Pennsylvania is “Local” Produce? And why should I bother?
Amantai Farms is roughly 130 miles from Ditmas Park, tucked into the fertile, rolling hills of central Pennsylvania. Jorge and his family travel across three states to bring us their produce. How can we consider this local?
The benchmark for food to be labeled “local” is widely considered to be no more than 200-250 miles from point of production to point of consumption. While that distance isn’t exactly right around the corner, in the United States, the average agricultural product travels between 1,500 and 5,000 miles from the farm to the table, with the higher number representing primarily out-of-season food. When you take these distances into account, Pennsylvania is positively right around the corner! This is a concept known as “food miles,” first conceived by U.K professor Tim Lang in the early 1990s.
In short, the term refers to the distance food travels from production to consumer, and it is a factor used to assess the environmental impact of agriculture. Closer is better, right? After all, with distance comes transport costs and environmental impacts from the burning of additional fossil fuels, and that concerns us all.
It’s a simple concept, but it doesn’t tell the whole story. Updated methods of determining the environment impacts of food production take more factors into account, such as processing (by far the largest energy input), economies of scale in transport (transporting food by boat and boxcar is more efficient than by small truck), and agricultural inputs (fertilizer and pesticides). When all of these factors are taken into account, food miles cease to be the most important factor, and can, in fact, become a red herring in the argument, as there is not necessarily a strong correlation between transport and environmental impact.
So why buy local?
Think about a tomato grown in Arizona or Florida in the off-season. It’s picked, it’s packed for transport, and then it travels. And travels. And travels. It ends up at distribution depots, then at the grocery store, where it waits to be purchased. How much time has passed? How could that tomato look so vibrant in the store?
Food grown for long-distance transport is typically picked before it’s ripe, then artificially ripened at depots with ethylene gas. Ethylene gas is a substance that tomatoes, bananas, and other plants develop on their own to ripen, and it has not been conclusively shown to be dangerous to humans or animals in the amounts we might consume from store-bought fruit. However, for agro-industrial applications, it’s created in bulk from petroleum products, stored in metal dispersant containers, and applied in ripening rooms. It is highly explosive, and in large amounts, causes dizziness and nausea. To be fair, ethylene does cause fruit and vegetables to grow uniformly, and it does not degrade the nutritional content of the produce. And how could it, anyway? Because they are picked before ripe, the full complement of vitamins and minerals never gets a chance to develop in the first place, and time and transport can all but eliminate those nutrients that do.
Now, imagine you’re the industrial farmer, growing a harvest of tomatoes to ship all over the United States. Are you growing the types of tomatoes that are the most tasty or most nutritious? Or are you choosing those with the highest yields and best able to withstand the rigors of transport? In the last half-century, we have seen a steady loss of nutrient density in food, primarily as a result of a dogged pursuit of higher yields.
There’s a value in knowing your farmer. When you buy your produce from a CSA or farmer’s market, you are making a choice. You may only get seasonal tomatoes for three or four glorious months of the year, so there is a certain expectation of quality. You know it, and the farmer knows it. As a result, the farmer grows those tomatoes for flavor, for beauty, and for nutrition. They are picked in season as they ripen, rather than at the ideal point for transportation. With shorter transport distances, they are less likely to be bruised or damaged. And they certainly aren’t gassed.
Buying local also means buying in-season. There are points in the year when produce is meant to be eaten. That means greens in the spring and fall, mountains of summertime zucchini, and hardy root vegetables and squash when the ground is frozen. Beyond the simple experience that food picked ripe and in-season tastes better, it also requires fewer inputs of energy and additives, and so is better for the environment. An awareness of the seasons may challenge us as cooks, but it gives us the gift of anticipating a harvest.
The Ditmas Park CSA allows us to eat seasonally and locally, and perhaps more importantly, it gives us the opportunity to engage in conversation about these issues that matter so much. Food, the most basic of staples affecting our health and well-being, is wrapped up in politics, ignorance, and ideologies, but a local farmer can often sum it up succinctly, such as when Jorge says, “Why Brandywine tomatoes? Because to me, they taste the best.”
-S. Daniel Ackerman
