Burlington Free Press EDITORIAL: Advantages, price of eating local

Published: Wednesday, August 15, 2007

Taking a meal that includes the harvest from your backyard garden is one of the true treats of a Vermont summer. The harvest is especially sweet because with the growing season short, fresh, local fruits and vegetables truly are fleeting pleasures.

That alone is reason enough to consider seeking out locally produced food for the dinner table. But this is one of those activities best left to those who have an inclination toward spending the extra time and money involved.

Any investigation into total food self-sufficiency in Vermont is mostly an academic exercise. Common sense says that it won't happen, at least not under our current economy, not to mention federal laws that forbid closing of a state borders to products from other states.

But the exercise raises interesting and even worthy questions about our daily habits and what we've come to accept as the norm. How "normal" is it to have fresh strawberries when the ground is frozen outside or to start each day with a glass of juice from oranges, a fruit that would have a hard time surviving the local climate?

Those kinds of questions take on an immediacy when a half-gallon of store-brand orange juice (not from concentrate) is creeping up toward $3, thanks in no small part to the cost of hauling the juice from California or Florida where the oranges are grown. In fact, much of the food found in local supermarkets has traveled 1,500 miles or more.

In some ways, the eat- local movement brings to mind the old mother's warning, "Don't put that in your mouth. You don't know where it's been." But the alternative should not be to find ways to grow oranges in Vermont, but to find an alternative to orange juice that's more local and in season.

Advocates of the local food movement say that you can't simply look at the price tag on the items in supermarkets to understand the total economic cost of the nation's food policy. Americans enjoy cheap food thanks to the efficiencies of large-scale agriculture and federal policy that subsidizes food production. Marie Antoinette can tell you something about the political pitfalls of ignoring the cries of a hungry mob.

Eating local should be a personal choice based on how willing or able a person is to pay a higher price in order to mitigate the hidden economic and environmental costs. Eating local is also a lot easier to stomach if your tastes run toward what's grown in Vermont. It's a lot harder for people whose cultural or ethnic roots are in a different region or another continent. Then, again, for many people, the priority is to get the food as cheaply as possible.

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