Locavore Movement
What is the locavore movement?
You may see the title and not only ask what a locavore is but do I really care? You should!
The locavore movement is made up by a group of individuals who try to promote local agriculture by only consuming and purchasing locally grown or raised food sources. The locavore movement has been picking up “steam” in recent years especially in the San Francisco Bay area. Some locavores go by the 100-mile radius rule where they don’t consume or purchase anything if it isn’t produced within 100 miles of where they live. Locavores believe in this practice for many different reasons. One reason is freshness because vegetables are at their freshness in the first 24 hours after being picked. Another reason is for energy conservation for the reason that many foods that are grown in one area may picked and shipped to a distribution center before being sent right back to the same area where it was grown to be put on supermarket shelves. This causes unnecessary waste of fossil fuels that cause even more damage to our environment.
Being a locavore means having a heightened awareness of what’s good for us as individuals and as an efficient community. People who live by the locavore theory also view it as means of staying organic. Staying with local foods and eating organic means the less likelihood of farmers and ranchers using adverse additives in their product as a means of producing faster and preserving longer. The communities that embrace the movement along with organic ideology have just as much concern about what is going into their body as what is going into the ecosystem around them. By doing this they believe they are protecting the soil in which their food is grown in, keeping pollution out of the water sources, and many other destructive ways of farming.
I don’t think the effect on our industry is that large as of right now. If the locavore movement continues to grow in popularity the effects could become huge. If the movement gets its way I think we would see a lot less big-box-stores in our communities, and a return to smaller, family owned stores and farmers markets.
Though, we don’t fully know how the lovacore movement will affect our industry as of now, it’s not hard to see where things will continue to go without them. I strongly believe the food distributors would continue to grow and local farmers and ranchers would continue to decrease if not totally be gone because of finding less expensive places to grow their product. There would be a certain loss of locally “grown with pride” mentality from areas that work very hard to harvest their resources.
Written By: Sous Chef Daniel Phillips
