An Urban's Rural View

The local-food movement is pushing ahead in an unexpected place: Alaska.

Capitalizing on a generous school-lunch program and an initiative that doubles the value of food stamps at farmers' markets, activists are making progress in encouraging Alaskan farmers to grow more of the state's food.

According to the New York Times (http://tiny.cc/…), "Alaska is now 16th in the nation -- up 11 spots in the last two years -- in the Locavore Index created by a Vermont-based local-food advocacy group." The state, the Times says, "recently got its first food co-op, based here and offering 50% locally grown produce in the summer to its 2,600 owner-members."

Good for the Alaskans. Good for the locavores. In a world where hunger is all too common, any effort to grow food deserves applause.

Ignore the local-food activists' dubious claims to environmental superiority, which incorrectly assume that food miles are the only variable in the greenhouse-gas equation. Ignore, too, the activists' gratuitous attacks on those who provide the great majority of the nation's food.

Annoying as its advocates sometimes are, local produce is good. It's good if for no other reason than it's fresh and nutritious. Growing food deserves applause.

All that said, this is still Alaska we're talking about. The state, the Times says, imports 95% of its food. The story doesn't indicate whether Alaska used to import a higher percentage; the main statistical evidence of the swing toward local food is that Locavore Index. So let's take a look at it.

According to its creator, a Vermont-based local-food advocacy group called Strolling of the Heifers, "The index is based on the number of farmers markets, the number of consumer-supported agriculture operations (CSAs), the number of food hubs -- all compared on a per-capita basis -- and the percentage of each state's school districts with active Farm-to-School programs" (http://tiny.cc/…).

Sounds reasonable. But glancing at the rankings this method of calculation yields, what leaps out is the position of California -- No. 37 out of the 50 states. How can that be, you may ask? According to USDA (http://tiny.cc/…), no state comes close to California's $45 billion in agricultural output (Iowa's second with $32 billion, Alaska last with $31 million).

Now the index adjusts for population-size differences and California, with 38.3 million people, is the most populous state. But even on a per capita basis California's agricultural output, at close to $1,200 per person per year, is a hair higher than that of the state that ranks highest on the index.

Which, coincidentally or not, is Vermont.

Could the explanation be that California is exporting most of what it grows while Vermont consumes its output locally? Possibly. But it's easy to imagine a different explanation, one that calls into question exactly what the Locavore Index is measuring: Isn't it possible that in an agriculturally bounteous state that also has cities so large and sprawling they defy being cobwebbed with farmers markets and CSAs, people buy their local food in grocery stores?

If that's what's happening, the Locavore Index wouldn't be gauging whether people are eating local, supposedly the objective of locavorism. It would be fetishizing particular distribution systems.

There's nothing wrong with famers' markets and CSAs, to be sure. They create markets for small farmers and give customers fresh, local food. But where food is produced locally by large farmers and distributed through supermarkets, is it any less local?

To put it a different way, if eating local food were really among your top priorities in life would you prefer to reside in Alaska, No. 16 on the Locavore Index, or California, No. 37?

California benefits from having big farmers who can provide local food to Californians through grocery chains. Alaska doesn't. Unlike California, Alaska doesn't have a climate that's conducive to agriculture, certainly not agriculture on a scale to serve the chain stores. Some years, the growing season barely lasts two months.

But in what growing season the state has, the days are long. As the Times put it, "With more than 22 hours of sunlight on the longest days of June, gardens in the far north can explode like gawky teens, sending out shoots, flowers and fruits in a compressed and frenzied summer cycle. Cruciferous vegetables, like cabbage and cauliflower, can get as big as basketballs."

And Alaska has one other thing: pride in its food-foraging tradition. It's a short step from eating "local" salmon, moose and seal to eating enormous "local" cauliflowers.

Sizing it all up, you can salute the Alaskans for making the best of the situation and be happy they're growing even a small bit more of their own food. Or you can join the activists in what the Times calls "an Alaska-sized debate" over issues like whether Alaksan-caught salmon is truly "local" if it's frozen and packed in a plant in Seattle.

The critical question for locavorism is whether, in the long run, it will focus on encouraging the growing and consuming of local food or pushing an anti-corporate, anti-large farmer economic and political agenda.

Urban Lehner can be reached at urbanity@hotmail.com

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