Plate to Plate

Maybe 2009 will be remembered as the year Local broke. Today’s New York Times certainly thinks so, with a two-page article discussing the co-opting of “buy local” marketing strategies by industrial agriculture.

Frito-Lay, the potato chip maker, will begin airing commercials featuring the farmers who grow the potatoes used in its chips, and ConAgra — by the way, could there be a name less evocative of bucolic farms and toiling with the earth? Why, yes, there could be, and it’s ChemGro — maker of crappy Hunt’s canned tomatoes, has been promoting the fact that most of its tomatoes are grown within 120 miles of its processing plant.

Jessica Prentice, the gal who invented the catchy term “locavore” — which, I can only imagine, prompted marketing execs from coast to coast to begin foaming at the mouth and rubbing their hands together barbarously when they heard it — has this to say:

“The local foods movement is about an ethic of food that values reviving small scale, ecological, place-based, and relationship-based food systems … Large corporations peddling junk food are the exact opposite of what this is about.”

I live in western New England, where the growing season passes in the blink of an eye. In the winter, I buy some of my food in the supermarket — even, sometimes, canned tomatoes — just like everyone else in the country. Will I buy tomatoes which are processed “local” to where they’re grown, even if where they’re grown is on the other side of the country? Probably not. Do I think this type of marketing is sleazy and misleading? Absolutely. Am I surprised? Not really.

Even if I opt out of this particular system — let’s say I can my own tomatoes this summer — there’s no doubt that someone will buy those “local” canned tomatoes. And maybe, just maybe, some of those someones, after having read some back-of-the-can marketing copy about the verdant green hills where bushels of plump red tomatoes grow, will find a way to the real food, at a farmers’ market, or a CSA, or a roadside stand during a drive in the countryside.

One does not emerge, fully formed, a die-hard locavore after a lifetime of the green-tinted aisles and towering shelves of the mega-market. One has to start somewhere. Seven short years ago I was a Tofutti-craving, cheese-eschewing, margarine-using vegan. Then I got a job outside of Union Square, in Manhattan, and fell in love with the farmers’ market. Are highly processed, dubiously “local” food products the best place to start? Not by a long shot. But I wonder — and even somewhat cruelly hope — if big agriculture’s marketing folly could backfire a little, sending shoppers, consciousnesses raised just a little bit, out of supermarkets and onto farms.

What does “eating locally” mean to you? How did you start?