If we can’t eat there, we can’t live there. But beyond that obvious truth, there are a number of ways that society benefits from local food and vice versa.
Resilience
Food that comes from afar is subject to disruption from several sources. With stored grain worldwide at historic lows, it doesn’t take as much to cause a disruption. Spikes in fuel costs cause a surge in faraway food costs, which hits the poor the hardest. A country that supplies our food could decide they don’t like us and refuse to sell us their goods, like OPEC did with oil in 1973. Trucker strikes can disrupt the flow of food as well. As more of the world becomes desert because of climate change, current sources of food can dry up, and climate change destroys crops in other ways, including increased storms and flooding. And currency exchange rates can imperil food as well; a recent drop in the value of a pound caused grocery prices to go up 40% all across England. Food grown in the neighborhood or in the countryside around town is still susceptible to weather risks, of course, but is nearly immune to the other risks of faraway food. And if a local crop fails due to weather we can always buy food from far away, but if food from afar fails or gets really expensive and we’re not set up to grow food nearby, there’s a good chance of people going hungry.
Taste
Food that must endure two to three weeks of jostling in the back of a truck from Central or South America to get to our grocery shelves would be reduced to a pulpy mess if agribusiness used heirloom varieties like the ones your grandmother or great-grandmother grew from seed she had saved from the year before. When the food giants expanded beyond the US border looking for sources of more and more of our fruits and vegetables, they solved this problem by genetically engineering their produce to be unusually tough. If you doubt this, slice open a grocery store tomato and one your grandmother grew from seeds your family has saved down through the years and see for yourself. But it’s not just the toughness; it’s also the fact that most grocery store tomatoes taste almost completely alike. That’s because there’s only a small number of genetically engineered varieties compared to the countless local varieties. So the local food isn’t just more tender; it’s more interesting as well.
Nutrition
Topsoil around the world that has been burned out