Locally Grown

Now that local food has gone mainstream, it seems that there is some consumer confusion that has resulted in the widespread conflation of food that is locally made by a locally-owned business with food that is both locally-grown and locally-made by a local business. Don’t get me wrong– there are some amazing local food businesses out there that have to source out of state in the cold months in order to keep up with demand for their product.

To me, what makes those local food businesses amazing is the effort they put in to source their ingredients from Michigan when they are in season, like the Brinery and Perkins’ Pickles, two of my favorite Southeast Michigan food businesses. They have struck a great balance between being grounded in the local food system while consistently producing high demand products year-round.

But there are other businesses out there riding the wave of the popularity of local food to market a product that may just be locally-owned or locally-made with ingredients straight out of the industrial food system. So, for August, the real core of the farmer’s market season, I wanted to help empower you to ask the questions and find out about where the food was grown or raised that is on offer to you.

Once you know the answers to those questions, the difference in pricing schemes between the chain grocery store and the farmer’s market will also become apparent. Although a couple years back a study in Vermont concluded that organic fruits and vegetables sold at the farmer’s market are cheaper than similar produce at the grocery store, people still don’t understand that in many instances the farmer’s market has items that are both cheaper and better quality than what you can find in the store.

We’ve talked about this price tag-driven purchasing here before, and, in this case, you can really see how embedded this practice, rooted in the artificially low cost of industrially-produced food, has become in our consumer psyche. So, go on, look behind the price tag the next time you are at the farmer’s market. Ask who grew that delicious sweet corn and where. Ask if those peaches are no spray or grown with organic practices – even ask for some delicious squash recipes to try.

The answers may surprise you. And if not, at the very least you had a positive interaction with a local food producer. For instance, recently we have been eating (and selling) a lot of purslane, a wild edible that also happens to be a bonafide superfood, and people have been genuinely excited to find out about this ubiquitous plant that they had maybe seen as a weed in their gardens and never before eaten. At the farmer’s market, this is what community looks like.

So, go on, ask your producers whatever questions you want to know about the food you are purchasing. Believe me, it’s a lot better than trying to pronounce the ingredients on some of the labels you can find in chain grocery stores. Plus, producers want to hear from you. You can ‘’vote with your fork,” so to speak, by asking for organic eggs, jams made with local fruit, Michigan-grown produce, etc. You can help encourage restaurants and locally-owned food businesses to source more ingredients locally by simply asking for them.

Maybe you will even play a role in encouraging more growers to make value-added products from their produce or sell to restaurants and producers that will convert those harvests into delicious meals or tasty jars of pickles, jams and salsa. After all, once we get more local food into distribution channels, it’ll be more widely available and cheaper for us to eat.

Therefore, we need to ask questions of our producers that remind them that the best way to make healthier food available to more people and challenge the industrial system is to source ingredients locally whenever possible, where the money spent will actually get re-invested in the local community. In this sense, locally-grown food does a lot more than just taste better. See you at market!