Buy Fresh, Buy Local in the Rockies

We all understand "Buy Fresh," but let's look at the rest of the slogan more carefully. "Buy Fresh" means "Buy Local," because only local produce can provide that special quality of just harvested food, delivered promptly to your table.

Long distance foods have come a long way (so to speak) from the days when tomatoes were picked green hundreds of miles away, to ripen – if you were lucky – on the truck or in the supermarket display. Lately, TV ads rave about the availability of "fresh" fruit from Chile, a journey of 5,000 miles. Peaches from Chile, picked unripe or bred to stay ripe-looking for a week or more, are as "fresh" as you would be after a rough ride across country in a produce truck and then a transcontinental flight.

The primary beneficiary of "fresh produce" from global markets is the chain of middlemen who recoup their transportation and packaging costs and then some. They want to sell you peaches... anybody's peaches. Move product. It is a process that takes the heart out of food, the soul and spirit that makes it more than "processed food product."

Consumers pay a hidden cost for global "freshness." If a peach must be shipped 5,000 miles to your table, it will be engineered genetically for travel not flavor. Breeding for travel is one reason that strawberries from your back yard taste different than those flown in from California. Yours are different kinds of strawberries, bred for flavor, not for the hardiness that helps them survive their last journey.

"Fresh" means "just harvested." It doesn't mean "modified to look, feel, or taste as if it might have been harvested recently." The peach from Elbert County took a few hours to reach your grocer. If you have the good fortune to have a neighbor with peach trees, that may be the only way you can beat the local orchard peach for freshness.

Is fresh, local food more expensive? It doesn't have to be. It costs more than $1,000 to fly a fresh, 200-pound business executive from Santiago, Chile, to Colorado. A peach weighs about 6 ounces, three to a pound. Putting two hundred pounds of peaches (roughly 500 of them) on the seat next to that executive would cost about $2 per peach. Peaches probably get a better rate than he did, but the cost of flying a peach from Chile to Colorado is a significant portion of what you pay for when the clerk rings up your purchase.

Even produce grown in the United States faces a freshness challenge. Typically, fruits and vegetables are picked as much as a week before arriving at their destination, and that destination averages 1500 miles from the farm where the produce was picked. Soaring fuel prices are built into the cost of that long-distance produce; environmental damage is an intangible cost as well.

Locally grown food is fresh and delicious and less destructive to the environment.

Locally grown foods are neighborly foods. Buying locally means knowing your local farmer. Unlike a bag of spinach blended from many locations (and the bottom line is, you don’t know where it's been), local spinach has a face, the face and reputation of the family that grew, cared for, and harvested it. If another country has failed or bypassed the regulations for imported food, how do you know if the anonymous produce in your refrigerator is risky? Without strict country-of-origin labeling, you have no way of knowing where your food came from... unless you buy locally. Buying locally lets you choose to buy from growers you know and trust.

Local foods mean local controls on safety. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, unsafe food causes 5,000 deaths a year in the US and more than 70 million incidents of sickness. As "Did the FDA Inspect Your Peach?" illustrates, imported food has meant lower prices with the risk of poisons like melamine in your dog food, salmonella-tainted cantaloupe, unsanitary seafood from around the world, DDT on your mangoes. The FDA actually tests less than 1% of imported food, and they are your only national line of defense. Inexplicably, as the federal administration forces imported food into the domestic markets, they are also planning to reduce the number of test facilities. Local food sellers are subject to local food regulations, typically similar to those regulating restaurants and grocery markets. More important, local food sellers are "self-policing." Unlike the global and long-distance entrepreneur, the local sellers' customer is the "end user," not a link in some chain of middlemen. The local food seller can't afford to disappoint customers with shoddy, unsafe merchandise, and more to the point, they are friends and neighbors.

Choosing to buy locally has another broad-reaching benefit. It helps ensure the survival of family farming. Of the $3.59 the grocer charges for a gallon of milk (statistics compiled from a 2005 USDA report), the dairy farmer gets barely a third. The dairy farmer sees $1.50 of what you pay for a pound of cheddar cheese. The produce farmer gets 28 cents of the dollar you pay for a head of lettuce, less than half of the 50 cents you pay for a pound of carrots. Less than 20% of your total food dollar goes to the food producer. With some farm products, the "profit" is nearly a negative value, barely covering the cost of production. By stepping around the middlemen or reducing their role, both the farmer and the consumer maximize their transaction. The farmer makes a living wage, and the consumer gets a better product at a better value. If your grocer buys locally, you still get this mutual benefit to some degree.

Buying locally supports more than the individual farming family. When you shop locally, you offer a direct benefit to your neighbors and community. The growers, the harvester, the truckers are all living, being paid, and spending wages in your home town. If you shop at a grocery store that buys locally, your patronage benefits the community even more broadly. In a rural community – as in any community – local spending is crucial to economic vitality.