What exactly is a “local” chicken?
After he read the Ground Level post Tuesday about measuring restaurants by how much locally grown food they serve, Scott Pampuch spent the evening looking at purchasing records for his Corner Table restaurant in south Minneapolis.
Last year, his food was 78 percent local, he told me Wednesday. This year so far, it's maybe 85 or 90 percent. That's by dollars. If he measures by volume, he puts the number even higher. That's the result, he said, of letting his network of farmers essentially determine his menu by virtue of what they make available. If you eat at the Corner Table in August, for example, you can't avoid tomatoes and corn.
But more interesting -- and I kind of hoped the discussion would get here -- he offered his own definition of "local food."
As far as distance goes, Pampuch puts it at 100 or 120 miles from his restaurant. That wraps in suppliers down by Winona and Rushford. (The Common Roots Cafe website, which I cited in the earlier post, defines "local" at a 250-mile radius. The U.S. Department of Agriculture not long ago defined "local" as within 400 miles or within the same state.)
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But the real nub of the argument is the part of the definition that has nothing to do with distance.
To Pampuch, "local" food means food that is grown by a farmer with a diversity of products. A monoculture of organic red peppers doesn't necessarily count. It means food grown with an awareness of topsoil and land management practices. Mother Nature land management, as he puts it, not Monsanto. It means food grown by someone aware of having a good pay structure for workers.
I think of this as the Gold'n Plump question. Is a chicken from a Minnesota farm local if you buy it from Gold'n Plump, a large corporation but one that touts the Minnesota and Wisconsin family farmers it gets chickens from and the natural techniques it insists they use? What if you buy it from the local food section at Wal-Mart?
If you define "local" with miles, you get one answer. If you define it by using other characteristics that have more to do with ownership and farming practice and the length of the supply chain from farmer to consumer, you can get another.
It's not simply a question of semantics. As the local food movement gets bigger, scaling up and looking for efficient ways to deliver more products to more places, how it defines itself could affect everything from prices in the grocery store to why people get into farming.
As Ground Level explores the local food movement further -- we'll be on the MPR News air with some reporting in coming days, and we plan to launch an online local food topic page soon -- I would love to hear other ideas about how "local" gets defined.