Locavore

The term locavore describes a person who makes a deliberate choice to primarily or exclusively eat food grown or raised locally, within his or her own foodshed. The term is analogous to carnivore, or meat eater, and herbivore, or plant eater. Its genesis has been attributed to Jessica Prentice, a San Francisco Bay Area food activist, who in 2005 coined the word as a way to define friends and colleagues who accepted her challenge to eat foods grown within 100 miles of San Francisco for an entire month. The popularity of eating locally has grown, and in 2007, the Oxford American Dictionary named locavore its word of the year.

Although the term locavore is new, throughout much of human history people have primarily subsisted on food produced by themselves or by people living fairly close. As [Page 288]transportation, storage, and processing technology improved in the 19th century, food production and consumption were increasingly separated, leading periodically to concerns about the reliability and safety of distant supplies. Local food production and consumption have been advocated at various points throughout the 20th century in response to concerns about food availability and quality. During the world wars and the Great Depression, people planted backyard gardens and urban farms to supplement their diets. Beginning in the 1930s, the organic agriculture movement raised questions about the health and environmental safety of large-scale conventional agriculture and promoted small-scale, local alternatives. In the 1960s, the environmental, labor, and counterculture movements criticized large-scale agribusiness and called for more ecologically sound, fair, and smaller-scale alternatives, including local food production using few or no synthetic chemicals. Beginning in the 1980s, chef Alice Waters, owner of the Berkeley, California, restaurant Chez Panisse, gained a reputation for her use of local, seasonal foods, helping to increase the popularity of eating locally. The slow food movement, founded in Italy in 1986 to counter the trend toward fast food, supports traditional foods and production practices that risk disappearing as a result of the preponderance of mass-produced food and the homogenization of tastes. The growing numbers of slow food members, although not necessarily locavores, work to preserve and celebrate traditionally prepared food made with ingredients that are unique because they reflect local growing conditions, cultural practices, or processing methods.