The strength and enduring nature of the local food movement continues to amaze me. I have worked in this field for a few decades and have seen trends come and go. The American public’s attention span is rather short, but local food grows on. There must be something more fundamental than what could be seen as a quaint notion that our food should come from nearby.

The deeper meaning of local is what Anne Lappe, in her book, Diet for a Hot Planet, is getting at when she states that for local food advocates, local “is code for sustainability and connectivity.” There are sustainability values, including but not limited to food miles, embedded in our quest for local. Feeling connected to our food sources is important to us for very practical as well as emotional reasons. I think most of us would recognize this when brought to our attention, but we often don’t act on it in our everyday food choices.

My preferred description of sustainable food is “good food”: healthy, local, green, fair, and affordable. In practice, we often see local as the best way to assure the other attributes in this list. Local food should be fresher and therefore healthier. We have a much better chance of knowing that our food is healthy, green, and fair if from local sources, and the chances are that it is. We are more likely to decide to afford better food if know the money is going to a producer we know and trust. And, if we do have a mega-industrial food plant down the road, we know that its localness is rather one-dimensional. (Once in Milwaukee, I asked our waiter whether they had any local beers, and realized my mistake rather quickly.)

When buying local, we must recognize this and insist on local and sustainable or “good” food. While a good bet, we shouldn’t assume it is sustainable just because it is local. We need to know the questions to ask of our local farmer or rancher. We need to let them know that we appreciate their extra effort and that we are there to support them. That this conversation is possible is part of the beauty and the “connectedness” we often seek.

This broader meaning of local also points out the folly of the “local or organic” question that people like to pose. I am not talking here about organic certification, but food that is produced essentially organic, certified or not. There are always trade-offs to weigh, best done on a case by case basis rather than by rule, but we should be seeking both.

However, for most of us, the majority of the food we buy is still non-local. If we go out of our way to find local, sustainable food, we should take the same extra effort to find the most sustainable food if local is not available. This requires a more complicated set of questions asked impersonally and at a distance—but critical questions nonetheless. We at HCFS are currently working on gathering some guidance for making these sustainable food choices easier. In the meantime, when you think local, realize that there is a lot more to it than food miles.