![]() ![]() But that understanding was flawed from the start, says San Juan, Puerto Rico-based Alicia Kennedy, author of the forthcoming book No Meat Required. This proliferation of the term in grocery stores arose in part from the fact that without a strict definition, “local food” was first used as a kind of shorthand for a type of food that addressed broken food systems. Whole Foods, HarvesTime, Union Market and Central Market did not respond to requests for comment. Lamme’s features Texas heavily in its branding but gets its chocolate from the California company Guittard, which in turn sources cocoa from Ecuador (around 2,500 miles, or 4,000km, away) and West Africa (almost 6,000 miles, or 10,000km, away) – a fact you wouldn’t find out without poking around online. Other times, the same sign seems to have more to do with where a food company is headquartered, as is the case with Austin-based Lamme’s Candies, 200 miles (320km) away. Meanwhile near Dallas, Central Market posts signs with the outline of Texas promoting “local flavor” that sometimes point to items that are grown in-state, like wine from the Frio Canyon Vineyard, 340 miles (550km) away. Illustration: Julia Louise Pereira/The Guardian At a Union Market in Brooklyn, the “local eggs” category includes cartons from a farm 158 miles (250km) away in Pennsylvania, one 17 miles (27km) away in New Jersey and another 270 miles (430km) away in upstate New York. ![]() In the produce aisle at a HarvesTime in Chicago, for example, microgreens classified as local are grown at a farm about 45 miles (70km) away in Carpentersville, Illinois. That’s led to a lack of clarity and consistency in how the term is deployed in supermarkets across the country, with each grocer defining the label for itself. But the US Department of Agriculture’s definition of “local” in the 2008 Farm Bill includes food grown in the same state or within 400 miles (640km) of where it is finally marketed – and even that definition isn’t regulated the way a label such as “organic” is. According to Food Tank founder Danielle Nierenberg, “local” is usually understood to refer to food grown within 100 miles (160km) of where it’s sold and eaten, a perception bolstered by books such as The 100 Mile Diet by Alisa Smith and JB MacKinnon. There was never well-defined agreement about what the term actually meant, though. What followed was a “flurry of activity to figure out how to re-localize supply chains” that had been decimated by the advent of 20th-century national grocery chains, which had de-localized in the name of efficiency, says Schweizer. Proponents like Pollan asserted that buying local would mean fresher and healthier food with a lower carbon footprint. Local became a selling point in the early 2000s as the result of an intellectual backlash to the growing hegemony in grocery stores and prevalence of highly processed foods, says Schweizer, who points to the publishing of Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma as one inflection point. Local food first started to attract attention against the backdrop of globalized supply chains at a time when US shoppers had become accustomed to eating quinoa grown in Bolivia or salmon caught in Norway. Every retailer has a different definition of ‘local’ Errol Schweizer, formerly of Whole Foods Even the retailers themselves will have different definitions, depending on where they are, and the original purpose of localization has totally gotten lost.” Most of it is bullshit. “Every retailer has a different definition. “Most of it is bullshit,” says Austin, Texas-based Errol Schweizer, who led grocery merchandising for Whole Foods from 2009 to 2016.
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