How Local Is Local?

Speaking of local food:  How do you know your "local" food is really local?  If you grow it yourself, you know.  If you buy it from a farmer, you know.  If you buy it through a CSA or at a farmers' market, you can feel pretty confident, I guess.  If you buy it at a grocery, you maybe can't be so confident.  And when you buy it at a restaurant — say someone says the asparagus or beef in their stir-fry is local — how do you know?  Eventually, you have to trust someone, but as the chain gets longer and longer, the web of trust extending from your mouth to the land — that local dirt — gets more and more tenuous.  If Frito-Lay buys potatoes from someone 300 miles from their factory, then ships their potato chips another 300 miles to you, is that local?

In my opinion, this is the organic problem all over again.  The "USDA Organic" definition has already been causing backlash for a while, and it's still going on.  It's probably resulted in more use of terms like "biodynamic," and maybe to a lesser extent in the interest in truly local food, and in the web of trust it implies.

Suggestions, O Gentle Readers?  Whom do you trust, and how do you do it?  Are we reduced to that supposed quotation from Stalin: "Trust, and verify"?  

Comments

[anonymous]

Two words: Local Yogurt

[t. rev]

I think it's a mistake to worry about coherent standards for organic or biodynamic or fuzzykittyluvluvluvdoubleplusgood food; it's all rooted in turn of the century German nature occultism. In other words, it's pseudo-religious nonsense, and should be handled and certified by fully private bands of credulous fools, the way kosher and halal foods are currently certified.

[FRITZ]

plant a garden

full of tomatoes

cook some pasta

go out to the garden

pluck those ripe tomatoes

make sauce outta em

spread it over the pasta

wash it down with a glass of red vino

kick back and know you ate what you grew

everything else is ... well HMMMMM

[Joe Eater]

anonymous - When I first heard of Local Yogurt, I actually took their name to mean that they were local in contrast to being a chain (e.g., not Goodberry's, TCBY, or the like). Of course, it would be nice if they made their own yogurt, but my understanding is that even though it's not difficult to make yogurt, it's *very* hard to get whatever the certifications are that N.C. requires. :( By the way, I've been told that Chapel Hill Creamery makes their own yogurt. You can get it at the Durham Farmers' Market.

T.Rev - Exactly. And part of my writing this was to raise the question of whether it's time for such a private enterprise to start. I think some restaurateurs feel trod upon by others making claims of "local" that don't seem to be true. But how do you expose that, or make it hard to make errant claims in the first place?