green your world

For 2007, The New Oxford American Dictionary's word of the year was locavore. In announcing the selection, Oxford University Press explained:

The “locavore” movement encourages consumers to buy from farmers’ markets or even to grow or pick their own food, arguing that fresh, local products are more nutritious and taste better. Locavores also shun supermarket offerings as an environmentally friendly measure, since shipping food over long distances often requires more fuel for transportation.

While the term was created in 2005 by four concerned Californians, it's somewhat tragic that environmentalists needed to re-invent a way of eating that—before industrialization—was essentially the only way to eat.

Growing your own food, or purchasing it from farmers who you know and trust, certainly has a health appeal of its own. But the popularity of the locavore movement, at least in part, coincides with rising awareness of food miles.

The concept of food miles was developed by City University London Professor Tim Lang, and is essentially the distance that food travels, from where it is grown or raised, to your dinner plate. In fact, some proponents now argue that—looking at the big picture—going local is better than going organic.

David de Rothschild, writing in The Live Earth Global Warming Survival Handbook: 77 Essential Skills To Stop Climate Change, claims that, “to reach your plate, a typical meal travels roughly 22,000 miles.” Using this method of calculation, he also explains that, “if one million people switched to locally produced food for a year we’d eliminate up to 625,000 tons of CO₂.”

The National Sustainable Agriculture Information Service offers a fairly comprehensive summary of food miles, including a lengthy overview of calculation methods. The food miles concept has its detractors, though, who argue that simply determining the distance food travels does not tell the whole story.

Robin McKie, writing for The Observer, addresses how calculation methods may be flawed:

“When you [account for differences in farming methods]—and incorporate these different factors—you make the counter-intuitive discovery that air-transported green beans from Kenya could actually account for the emission of less carbon dioxide than British beans. The latter are grown in fields on which oil-based fertilisers have been sprayed and which are ploughed by tractors that burn diesel. In the words of Gareth Thomas, Minister for Trade and Development, speaking at a recent Department for International Development air-freight seminar: ‘Driving 6.5 miles to buy your shopping emits more carbon than flying a pack of Kenyan green beans to the UK.’”

I can see the point of some of these criticisms, but frankly I think they're misguided—assuming that consumers will purchase either organically grown food, or locally grown food, but not both. Are there no farmers in the U.K. who are growing without the use of oil-based fertilizers or plowing without diesel-burning tractors?

Additionally, the closer to home that your foods are produced, the more likely that you'll be able to talk to the actual farmers, to ask what sorts of pesticides are being used on your produce, to see for yourself whether the chickens are free-range and to find out if the cattle are grass fed. Local eating is about much more than CO₂ emissions, it's about knowing as much as you can about the foods you're ingesting.

Ideally, people should be purchasing food that is both locally-grown and organic. The woman of Locavore have taken this hierarchy quite a bit further, prioritizing locally-grown and then organic foods, followed by food from family farms, local businesses and finally terrior, or taste of the earth.

Terrior sourcing, they explain, means buying foods from the regions from which they are famously produced, such as Brie cheese, from Brie, France. I like this idea for certain necessities, such as my Italian olive oil, since olives are not exactly indigenous to New Jersey. Frankly, you'd have to pull my 3-liter can of olive oil from my cold, dead hands before I’d move to a different cooking fat.

Some locavores follow what are called the Marco Polo rules, which allow for the kinds of spices popularized by sea exploration. Others are even more rigid, eschewing anything not grown within 100 miles of their homes. To be that disciplined, I suspect a locavore’s diet would be deficient in carbohydrates, particularly with limited access to grains like wheat or rice.

While I appreciate the concept of locally sourcing food, I just can’t see myself becoming quite so dogmatic. In fact, I must confess that I came a bit late to the local foods movement.

A few years ago, my wife, Michelle, and I discovered Whole Foods, and I started buying all of my produce from their store. Smug and self-satisfied, I always chose organic over the innocuous-sounding conventional, which I believe literally translates to “sprayed with poisons.”

Not only did the Whole Foods produce look so much healthier than the limp, tired vegetables I was used to, but there were exotic choices too. They tend to carry the strange sorts of produce you only learn about after watching the serious cooking shows relegated to late-night broadcast on PBS. You know the type, too high-brow for The Food Network—whose only dietary requirements seem to be quick & easy .

I gleefully purchased these globally sourced fruits and vegetable, happy that I was taking care of my body, but oblivious to the ecological impact of my choices.

Michelle is smarter than I am, and with a minor in Human Ecology from Cook College, she was much quicker to grasp the impact of buying Chilean strawberries in January. In fact, I seem to remember having something of a spat over those strawberries, which I wanted to buy for a salad recipe. Michelle pointed out that the salad, made with dried New Jersey cranberries, would taste just as delicious, and she was right.

A year or so later, I became aware of the community supported agriculture (CSA) concept, and that local, organic produce had become so popular that it was now possible to purchase a “share” in a community farm. The farmers would plant crops, based on the number of shares sold, and members would go to the farm once a week to collect their share of the harvest.

There are variables, of course. A share does not guarantee a specific yield—sometimes Mother Nature has her own plans. Some CSAs require their members to donate their time to farm work. Other farms deliver shares, either directly to their members, or to specific farm stands or businesses throughout the region. Others require that you pick up your produce at the farm, and some even allow you to harvest crops directly from the fields.

We discovered our local CSA, Honey Brook Organic Farm, through the Local Harvest website. Even those who don't necessarily want to commit to a seasonal farm share can still use Local Harvest to find locally-grown, organic produce, sold at farmers markets or directly from the farms themselves.

Finally, I would be remiss if I did not mention that our good friends, Tami and Bill, recently launched their own CSA, Earthen Harvest, serving Ocean and Monmouth counties in New Jersey. Bill and Tami have been farming in New Jersey for several years, and in 2001 began selling their produce at the Red Bank Farmers Market.

If you are interested in locally-grown, organic food, and live in either Monmouth or Ocean county, I urge you to check out Bill and Tami's offerings. If you live elsewhere, why not visit Local Harvest, and find an organic farm, close to your home, and begin experimenting with a locavore diet?