NPR has a piece up about Walmart and local food which makes an excellent point:

[T]he retailer’s definition of what constitutes locally grown doesn’t match the one promoted by many in the so-called local food movement.

Does it matter that Walmart isn’t catering to a bunch of foodies? Yes, if you care about what you eat:

On a Saturday morning at a weekly farmers market in Sacramento, Calif., farmer Patrick Hoover is ladling blueberries into small plastic boxes and offering samples. He drove less than 50 miles, from his 40 acres up in the foothills, to sell them. And that’s what most locavores — the fans of locally grown food — describe as “real local food.” Hoover says selling to Wal-Mart doesn’t really appeal to him.

Wal-Mart says anything grown in the same state is local food.

“The quality, I have. I don’t do any markets like that, just because my stuff is picked ripe, and the only shelf I want it on is between here and the customer at home,” Hoover says. “And sitting in any retail store is just not good for my produce.”

But farmers who sell at local markets acknowledge their products are usually more expensive than what’s stocked in the stores. The price difference is partly due to the additional labor involved. Many of Wal-Mart’s local producers are large-scale farmers that can supply in bulk, which generally means cheaper prices.

They’re being too nice to Walmart by not explaining the counterargument well enough. Sustainable Table offers a really good explanation as to why moving business to local large scale farmers misses the whole point of the local food movement:

Small, local farms tend to be run by farmers who live on their land and work hard to preserve it. Buying local means you can talk directly to the farmer growing your food and find out what they do and how they do it. Do they grow their food organically? If they’re not certified organic, ask them why. Many small farms, even if they haven’t taken the certification step, still utilize sustainable or organic farming methods that help protect the air, soil and water.

Notice the emphasis on scale rather than just location. Here’s more:

Local foods from small farms usually undergo minimal processing, are produced in relatively small quantities, and are distributed within a few dozen miles of where they originate. Food produced on industrial farms, however, is distributed throughout the country and world, creating the potential for disease-carrying food from a single factory farm to spread rapidly throughout the entire country. The 2006 E coli outbreak is a good example of this, as contaminated spinach from a single region in California managed to sicken people in 26 states.

Under Walmart’s system, food from giant industrial farms in California can be sold as local. Technically it is, but that’s why you have to care as much about how your food is produced as from where it comes from if you really want to eat well.

Readers with memories that go back a month or two know we’ve been over this issue before in this space. Indeed, we actually have Wal-Mart sustainability guru Rand Waddoups’ response to this criticism of Walmart definition of local:

On the local definition, I have to tell you we thought a lot about this one. We have been wrestling with this definition for a year now, and finally landed on what customers told us they understood the best…state. Is it perfect, no, but it is the best we have found to help customers understand and buy better b/c of that understanding.

The best way to help customers understand the local food movement would have been to explain its principles to them. However, if Walmart’s customers really understood those principles, they wouldn’t shop at Walmart. Local food is at Wamart because it helps Walmart, not its customers nor the environment.

In short, local food is a marketing gimmick; one of a long line of marketing gimmicks at Walmart.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 26th, 2008 at 1009 by Jonathan Rees and is filed under Groceries. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.