On Eating Locally — The Catch

In the green movement, there are calls for folks to eat locally grown food, to maximize sustainability, and to minimize the harm done from transporting food long distances.   See, for example, the 100 Mile Diet.

I’ll admit that the idea has some intellectual appeal to me.  And, when I want to pay premium for organic food, I’ll do so only from a local farmer.  (I think you’d find that folks with more than casual exposure to commercial agriculture have similar feelings.)

However, there’s one big problem I see with the notion of eating locally — isn’t part of the reason we transport food from a far, at least in some parts of the country, the fact that some urban parts of the country have more people than local/regional agriculture can feed?

I mention this now, because of an article that appeared in Sunday’s Courant:

Customers at Urban Oaks Organic Farm in New Britain, for example, are likely to end up on a waiting list. Three years ago, the small nonprofit farm sold only a few pounds of greens each week. This year, it’s selling 40 pounds a week and is looking for more land to expand.[...]

Record fuel prices also are boosting competition as local growers vie with huge agricultural businesses that ship goods across the United States. Still, the high demand hasn’t yet produced more growers, with farmland in Connecticut continuing to be pressed by land development.

“We are bumping up against an initial feeling of limited supply,” said Jennifer McTiernan, executive director of CitySeed, which operates farmers markets in New Haven. “We do need some more farmers in Connecticut and that is incredibly good news.”

The demand for locally produced food has grown so much that trying to find a “crop share” - a system that calls for customers to pay in advance for a portion of a farm’s summer harvest - is nearly impossible. Holcomb Farm in Granby, which operates one of the largest crop-share programs, said by last Thanksgiving, it already sold out the 350 shares available for this year.

If everybody in Connecticut ate only food grown and raised in Connecticut, we’d end up being a much less populous state, I think.