"I think it's pretty hard to co-opt local, though doubtless people will try," says environmentalist author Bill McKibben. In 2005, McKibben wrote an article for Gourmet magazine detailing how he subsisted entirely on local food through a Vermont winter, thanks to a lot of canning, the help of a local wheat grower, the consolations of locally brewed beer, and more root vegetables than you could shake a parsnip at. He says he came away from the project with a greater appreciation for the community connections that sustain local food production. "You just keep narrowing the distance you want your food to come from -- 100 miles this year, 75 next. The industrial food machine depends on economies of scale, and these simply aren't available locally -- which is good."
Though their approaches are different, behind both BAMCO's and McKibben's quests lay the same economic, environmental and aesthetic rationales. Economically, local sourcing can help small farmers establish relationships with the chefs and consumers who appreciate the quality of their produce. In Northern California, "farmers could easily build condos and get rich selling land at $100,000 an acre," Yahoo's Hart reports, so local purchasing provides the higher profit margins that can keep farms in business and the Bay Area a diverse ecosystem.
In Idaho farm country, where land prices are nowhere as dear, small farmers still face steep competition from the state's powerful agribusiness sector. Boise lacks the concentration of high-end restaurants of Silicon Valley, so the small farmer is often searching for buyers. "We get calls from farmers who want to sell us their excess peaches and peppers at a low price instead of letting them rot in the fields," Delmar says. Such unexpected bounties translate into char-grilled peaches for the Albertson students and lots of cobbler.
Tim Fischer, of Fischer Farms Natural Pork, raises 1,800 head of hogs a year in rural Minnesota, which is nothing compared to the corporate hog operations that supply tens of thousands of pigs for bacon, sausage and Spam. "I raise hogs the way my grandpa raised them in the 1940s: in big open buildings where they have room to run around," Fischer says. "It's hard to sell those kinds of pigs to Hormel because they have more fat on them. The meat is a crimson color." The meat of the Hormel pigs, he says, turns gray because of the stress of their confinement.
Dozens of restaurants in Minneapolis, including the BAMCO cafes at the Guthrie Theater, want this tasty and tender pork. Fischer makes a better profit margin on his meat now than he did during his days supplying Hormel. But he also works harder. "The way I raise hogs is a lot of hard work, a lot more manual labor," he explains.
On the environmental front, eating local reduces the amount of energy consumed in transporting food across vast distances. In his book "Coming Home to Eat," ethnobotanist Gary Nabhan reports that food in America travels an average of 1,300 miles between farm and fork, changing hands six times -- a figure that, according to Worldwatch, has increased by 25 percent since 1980. The Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture estimates that the food system accounts for 16 percent of U.S. energy consumption. And we're importing more fresh fruits and vegetables than ever before: According to the USDA, 9 percent of our fresh fruit came from abroad in 1985; the figure had risen to 23 percent 16 years later.
But those numbers don't even take into account the amount of energy that goes into the industrial production of food, from the petroleum-based fertilizers to the heavy machinery. Every mouthful of food fairly oozes with oil, and it's not canola.
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Conserving energy and preserving America's small farms may be important, but eat-local initiatives like BAMCO's will likely live or die by taste. Many of those who opted for the local meat and potatoes at Georgetown Law chose to do so because the food looked better and, as they discovered, tasted better too. As he tucked into his roast chicken, law student Francesco Totaro spoke glowingly of the food traditions in Italy, his home country. "When we eat local, we know what it is," he explains. "Here everything is artificial, plastified, genetically modified."For Americans, the desire to recapture a lost taste may prove the most powerful agent of change in our food culture -- even if, for the younger generation, the taste is not remembered from their childhood but, rather, appropriated from the recollections of their parents and grandparents. Amy Trubek, an anthropologist of food at the University of Vermont whose book on the geography of taste will be published this year, believes that force is what will determine whether eating local will endure or "be just another blip, the latest version of food activism from the 1970s -- what Warren Belasco calls a 'counter-cuisine.'"
For local eating to catch on, Trubek argues, taste must drive large-scale infrastructural change. "If it's going to be more than the month of August or a special week of menus at restaurants, like in Chicago or San Francisco, we have to create the infrastructure for slaughterhouses, processing plants, along with food safety regulations that are not based on huge factories but on small-scale operations," she says. "All of the policy and regulatory apparatus around the food system since World War II has just assumed the industrial model. Everything has conspired against the small and the localized." BAMCO has no plans to reduce its 150-mile target for either its Farm to Fork program or its Eat Local Challenge. But Ganzler, the company's director of communications, agrees with the notion of scalability. "Because we value local over organic, our system is set up so that each individual chef and manager is responsible for sourcing products locally in their own community," she says. "Our approach is scalable because it's managed at a micro level. Our model puts power in the hands of people closest to the food."
If Ganzler is right, local eating can indeed go national without suffering from the industrialization and homogenization that has afflicted the organics sector. Under current organic standards, you can eat organic lettuce that was grown with sodium nitrate fertilizer on a huge corporate farm, picked by poorly paid labor, and shipped thousands of miles. As the organic sector has grown, so has the pressure on growers to cut costs. Sure, if you happen to live right next to a corporate farm, eating local might not be any better for the environment or for your taste buds. But in most other situations, local sourcing eats away at the very foundations of corporate agriculture.
Whether appreciating the bison-and-wild-rice soup at Macalester College in Minnesota or the heirloom-tomato gazpacho at the Yahoo cafe in Sunnyvale, consumers might never go beyond the sybaritic pleasures to meet the local farmer or fully understand the fuel savings behind their food choices. Yet behind the scenes, consumer tastes, the rising cost of energy and the falling prices of agricultural commodities will conspire together to replace the agro-industrial complex with a new, sustainable system.
The effects of eating local don't stop at the water's edge. Eating local is not the culinary equivalent of Pat Buchanan's isolationism. We live in an increasingly global age, and our food depends on global environmental conditions, the working conditions for migrant labor, the overall stocks of fish in the sea. It's no contradiction, then, that the local meal at the Georgetown Law School cafe was dished up at the "global station." "This is the station where I want to do the sustainable stuff," chef Horne explains. "It's because this is where we can have the most effect."
About the writer
John Feffer is a writer, editor, and co-director of Foreign Policy In Focus.
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