Triangle Sustainability Blog

In the North Carolina Triangle Region, local food is really hot right now. Restaurants in downtown Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill are buying up fresh local produce and meats. Small local farms are doing booming business. New farms are opening up. And some residents are making extreme efforts to eat only local food.

Of course, the Triangle isn’t unique in its newfound hunger for local delicacies. The national local-food movement has reached a higher level of maturity in the last few years, spurred on by Michael Pollan’s popular book, “The Omnivore’s Dilemma.” And locavore — the term for those who prefer to eat locally grown food — was even named the New Oxford American Dictionary’s 2007 Word of the Year.

So it’s settled. If everyone eats locally, all our environmental, health and economic problems will go away, right?

Unfortunately, it’s not quite so simple. While eating local has many positive benefits, we need to remember that consumption of local food is a means and not an end in itself.

“What communities want is a goal, like tastier food or a cleaner environment, or stronger rural economies, or protecting open space near cities, or social justice in inner cities,” noted Branden Born, a professor at the University of Washington and researcher on the local food movement.

For Triangle residents, those are probably all goals that we would like to accomplish. And we have many different policy options that could help us in reaching those goals. Local food is one option that can help in some cases, but not necessarily all the time. “Imagine a carpenter saying, ‘I use a hammer,’ but the project requires a saw and screwdriver,” Born said. “What is it that you really want — the choice of the tool or the successful completion of a project?”

One of the most commonly cited justifications for eating local is achieving the goal of environmental sustainability. Locavores argue that local foods require less energy to bring to market because they aren’t transported for thousands of miles, called food miles, before they get to the store.

But the food-mile argument ignores the energy that consumers use to go to purchase the food. A British study found that eating local doesn’t save energy in some cases, because local foods are typically sold at locations that are farther from customers than the neighborhood supermarket. So even though the food travels a shorter distance, people driving extra miles to purchase the food erases the potential environmental benefits.

In the Triangle, we’re blessed to have a variety distribution locations, such as local farmer’s markets and Whole Foods, which are central for many residents and so don’t require extra driving. But some hardcore locavores are taking things to the extreme, driving all over the place filling their feedbags. If their goal is eating local, they might accomplish it. But if they intend to help the environment, they’re way off track.

Born has dubbed these types of misdirected efforts as “the local trap.” His research points out that other assumptions commonly made about local food — that it is always fresher and more nutritious, for example — are also wrong in some situations. We fall into the local trap whenever we decide that local food is always the best choice, no matter what our ultimate goal might be.

In one Triangle town — Chapel Hill — the Town Council Committee on Economic Development is preparing an economic development strategy. One of the strategy’s goals is for the town to become “a community focused on creating a welcoming environment for green and ecologically sound businesses and developments.” Local food is listed as a potential method for reaching that goal.

That’s a great start, but now it’s up to both the council and residents to determine the proper way to support the local food movement. We should bring all the stakeholders together and have an honest discourse about how to make local food an entirely positive solution without wasting any of our limited resources, such as encouraging more grocery stores to carry local food.

Our diets might not always follow the locavore mantra of “think globally, eat locally,” but a sound strategy will help us reach our ultimate goals of saving the environment and enjoying fresh veggies.