The Ferry Building Farmer’s Market, which takes place every Tuesday along San Francisco’s embarcadero, is not a traditional place to pick up groceries. When my coworker and I visited last week—an unseasonably warm day in late March—vendors from local farms packed the sidewalk while shoppers bustled between the stalls, filling their canvas bags with seasonal goodies. For late spring, this meant piles of arugula, sweet tangerines, and big heads of broccoli. There were no grocery carts or ATM machines, and you couldn’t find bananas, mangoes, or other items that necessitated thousand-mile journeys. What you could find however, was a cashier with soil-caked fingernails who could tell you how to cook your mustard greens, how best to store them in the fridge, and what was going to be in season next month. At the Farmer’s Market, you can find something you’ll never be able to at Safeway: the farmer.
The Local Lore
Locally grown, seasonal foods aren’t the norm for most Americans, who shop at large grocery stores supplied by industrial scale farms and producers. But scenes like that of the Ferry Building are becoming more and more mainstream. The popularity of buying foods from local farms was evidenced in 2007, when the New Oxford American Dictionary named “locavore” its Word of the Year. As they explain, “the past year saw the popularization of a trend in using locally-grown ingredients, taking advantage of seasonally available foodstuffs that can be bought and prepared without the need for extra preservatives.”
The word locavore was coined in 2005 by four women in San Francisco, who only ate food grown and produced within a one hundred-mile radius and wrote about it on locavores.com. Though certainly not the first to advocate for seasonal, fresh, or home-grown foods (the movement has been underfoot since the 70s), the eating local idea sparked others to try to do the same. The Web sites EatLocalChallenge and 100 Mile Diet are just two of many that give tips, advice, and resources on how to eat locally.
Chronicles of eating locally aren’t just reserved for online, however. The original locavores were inspired by Gary Paul Nabham’s book Coming Home to Eat, which describes his yearlong quest to eat only food native to his home in Arizona. Michael Pollen’s Omnivore’s Dilemma contrasts the difference between industrial, organic, and local scavenging. Barbara Kingsolvers’ best selling novel Animal, Mineral, Miracle chronicles her family’s year of eating home-grown food.
Why Local?
There are many reasons why eating local has become trendy among the food conscientious. One reason is that it’s less polluting, since most of our food travels an average of 1500 miles to reach our supermarket shelves (think bananas from Panama, meat from Nebraska, noodles from China) and therefore requires more fuel for transportation. Even most food grown on U.S. soil is done by large agro-industrial complexes that are heavy on the petro-chemicals and polluting fertilizers.
Local eaters also contend that food grown on sustainable, small-scale farms or in your own backyard is more nutritious and simply tastes better. Having experienced the difference between tomatoes grown in my own backyard (juicy, sweet) versus those on the supermarket shelves (mealy, bland), I’m apt to agree with the latter.
For others, buying local is a backlash to the highly processed and impersonal experience we have with what we eat. Getting back to the way things were is an attempt to reconnect with ecology, in a society ruled by technology.
It Ain’t All Peaches
In California, even an amateur like myself can grow tomatoes, and apartment dwellers in San Francisco can find farm fresh foods, if they so seek them. But what about eating locally in cold climates? Or finding a farmer’s market in dense urban areas not surrounded by fertile soil?
From the online communities, it seems local eating enthusiasts do exist everywhere—Colorado, Missouri, the New York Tri State area. Farmer’s markets are on the rise, increasing from about 2500 in 1996 to around 4400 in 2006. And it’s not just produce—meat, eggs, cheeses, honey, breads, chickens … if it can be raised nearby, it can be sold.
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