- Author: Jim Muck
I would imagine you have noticed the new hot trend in the food world: local, local, Local. Everything is “local” now. I am a big fan of buying local, and I am very happy that supporting local farmers and ranchers is all the rage right now.
You could call me a skeptic, but I have a feeling that some of the “local” produce currently for sale may not quite match what your average person would call “local.” The problem is: how do you know whose product really is local? Hopefully, I can help you separate the wheat from the chaff with a few simple tips.
The easiest (and probably the most effective) thing to do is to ask questions of the person who is trying to sell you something “local.” I like to ask the name of the farm, and I if I know the farm or farmer from the farmers market, then I don't need to ask any more questions. If I have never heard of the farm, then I ask where the farm is located and how far away the farm is. If the person I ask can't provide an answer, I start to see red flags. Just because I have never heard of the farm does not mean it is not local, but it does mean that I need to do more digging. If I am curious about the location of the farm, I will search for the website of the farm in question. Once I am on the farm's website, I can usually find the address. If I can't get location from the farm's own website, then I get suspicious about how “local” this farm is.
The other clue to determining “local” is to pay attention to the seasonality of what is being offered. For example: if you are in a restaurant that serves an heirloom tomato salad in January, you can be pretty sure those tomatoes aren't local. I have been to a restaurant that brags about cooking seasonally and sourcing locally, and have been served zucchini in February. This restaurant missed both seasonality and proximity. If you own a restaurant and want to serve zucchini in February, I am fine with that; just don't claim that you purchase all of your produce locally when you obviously don't.
I take issue with many of the home vegetable delivery services that claim to offer “fresh and local” produce that is clearly not in season and is grown nowhere near the consumers' homes. While these businesses offer helpful and legitimate services to consumers, to claim that their offerings are local is downright misleading: the warehouse where the boxes got packed and the delivery van loaded may be local, but the produce is not. A quick look at the website of one of these farms located in Northern California demonstrates my point: featured were Meyer lemons, satsuma mandarins, sweet potatoes, kiwi, and butternut squash as options to include in box delivery. None of these items is truly in season in July in Placer and Nevada counties. (You could give them the benefit of the doubt on the butternut squash: the farm could just be harvesting early, but I don't think so.) I think all of those items are stored produce from last fall and winter. I was surprised to see that tomatoes, squash, and cucumbers were not listed as box items. All of these are in season all over California right now, and yet they are not listed as box items. Even more amazing was the listing of bananas as a sample box item. Bananas?!? You can't grow bananas in Northern California. I am not even sure you can grow them in Southern California, so how can all the produce in the box be local?
I suppose it is fair to allow that everyone may have his own definition of what is local. I do argue that your average citizen would not consider the entire Northern Hemisphere as local. The crazy thing is some big stores (who shall remain nameless), some restaurants, and yes, even some home delivery produce services consider the Northern Hemisphere as their backyard. In a surveys completed by the Eat Local Project in Placer and Nevada counties 68% of respondents consider their county and adjacent counties as local and only 4.5% or respondents considered the entire state of California to be local. Eating more fruits and vegetables is great, but I'd ask these retailers to not ride on the shirt tails of the local farmers who are legitimately working hard to feed their communities, and to not further confuse consumers about the seasonality of their food.