Local [food] doesn’t use nearly the petroleum…

I hear this statement repeated often, but it’s usually unsubstantiated and based on some very shaky math. For example, see this critique at Salon. Do you have any information that definitively shows growing food locally to be the most energy-efficient method?

… and tastes better.

Come on, that’s wholly subjective. If anything, local produce simply has a greater range of tastes – from the exceptionally good to the stomach-rending bad. Personally, I’ve tasted both.

And even though they aren’t all certified organic, many times the small local farmers are pretty close.

Considering how weak the organic standards are, “pretty close” offers no comfort.

Unilever may be a huge hypocrite here. But they may actually locally produce many of their products. I know the soap I had in Africa (made by Unilever) was made their locally, it wasn’t even put in a package.

However, I fail to see how eating mayonnaise is really going to help that situation. Let’s face it, making mayonnaise is a highly industrial process, one that requires building a big old factory, storage and shipping facilities on land that could probably be used otherwise. It would probably be much more beneficial to buy local eggs and then actually prepare it at home yourself. A process that isn’t as difficult as Unilever would probably like you to think it is.

I also hate the whole concept of eating locally to Unilever apparently means anything grown anywhere in Canada, but unfortunately eating cherries from BC is not actually doing anything to protect the farmland in Southern Ontario where I do live.

Absolutely important points to consider. I specialized in the sociology of agriculture, and I’m all for changing a lot of food policies (particularly the effect of water subsidies in arid areas, etc.) particularly as they directly improve producers’ lives.

But last year I read Barbara Kingsolver’s book on eating locally called “Animal, Vegetable, Mineral,” and I just thought, people aren’t going to starve through winter (which can be awfully long in places like Ontario) so they only eat stuff that comes from very close by. They just aren’t.

The other issue is that there’s often an assumption that local automatically = organic. Here in Vegas, I can get “local” stuff, if by local you take a generous 200 mile radius that includes part of California. But it’s not organic or in any way different from what I could buy at the grocery store. So in a situation where I can’t get both…which is the “better” option–to buy (relatively) local produce, or to buy organics from Whole Foods?

I’ve gone with the organics, just b/c twice this summer my 5-year-old nephew and 3-year-old niece were doused with agrichemicals from aerial spraying nearby and it pisses me off, and buying organic made me feel just a little bit better.

The point is, there are lots of things that may or may not make local agriculture efficient or realistic. There are also other considerations that, as a farm kid whose family still raises beef, I find compelling, such as if local purchasing provides producers with a halfway decent standard of living by cutting out middlemen.

Particularly, the Northwest US appears to have few cattle relative to population, while the Midwest appears to have a relative surplus. Meanwhile, Saskatchewan and Alberta seem to have a relative surplus in Canada, but the rest of the country seems to have few to no cattle stocks. If this were the case, it might be possible to send Midwestern cattle to eastern Canada and simultaneously import western Canadian cattle to the US Northwest, for a net efficiency gain.

I am ill-informed about the particulars of cattle markets; still, it seems within reason that large contiguous countries can have productive mutual trade in the same commodity.

The beef industry is just the commodity I’m most familiar with, but there are lots of similar situations in which countries are shipping the same product back and forth, often at the exact same time (not to even out supply over the course of a year).

Similar discrepancies between where food can be produced and where people actually live doom the “local food” movement to irrelevancy. Eating local used to mean that one was too poor for anything else. Now it means that some people will pay any price – and endorse any farming practice, no matter how inefficient – to get the foods they want from a nearby producer. The people who buy local food do so because it makes them feel better about themselves, so it is only natural for Unilever to try to make money off of this sentiment. The company is likely not concerned about “people really beginning to eat locally” because such a scenario is improbable.

Also, tea doesn’t grow where I live, so if I want to drink it, then it must be imported…It’s the original global product, having been traded for centuries.