La Vida Local

Does eating Minnesota-grown food truly benefit the planet and the local economy? One man finds such claims difficult to swallow.

Photo by Shannon Brady (Illustration)

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I had my favorites. I liked the Beauty Heart radishes (dubbed watermelon radishes because of their green exteriors and shocking red insides) and the tangy Stravecchio cheese, both from Wisconsin. And I loved the grass-fed round steak from Thousand Hills Cattle Company in Cannon Falls, mainly for the way Susan prepared it—marinated in (nonlocal) soy sauce, honey, garlic, shallots, and locally grown Thai peppers, and then pan-seared.

Not only was I satisfying my own appetite with these wonderful local foods, but if I were to believe the claims made for buying local, I was also supporting family farmers. But was it more important to me to support a Minnesota farmer than, say, a migrant worker and his family in California? Or a trucker hauling goods on I-80? Or my friend Gene, who works at Rainbow Foods?

Pro-local literature also told me that buying from nearby farmers helps build a strong local economy—even if I have to pay extra. By this logic, the money I spent with local producers eddied about in the local economy for several transactions, benefiting my neighbors and, not incidentally, enriching myself. Thus, I stood to gain, even if I got less for my dollar. This entry from a blog promoting local food was typical: “We must be willing to pay a small price premium for the overwhelming benefit of keeping money circulating in the local community rather than shunting most of it off to a corporate office out of state.”

Even assuming that I and my neighbors are more deserving than, say, farmers in Texas or business owners in Chicago, is spending local really the way to build a local economy? I was suspicious on a number of counts. For one, our economy is not very local anymore. If I give a buck to Farmer Jones for a bag of sweet corn, where does it go? For gas, for utilities, for his mortgage. It flies out of the local community pretty fast. We here in Minnesota are, after all, net exporters of food. What if the rest of the nation rejected our products in favor of local goods?

I asked Arthur J. Rolnick, senior vice president and director of research at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis: Does paying a bit more for local products really contribute to prosperity, local or otherwise?

“From a particular producer’s point of view, it might look like that makes some economic sense—the more people who buy my product here, the more successful I am, the more people I can hire,” Rolnick says. “[But] it’s just bad economics. We know that economic trade is a cornerstone to any successful economy. So, for example, if buying local was good for St. Paul, I assume buying local is good for Minneapolis. So all the agricultural goods we sell overseas, if they start buying local, we can’t sell them over there.

“If you look at the big picture, trade is the key,” says Rolnick. “If people bought higher price goods here and stopped buying in Wisconsin, or China, in the big picture you would actually see economic stagnation.”

During our experiment, Susan and I argued. We even fought. (Food is a passionate business.) Our fights came down to this: First, that I was pig-headed and argumentative. (These were not new discoveries.) Second, Susan said, I was ignoring the fact that “local” is really a code word for a lot of other values—high-quality food, small farms, animal welfare, environmental stewardship. “It isn’t just about local food,” she said.

Local food proponents often say that buying local helps you to know the farmer, how he treats his animals, how he cares for the land. But is that realistic? A local farm isn’t necessarily a well-managed one. Walk along any farmland stream in Minnesota and before long you’re likely to see eroded banks where cows have grazed too long, and murky water that’s cloudy with pesticide runoff from corn and soybean fields.

I tend to put more trust in food that is certified. In our stash of local groceries, several items were certified by the Food Alliance Midwest, so I called the St. Paul office to find out what the seals meant. “We define sustainability in a broad way,” alliance director Jim Ennis told me. The organization consulted with universities in Minnesota, Oregon, and Washington to develop standards for farms and ranches that include: providing safe and fair working conditions for employees, treating animals humanely, reducing pesticide use, conserving soil and water, and protecting wildlife habitat. Those are all things that I can endorse. They are values for which I would pay extra. But that certification has little to do with “local.”

My most favorite meal began with a deer I shot last fall. The venison was local food of the highest order, procured just three miles from our cabin—though its “localness” diminished steadily as it traveled 150 miles to our St. Paul home. Susan sautéed cubes of the meat with bacon, shallot, garlic, local mushrooms, and then braised it with wine from Saint Croix Vineyards. The side dish was polenta of local corn meal. Fried cabbage, green beans, and red pepper with garlic and shallots rounded out the meal.

After two weeks, the experiment ended. As foods from all over the world began to replace the locally grown items in our cupboards, I drew two conclusions: First, eating local, even in the dead of winter, was both feasible and enjoyable. Second, it still didn’t make sense to pass up nonlocal foods.

I had come to appreciate the miracle of a distribution system that wraps the world, offering me a pear from China or a tangerine from Spain, like a kiss of summer, even as snow blankets my yard.

I would make a point of looking for local food for only one reason, and it had nothing to do with food miles, the local economy, or the family farm. “It’s cultural. It’s psychological,” Ben Senauer told me. “We want to connect with our food. It’s not just another industrial product. It’s something we put in our bodies.”

For those very reasons, I expect Susan and I will continue to buy pork from the hog farm we pass as we drive to our cabin. I enjoy watching the free-range pigs jostle at the trough, like the squealers on my grandfather’s farm a half-century ago. We’ll continue to burn extra gas to run to the farmers’ market—because we like to see the produce of the moment, fresh-picked and just trucked into the city (no matter how inefficiently). And this fall, I will lug my rifle to the woods again, because I love to hunt. I don’t mind the killing, and I have come to find satisfaction in carving, wrapping, and packing the red muscle—meat whose provenance I understand.

None of this guarantees that my food will be tastier, more nutritious, or better for the local economy and the planet. But I like the sense of reaching toward the source of my food, whether it is on a local farm or deep in the woods or at a busy market. To do so gives me pleasure. That is the best reason, and as far as I can tell, the only reason, to eat local.

Greg Breining is a frequent contributor to Minnesota Monthly.