‘Locavore’ Movement Is Aimed at Using Mainly Locally Grown Products

Read the second installment of this series here.

Charlie Foster’s options were limited when he started selling the fruits and vegetables his family raises on their farm in Washington County, Va.
“Forty years ago, we were selling out of the back of a pickup truck at just about any space you could find,” said Foster, who describes himself as “an old, longtime farmer.”
Foster, who will be 70 in July, said he’s been farming since he was 10. Over more than half a century, he’s seen a lot of change, especially when it comes to venues and markets for his produce. In addition to farmers markets, the fruits of Foster’s labors now can be found on local restaurant tables and grocery store shelves.

“That’s a wonderful thing,” Foster said as he showed off some snow peas that were ready to harvest. “They’ll probably want some of these peas.”

The increased number of outlets Foster and other farmers have found for their produce has a lot to do with a group known as locavores. These people blend their concerns about the environment with a desire to support the local economy as they choose the one thing everybody purchases or prepares every day – food.

Local foods and the Locavores In 2005, Sage Van Wing, who now lives in Seattle, and three of her California friends known as the Locavores did a lot of thinking about their food and where it came from. She said they wanted to make sure it was grown by people who were good stewards of the environment and who treated their workers and animals with respect.

But they ran into a problem. Food travels an average of 1,500 miles before it gets to grocery store shelves or restaurant kitchens and this distance “represents our separation from the knowledge of how and by whom what we consume is produced, processed and transported,” the group argued.

“You have to have a relationship with the person you’re buying your food from,” Van Wing said in a recent phone interview. “There are all sorts of things you can’t guarantee if you don’t know your source.”

The distance traveled also presented a problem for the Locavores, who were worried about the increased fossil fuel consumption and greenhouse gases produced by the trucks that delivered their food.

While facing this situation, Van Wing said the Locavores were doing a lot of research about food and sustainable farming. One book that stuck out, she said, was Gary Paul Nabhan’s “Coming Home to Eat,” which chronicles the author’s attempt to spend a year eating food that came from within 250 miles of his Arizona home.

Soon after reading this book, Van Wing said she and her friends thought if Nabhan could eat locally in the Arizona desert, then surely they could do the same in California. So in August 2005, the group set out to eat only food that came from within 100 miles of their San Francisco Bay area homes, or an area they called their local “foodshed.”
“We kind of got together and said, ‘let’s all try that as a challenge,’ ” Van Wing said, adding that they invited people from across the world to join them through their blog, http://www.locavores.com.
News of the challenge spread like wildfire and in 2007, the Oxford American Dictionary made “locavore” its word of the year, granting it a space in the buzzword hall of fame.

Bringing it here

One of the people to pick up on the buzz created by the Locavores was Meadowview, Va., author Barbara Kingsolver, who went out on her own local foods challenge when she wrote her 2007 book, “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle.”
For the book, Kingsolver, her husband, Steven Hopp, and her daughter, Camille, decided to spend a year eating only foods they grew or raised on their 100-acre tract of land in Washington County, purchased at local farmers markets or obtained through their friends who also were farmers.

“We wanted to join the community of scholars and writers and people who had already contributed to the body of work that’s been done on this subject,” Kingsolver said about the book.
In addition to showing the world that a “normal-ish family could be content on the fruits of our local foodshed,” Kingsolver said she wrote the book to show others how they could do their part at trying the decrease the amount of fossil fuels involved in the food-distribution process.

If every family in the United States ate just one meal a week prepared with local ingredients, they would save 1.1 million barrels of oil, Hopp said. He also estimated that 20 percent to 40 percent of the money spent on food goes toward distribution costs alone, because the food production network is so widespread.

“Something you ate in the last few days came from the other side of the planet,” Hopp said in a May interview.

He set out to reverse this trend and build the local economy in October 2007, when he opened The Harvest Table, a restaurant that serves only locally raised foods. Hopp opened the eatery as a way to oppose and negate plans by Love’s Travel Stops and Country Stores to build a truck stop at the Meadowview exit on Interstate 81. The controversial truck stop has yet to be approved by county officials.

