Just because it's local is it good for you and the world?
Excitement about the local food movement sometimes soars into the romantic stratosphere, with visions of sugarplum fairies dancing on rooftops and backyards, scattering organic rutabagas to eager schoolchildren while neighbours gather in community gardens singing ring-around-the-rosy. That's the way it looks to some of the hard-working corporate farmers toughing it out in world export markets.
At a recent Food Summit conference in Toronto, organized by the Conference Board of Canada, an evening debate went off in search of reality, pitting two teams of debaters on the topic, "Local food: good for us and good for the world."
Without getting into who said what, it soon became clear that "local food" is a clumsy marker for an amazing array of initiatives that are not just about doing what the corporate food system does so well: providing Canadians with year-round access to a great variety of safe, quality food at low prices (relative to income) never seen before in history.
No reasonable person is going to pretend that we can replace all that with local food.
Even Alicia Smith and James McKinnon, Vancouver inventors of the 100-mile diet, never intended that everyone should live according to their fascinating experiment. I don't know anyone who wants all local, all the time.
Give up guacamole and espresso? Never! Trade has many benefits, as B.C.'s agricultural industry proudly demonstrates, depending on foreign buyers for our fish, cranberries, blueberries and wines.
But the local food movement is code for many things that aren't just about being local.
The full ecology of benefits credited to local food makes policy-makers drool: more fresh, more nutritious food, more prosperous local farmers, healthier eating, fewer fat kids, less diabetes, lower health care costs, safer neighbourhoods, more beautiful streets, fewer hungry people, more exercise, lower GHGs, more resilience to climate change, safer food, less soil erosion, happier animals, less pollution and rutabagas forever.
Like our food itself, this revolution in growing and eating needs more honest, transparent labelling. Whether it's called the good food movement, the sustainable food movement, the organic food movement, the equitable food movement or the urban food revolution, it's underway everywhere. There are no fewer than five recent books, including my own, on this topic with the word "revolution" in the title. There are also five different organizations working feverishly on a national food policy for Canada, from the Conference Board to the People's Food Movement.
The debate in Toronto melted down, Canadian style, into a mushy agreement that both views had merit. No, local food doesn't always have a smaller ecological footprint. Yes, it is more likely to deliver health than profit. Loblaw executive chairman Galen Weston was right: it's about balance.
You could also say it's about going back to the junction where we detoured away from sustainable eating and food production into a world of plentiful, profitable, harmful food. The local food movement, or whatever you want to call it, is taking us "past forward" down a new path-not a moment too soon. n
PETER LADNER is a former Vancouver city councilor and author of The Urban Food Revolution: Changing the Way We Feed Cities. He writes a weekly column for Business in Vancouver.
