

“I think we need to connect farmland preservation with the community,” says McKibben. “I love the efforts farmland and conservation advocates are making not just to preserve land, but to make sure that it is worked in ways that really benefit the community. I drink my daily cider off conserved farmland, and eat bread made with wheat from conserved land.”

“Boosting the amount of local food produced, marketed and consumed by just 20 percent annually would significantly increase local food security and strengthen agriculture’s many contributions to the quality of life in our communities,” says Freedgood. “But these gains will require what we call a ‘critical mass’ of productive farmland to assure that the natural resource capacity matches the market demand for fresh, local food.”

Local food advocates point out that there are many reasons to support locally grown food. Our industrialized system of agriculture uses tremendous quantities of fuel to grow, package and distribute food that needs to travel long distances before reaching your plate. Purchasing food produced by farmers on local farms supports a less energy intensive method of food production and dramatically reduces the fuel consumed during long-distance transport. 

A very personal reason to eat locally produced food is simply that it often tastes better. Food traveling long distances sits for extended periods of time in transport and in storage, diminishing its freshness, nutritional value and quality. And perhaps one of the biggest benefits of eating local for consumers is the chance to know the person who grew the food. When a high quality product is backed up by a farmer’s direct relationship with the consumer, a bond is created that is hard to break.

“We get a superior quality product when we buy it from people we have a direct relationship with,” says Hoffman. “They raise it to be the best it can be with the flavor always in mind. They have to answer to the person they sold it to. They care about all aspects of the quality, not just that it looks the way it is supposed to look.”

However, as with many things in life, higher quality often comes at a higher cost. Because of food policies enacted in the first farm bill following the Great Depression and still in place today, Americans enjoy a bountiful supply of good food at incredibly cheap prices. But those policies often don’t benefit the small-scale farmers who sell their products at farmers’ markets.

For some cooks, the challenges remain even more basic than cost. “I run a school food program that feeds 9,600 kids,” says Ann Cooper, also known as Chef Ann or the Renegade Lunch Lady. She is director of nutrition services for Berkeley Unified School District, located in Berkeley, California, and has written Lunch Lessons: Changing the Way We Feed Our Children. “Serving local foods is often way down the list of what’s important for schools, but the most important thing should be to serve fresh, healthy food.”

Yet too often, feeding a family and making buying decisions that support environmental protection and the local economy is a luxury not everyone can afford, she says. “Buying local, seasonal and sustainable is great, but when you’re hungry and your kids are hungry sometimes you don’t care where your food comes from,” says Cooper.

The USDA’s Farmers’ Market Nutrition Program is helping some people who normally couldn’t afford to buy fresh food from farmers’ markets. In 2005, 2.6 million participants in the federal nutrition program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC) received coupons to purchase fresh fruits, vegetables and herbs from farmers, farm stands and farmers’ markets. The program also provides coupons to low-income seniors. Changes in the federal farm bill supported by American Farmland Trust could also address issues related to the affordability of local food (visit www.farmland.org/campaign to learn more).

Issues of wealth and education aside, there is no doubt that many Americans don’t buy locally grown food simply because it is inconvenient. “The biggest obstacle to overcome in the local food movement is people’s unwillingness to go outside the mainstream infrastructure and take the time to seek out local food,” says Jim Sincock, of Colorado Local Sustainability, publisher of the Rocky Mountain Grower’s Directory and based in Boulder, Colorado.

But many groups are working to change that, through public awareness programs that remind consumers of the benefits of locally grown foods and make it easier for shoppers to find out where to go to buy them. Even giant retailers like Wal-Mart and Whole Foods are now getting in the game by launching local food initiatives. In 2006, Whole Foods Supermarket promised “locally grown produce” on its grocery bags and started hanging signs and banners in stores to trumpet the same message. Big and successful enough to pull the rest of the supermarket industry along with it, Whole Foods has begun to require its stores to buy from at least four local farmers.

Re-circulating food dollars within the community helps to strengthen local economies as well as wean people off an industrialized system that is causing significant environmental damage. “If we grew most of our food close to home,” writes McKibben, “we’d use far less energy in the process, helping to alleviate both oil shortages and climate change.”

By purchasing locally produced food, we can choose not to participate in an industrialized food system heavily reliant on a limited supply of fossil fuel. Buying direct from farmers supports the local economy and preserves farmland, which ensures food security for generations to come. “Daily decisions are being made that improve not only daily life but improve the functioning of the economy,” says Hoffman. “Eating high quality meals you cook yourself or a chef cooks for you has an impact on the landscape.”

And yet it is even more than this. When we buy a whole chicken or a head of lettuce from a local farmer, we preserve our connection to the land and the natural systems that sustain us. By eating local we participate directly in the age-old human tradition of sowing, cultivating, harvesting and eating—and that is the stuff of life.