Locavore Movement Essay

In recent years, with rising concerns about sustainability and health, the locavore movement has been gaining steam. Locavores strive to eat only locally-grown and locally-sourced food, often only looking at food within a one-hundred mile radius of their home. They claim that by eating locally, they cut down on transportation emissions and encourage environmental sustainability. However, this local model is not as sharp as it seems. The locavore movement is a flawed way to approach sustainability, as it fails to take in the most important factors of sustainability and is largely impractical for huge segments of the population. Instead, the sustainability movement should look towards farming and processing factors to determine the viability

The reality is, the majority of people do not live near very many farms—According to Paul Roberts, eighty percent of U.S. residents reside in urban centers, primarily near the coast, meaning that there is unlikely to be an abundance of local food (Source F). This means that those looking to become locavores need to either live in suburban or rural areas near agricultural centers or expand their definition of “local”, which makes the locavore movement meaningless anyways. This means that the locavore movement overwhelmingly favors those of higher socioeconomic status. Those with lower incomes tend to be concentrated in urban areas, meaning that local food is inaccessible to them. In addition, local food tends to be much more expensive due to the lack of government subsidization and the lack of industrial techniques such as monoculture that lower the cost of production. This means that the locavore movement runs the risk of excluding those who cannot afford the costs of local food. In addition, locavorism changes the distribution of money, channeling it to wealthier areas. As mentioned before, those who live in wealthier areas are more likely to buy into the locavore movement due to location and their abundance of economic resources. Buying local means that wealth stays within the local economy—according to Jennifer Maiser, it puts twice as much income in the local economy (Source A). While at first, this may seem great, it actually means that locavorism concentrates wealth more heavily in certain areas, creating pockets of wealth in locavore areas and plunging areas with residents that can’t afford local food deeper into poverty. This also means that farmers in parts of the world where the locavore movement isn’t as popular suffer. As McWilliams mentions, a large portion of our non-locally sourced food comes from impoverished areas in