[getsmart-l] Fw: [Discover Local Food] Cashing in on local crops

[John O'Gorman]

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From: Discover Local Food 
To: Discover Local Food 
Sent: Tuesday, January 08, 2008 8:37 AM
Subject: [Discover Local Food] Cashing in on local crops


Cashing in on local crops
 

Mary Vallis, National Post 

Published: Thursday, January 03, 2008

National Post - Toronto,Ontario,Canada

Nathan Denette/National PostBarbara Kay, owner with her husband David of the 100 Mile Market helps customer Shirley Den Tandt on Thursday, Dec. 20, 2007 in Meaford., Ont.

The National Post presents a week-long series about some of the most interesting ideas to emerge in the past year -- innovative notions that helped define 2007 and will shape the way we live in 2008. Today: the local food movement.

The main floor of a creaky old house in downtown Meaford is a simple store stocked with frozen elk, spelt flour and pepper squash. The 100 Mile Market is the kind of place where the coffee maker is always brewing, customers are known by name and street (or rural route, as the case may be) and the lights flicker when the Christmas lights are plugged in.

Yet it is also proof that the local food movement is not just a cause embraced by granola-crunching, ageing hippies who are willing to pay double for cruelty-free honey in Vancouver. Everything in the store, as its name suggests, is grown or produced within roughly 100 miles of Meaford, on the shores of Georgian Bay.

The concept does, of course, lend itself to a rather odd inventory come December. The produce table is filled with red cabbage, parsnips, red potatoes and celery root -- nary a strawberry or fiddlehead is in sight. Even so, customers keep arriving with blasts of winter air and leaving with organic ice cream, locally roasted coffee and frozen elk, venison and wild boar pie (hydroponic tomatoes grown up the road are also still available). Business, says store co-owner David Harper, has been "unbelievable."

"Why would we be buying garlic in China when we could go out to our garden and dig it?" asks Barbara Kay, Mr. Harper's partner. "It doesn't make any sense. If we all do a little, hopefully, together combined, it will make an impact. More and more, people are doing more than just a little bit."

A hardcover copy of The 100- Mile Diet: A Year of Local Eating rests in the store's front window. The best-selling book provided the inspiration for the business, and has indeed fuelled much of the growing movement. Writing with humorous, self-deprecating touches, Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon detail their quest to eat food grown near their Vancouver apartment. For an entire year, the writers swore off olive oil, chocolate, beer and Cheerios and spent seven months searching for a local wheat farmer. In the interim, they ate sandwiches in which turnips served as bread and gobbled potato after potato.

"One of the big reasons that the 100-Mile Diet has appealed in the way that it has is that we're not telling people to do something," Mr. MacKinnon says. "We're telling people to try something."

People are trying it in droves. The local food movement has gained so much profile that the New Oxford American Dictionary named "locavore" its word of the year, beating out "tase" (a verb for stunning someone with a Taser) and "cougar" (in the context of a woman romantically pursuing a younger man).

Farmers' markets are springing up in the dead of winter, catering to crowds hungry for local produce. Advertising campaigns for local vegetables are front and centre. Small grocers and restaurant menus are advising shoppers on not only the origin of their products, but in some cases even specific farms. And after Mr. MacKinnon and

Ms. Smith began lamenting about their lack of wheat, Victoria played host to "Canada's first bread and wheat festival" this fall.

The authors have travelled from Whitehorse to Miami spreading the word about the locavore lifestyle.

The movement is no doubt virtuous, but is it effective? It all depends on how you measure. Plenty of research supports the locavore movement. A 2005 study prepared by the public health department of Waterloo, found that producing 58 common foods locally rather than importing them -- an average of 4,497 kilometres each -- would reduce greenhouse gas emissions by the equivalent of more than 16,000 cars off the road (or 5.9% of the region's annual household greenhouse gas emissions). The list included beef, potatoes, onions and apples.

And then there is the economic benefit for local farmers. A report issued by Iowa's Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture last year found that if the state's residents ate five servings of local fruit and vegetables each day for three months, their diet would inject an additional US$302-million and add 4,000 jobs to the local economy. (Hard to argue with those apples.)

"On the economic side, it's more than a feel-good movement," argues Rich Pirog, who leads the centre's marketing and food-systems initiative. "Local isn't a brand, but consumers feel they're part of it. That's part of the reason for its success: They're co-participants more than they are in the conventional food system. They're actively making choices; they're learning more; they're making statements with those food choices."

But there are just as many studies that refute the local food movement. Researchers at Lincoln University, for example, recently conducted a study that concluded lamb raised in New Zealand and shipped by boat to Britain was more efficient, in terms of carbon dioxide emissions, than raising the animals in British pastures (due in part to farming practices and different climates). The U.K.'s Department for Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs also released a 103-page study on the "food miles" concept in 2005 that found tomatoes grown in Spain and imported were more energy efficient than those grown in heated British greenhouses outside the normal growing season. The report concluded that a food's travel distance is "an inadequate indicator of sustainability."

Furthermore, the effects of shopping locally could be negated if one drives a gas-guzzling vehicle to the farmer's market. An orange may come all the way from Florida, but in a large shipment sent by rail -- perhaps making it more sensible than a counterpart driven to Toronto by truck from the West. Or perhaps the more distant orange comes from a small, locally based orchard, while the local option is grown at a massive farm engaged in experiments with genetic modification. It seems impossible for the average consumer to determine, unless companies stocked annual reports on their shelves alongside their products.

Mr. MacKinnon tries not to get too wrapped up in what he calls the "hair-splitting level," but attempts to adhere to general principles instead -- eating locally, seasonally and organically, where possible.

"We often say if the thing that's keeping you from eating locally is that you want to have your morning cup of coffee, then have your morning cup of coffee. Local eating is not vegetarianism. It's not something that you decide one day that you will do it or not do it. You can do it at any point on a spectrum."

What's most important for consumers, he said, is for people to go with their guts.

"In a completely unscientific way, I'm a straight-up believer that when your food tastes a lot better, it's probably better for you," Mr. MacKinnnon said.



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Discover Local Food is for those interested in the growing number of celebrations, projects and initiatives in support of local food in the Greater Toronto Area and beyond. The list circulates invitations, announcements, news releases and project summaries that relate to local food in the GTA and throughout Ontario. The list is dependent on readers for suggesting items. Send yours now. Discover Local Food is a project of the Greater Toronto Area Agricultural Action Committee: www.gtalocalfood.ca. GTA AAC staff moderate this list.

 

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