For those of us fortunate enough to have access to a garden and freshly grown vegetables, now is the time to fully appreciate local food, Sean Connelly writes.
You can't get more local than pulling a carrot out of the ground and eating it.
Local food often serves as shorthand for a range of different goals. For some people, local food means more environmentally-friendly food. For others, it means supporting small producers and family farms. For others, it signifies tastier and more nutritious food, organic or ethical production.
However, these attributes are not necessarily local in nature.
Support for local food is often used as a strategy against an increasingly globalised agro-industrial food system that generates a series of negative social, economic and environmental outcomes.
We often assume that local is better, but there is nothing inherently "good'' about local.
I was vividly reminded of this fact a few years ago while driving across the Canadian prairies.
As we approached the small town of Brooks, Alberta, we came across massive feedlots on either side of the highway with thousands upon thousands of cattle.
These feedlots (or confined feeding operations to use the industry term) are where beef cattle spend their last 200 days before reaching their target weight. They then make their way a short distance down the road to the slaughterhouse.
The Brooks slaughterhouse is one of the largest in Canada and employs about 2000 people in the slaughter (or processing) of up to 5000 cattle per day to serve the North American market.
An E. coli outbreak resulting from food safety violations led to human illness, the recall of 4000 tonnes of beef and the temporary shutdown of the plant in 2012.
It is not an image that comes to mind when I imagine local food.
This is meat production on a massive scale, but for the people of Brooks, it is also local food.
Local can be good or bad, healthy or unhealthy, ethical or unethical, small-scale or large. Often, the term local food is used and abused to achieve certain objectives.
So what does this mean for proponents of local food?
Do the underlying attributes assigned to local food in Dunedin match those attributes of a just and sustainable food system? The answer, of course, depends.
Proponents of local food often emphasise the benefits that arise from reducing the physical distance and the number of steps or processing between field and plate.
These benefits include reducing transportation impacts, improving freshness, taste and nutrition of food, supporting local economies and greater access to information about the food production process (i.e. organic, fertiliser and pesticide use, worker conditions and animal welfare).
In many instances, these benefits do arise. But they are not automatic.
It is useful to think carefully about the ways "local'' might be used as a strategy to advance certain goals and understand the many different underlying meanings and values associated with use of the term local food.
Proponents of a just and sustainable food system that use local food as a strategy to achieve their objectives need to be clear that not just any local food will do.
And just like food, we can't take local for granted.
• Sean Connelly is a lecturer in the University of Otago Department of Geography.
