'Eat local' movement takes root

By MICHELLE LOCKE Associated Press
Posted: 12/26/2008

SAN FRANCISCO—Here's something you might not know about being a locavore, the new-fangled term for the old-school tradition of eating food grown close to home: Coffee is almost always negotiable.

Here's another: The people practicing this new-old (and currently quite hot) trend may surprise you. Suburban moms? Check. Artisanal-cheese sniffing foodies? Double check. And how about denizens of the decidely un-hippie halls of Wal-Mart?

"It's really amazing how it's just exploded," says Jennifer Maiser, a San Francisco database consultant who was part of a small group credited with coining "locavore," as part of an "eat local" challenge they mounted three years ago.

Since then, wildly fluctuating transportation costs, food scares and global warming concerns, have lent a mainstream patina to eating local. Wal-Mart, the nation's largest grocer has pledged to source $400 million worth of fruits and vegetables from in-state farmers this year.

Some numbers:

— There were 4,685 farmers' markets as of August, according to the USDA's Agricultural Marketing Service, up nearly 7 percent from two years ago and nearly 3,000 more than 1994, the first year of tracking.

— Locally grown produce was listed as the No. 2 item on a "What's Hot" list by more than 1,200 members of the American Culinary Federation in an October 2007 Internet survey by the National Restaurant Association. (No. 1 was bite-sized desserts, but that's another story.)

— The Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) movement in which members get food delivered from nearby farms has grown to include more than 1,300 farms since its inception in 1985, according to the Robyn Van En Center at Pennsylvania's Wilson College.

Who's eating all this local food?

All kinds of people, from trowel-wielding back-to-the-landers to the tech titans of Google, Inc.'s headquarters in Mountain View, where Cafe 150 serves food from within a 150-mile radius.

And then there's bluesman Elvin Bishop, accidental locavore.

Best known for the '70s hit "Fooled Around and Fell in Love," that sent many a couple swaying into the night, Bishop is often to be found these days working in his well-cared for garden in rural Marin County, north of San Francisco.

Bishop started out eating local as an Oklahoma farm boy, but turned to a road diet of fast food and bad food when he started traveling with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band in the '60s.

A decade of that moved him to buy a place with some arable land—his first tasks were pulling apart an old redwood deck then on the property to frame a greenhouse and digging up the raggedy lawn to plant vegetables.

He's still busy with music, recently releasing a new CD "The Blues Rolls On," a funky collection that features some well-known names, including old friend B.B. King.

But that hasn't stopped him from stocking a deep cupboard in his kitchen with gleaming jars of preserves. (He tried to take a jar of his strawberry jam to King, but couldn't get it through airport security.)

Bishop isn't an official member of the locavore movement, "I'm not too much of an 'ism' type of guy," he notes. What he likes is knowing where his food came from, and that it's going to be tasty.

Taste and freshness are the driving forces for a lot of people interested in buying local foods, says Laurie Demeritt, who studies American eating patterns for The Hartman Group, a research firm in Bellevue, Wash.

National surveys of consumers showed that "local" has a world of different meanings, but there is a unifying theme of wanting to connect with the product—how was it grown, were pesticides used, how were animals treated.

"What we're finding is that the desire to know more about where your products come from is critically important across the United States," Demeritt says.

With the movement still young, researchers are looking for more data to see whether local foods live up to their promise of being safer, healthier and better for the environment, says Rich Pirog, associate director of Iowa State University's Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture.

There is some anecdotal information—for instance, farmer's markets are more likely to be selling unusual varieties like heirloom tomatoes, which maintains genetic diversity, he says. And common sense indicates eating locally means less processed food, and an easier task of tracing where your food comes from.

Living locavore can be tough—imagine life without bananas.

Some followers are hard-core, drinking tea made of local herbs, for instance; while others are more relaxed.

Flexibility is key for Tammy Donroe, a Boston freelance writer and mother of two, who tries to incorporate local food into her family's diet all year.

In October, she went a little deeper for an "eat local" challenge month, which worked fine until farmers' markets closed down and the options were squash, squash or squash.

They survived (with a slight redefinition of "local" pizza) and continue to put as much local food as possible on the table.

"You feel better when you know your money is going to people that you know are trying to make a living honestly and are trying to do the best thing for the environment," Donroe says. "Food that's grown locally tastes better and fresher. I just like the idea of that for my kids."

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On the Net:
http://www.localharvest.org
http://www.eatlocalchallenge.com/
http://www.elvinbishopmusic.com/
http://www.leopold.iastate.edu/