“Businesses like that drain all the money out of a community,” Hopp said of the truck stop. He added that while the business may generate some jobs, it would likely send most of its revenue to the company’s headquarters in Oklahoma. But while he wanted to really fight the truck stop, Hopp knew he first had to build the local economy in some way that would absorb the jobs the truck stop might create. This led to the Meadowview Farmers’ Guild, which features a general store that sells jewelry, clothing and other items produced by local artisans. Right next door in Meadowview’s town square is the Harvest Table, which was a natural extension of the project because of the region’s agricultural heritage, he said.

“Our goal was to start with what we could start with,” Hopp said, adding that the restaurant began serving meals made with ingredients farmers brought by themselves, what he could grow on his own farm, or what he and the restaurant’s staff could find at the local farmers market.

These beginnings grew into a series of contracts Hopp and his staff worked out with some of their best producers. In each agreement, the farmers commit to supplying the restaurant with a certain amount of fruits, vegetables or meat each season and Hopp agrees to pay his suppliers a price between what he’d be able to get from a traditional food distributor and what they’d be able to get from a farmers market.
Last year, Hopp said, the restaurant “channeled” $200,000 to the community in terms of the money it spent buying food and what the farmers spent in terms of hiring extra labor or buying new equipment to meet the Harvest Table’s demands.

Since Hopp opened his restaurant, other eateries – including the Troutdale Dining Room and the Troutdale Bistro in Bristol, Tenn., as well as the Wildflour Bakery in Abingdon – have picked up on the idea of serving local foods.

Like Hopp, chefs at these restaurants serve locally produced foods because they want to support the local economy and build a relationship with their producers. They also said the produce they get through local sources is simply fresher and tastes better than what they get from normal food distributors because it has not traveled 1,500 miles.

Big money

If every Virginia household spent just $10 per week on locally raised foods, it would have a total economic impact on the state of $1.65 billion per year, according to a study conducted by the Virginia Cooperative Extension office, which is an educational outreach program of Virginia Tech and Virginia State University. Southwest Virginia alone would see $137.9 million per year, according to the study.

“It’s got a good potential for economic development,” said Community Viability Specialist Jonah Fogel, who works with the extension office to develop and study the state’s local foods market, which he said has experienced “tremendous growth” over the past few years.

Across the state, Fogel said the number of farmers markets has more than doubled. The number of community-supported agriculture programs, where farms sell shares of their crops to people and make weekly deliveries of food in exchange, has taken off as well, he said.

The market for local foods has grown so fast that Fogel admitted his office has a hard time keeping track. One sign is the fact that in 2007 there were about 300 Virginia farms, farmers markets and other businesses that either sold or served local produce and meats listed on the Web site, http://www.localharvest.org.

On Friday, this Web site had 613 Virginia listings.
Just like the state’s local foods business, sales of local produce for a nearby grocery store chain have skyrocketed as well. In 2005, KVAT Food Stores Produce Manager Mike Tipton said his company, which owns the Food City grocery chain, decided it was time to stop “walking softly” with its sales of local produce. That year, the company beefed up its marketing efforts to sell produce, the number of farmers it bought from and the amount of produce it planned to sell, he said.

This extra push paid off because between 2005 and 2006, Food City’s local produce sales jumped from $3 million to more than $4.5 million.

The company sold $6 million worth of local produce in 2008, Tipton said, and $500,000 worth of strawberries alone this spring, even though the season was short due to rainy weather.
“It’s been fantastic,” KVAT President Steve Smith said, adding that 20 percent of the produce his company sells in July and August – the height of the local growing season – comes from local sources.But while Food City’s commitment to serving local produce has its benefits, Smith said it’s also had challenges. Working out contracts with local farmers takes a lot more work than simply picking up the phone and calling California and Florida to order food. It’s also more expensive, Smith said, adding that while local produce can sometimes cost more than what he gets from traditional sources, he has to price the fruits and vegetables so they are competitive with both the produce his competitors sell and the non-local produce he sells himself.

“We actually see a little less profit on locally grown produce,” Smith said. “But that’s OK.”

Cost also is a factor for Hopp, who estimates that his restaurant spends two to three times more money buying local produce than it would spend on food bought through traditional means. He hopes that as the demand for local produce increases, the supply will increase and the price eventually drop.
Even the original Locavores dealt with the increased cost of eating locally when they set out on their challenge, Van Wing said. They often asked themselves whether it was more important to eat food produced by people they knew and trusted or to eat what was cheap and readily available.

“You make choices every time you go to the supermarket,” she said. “You just need to make the best choices that you can if you can afford to make them.”
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