Should We Buy Local?

There are many good reasons to eat locally-sourced ingredients. They are generally fresher and thus better tasting when purchased at the farmer’s market rather than a grocery store. However, local isn’t always better. Bananas from Central or South America,  European cheeses, Italian truffles, coffee from Brazil, cacao from Ecuador, French or Italian wine, olive oil from the Mediterranean—there is a long list of products that we’re better off buying elsewhere. What matters is not where something came from but how it tastes.

Sustainability is often a reason given for eating local products. “Food miles,” the distance something must travel to get to market, is used as a marker for sustainability. But “food miles”  can be misleading. If crop yields are poor in your local growing area it will take more land, more water, more fuel, and more fertilizer to grow and harvest a crop compared to a distant locale with more favorable growing conditions. And container ships are a very efficient form of transport, much more efficient than long-haul trucking.

So local doesn’t necessarily mean tastier or more sustainable.

Some people argue there is virtue in being self-sufficient, that local economies have more security if they are able to meet their food demands locally. But that simply isn’t true. In fact, buying exclusively local makes local economies more vulnerable. When local crops fail its an advantage to have well established supply chains that can bring in food. A food economy that has a mix of local and more distant supply chains makes it possible for us to eat well all year round regardless of local weather conditions.

In general, trade allows local economies to concentrate on what they are good at and what they can efficiently produce. It makes no sense to invest resources that will be used inefficiently if, via trade, we can buy products that others make more cheaply. With enough effort, capital, and ingenuity in building artificial environments we could probably grow coffee in the U.S. But why when Brazil, Kenya, or Sumatra can do so at less cost.

Trade has always been central to human civilization. The execution of contracts requires trust on both sides and when people exchange goods they exchange ideas and experiences as well. Nature and its variations in weather are much more fickle than trading partners who stand to lose a great deal if they don’t honor their commitments.

There is of course nothing wrong with buying local and it is certainly worth supporting local farmers if the quality is good and the price is right. But idealizing the local risks creating a parochial perspective. There is a fine line between healthy local pride and pernicious, divisive chauvinism.

Local traditions are strengthened and made sustainable by their connections to the wider world through trade and exchange. The problem with globalization is not that we trade with strangers; the problem is that global trade is dominated by mammoth corporations that reduce all goods and the people who grow or make them to commodities. The interest in localism is an attempt to make economic life more human, characterized by face to face interaction and personal trust rather than a confrontation with faceless bureaucracies that are nothing but profit machines. That is understandable and a worthy motive but it misunderstands the problem.. We should buy food that has a sense of place, but it needn’t be one’s own place. It is more ethically defensible to buy wine from a particular producer in a particular region of Italy that reflects its origins and whose farming practices are reasonably transparent than it is to buy generic California juice from a wine conglomerate.

Global corporations create a homogenized product with no trace of a local origin. The alternative is not to buy local but to buy directly from local producers in other parts of the world when it makes sense and their products are distinctive–and to welcome the ideas and flavors of other locales and treat them with respect. Food is authentic if it is distinctive of a particular place, but Valencian paella made from good ingredients in California is more authentic than a packaged microwave paella in Costa Blanca.

Regarding moral arguments about eating local, taste is the most reliable criterion.