The Locavore Movement

In modern society, the argument of eating locally or eating shipped foods is quite controversial. There are many benefits to becoming a “locavore”, or a person who eats as much locally made food products as possible, such as the stimulation of local economy, but there are also many negatives to a mass movement of locavores. Though eating local can be a good factor for local economy and can provide slightly better nutritional value for the consumer, a locavore movement would most likely be detrimental to local farmers and would be too difficult to sustain in certain parts of the country, such as cities, A locavore movement would be very difficult to make happen and would most likely not be possible for many people. As shown in source G and

The opposition claims that, “when you buy local, you give those with local open space--farms and pastures--an economic reason to stay open and undeveloped” (Source A). This is true, yet only on a small scale. Source E points out, “the number of small farms has increased 20% in the past six years”, however compared numerous number of people that these farms would have to sustain, this number is still insufficient. For example, there are about 317,419 peopling living within the city of St. Louis, Missouri and nearly 1,001,876 in St. Louis County. If even half of this amount were to convert to a local diet, the local farmers would be unable to sustain them. This would lead to the overworking of the land and overcrowding of plants, which would devastate the soil. Furthermore, it would take a long amount of time to mend this damage and return the soil to its previous

It is true that shipped foods have less nutrition than locally grown foods have, but the difference is slight. Marion Nestle, who is a professor at New York University, stated that, “‘there will be nutritional differences, but they’ll be marginal...But people are not nutrient-deprived” (source B). It is not difficult for a consumer to get their nutritional requirements from non-local foods. Also, as shown in source A, local food is more fresh and therefore seems to contain more benefits such as nutritional value and better taste. This, however, is obsolete when the wastefulness of the food comes into play. The food is more fresh, yet it does not last near as long as store-bought produce. Consumers would buy produce, but most likely waste a portion of it due to this. Weighing the marginal difference in nutritional value against the difficulties and wastefulness of a locavore movement makes the movement seem