Eating only what grows around you

Locavores also report other, perhaps unexpected, benefits to eating food produced near their homes. Maiser said it gives you a better understanding not just of where food comes from, but when it is freshest.

“I would say the normal American who goes to Safeway or something like that doesn’t really have a good idea of when asparagus is in season,” she says.

Some find themselves making healthier eating choices because eating locally tends to mean eating more fruits and vegetables, rather than processed foods. Others, like Gray, aren’t sure they’ve made their diet any healthier, but they like the other benefits.

For example, once you’ve eaten food that was just picked from the farm, many say it’s hard to go back to the refrigerated, shipped variety. Baskerville-Burrows hated tomatoes until she had some fresh ones from a produce market in Berkeley, Calif., and realized what they really taste like.

Still, people who are trying to eat locally concede that it is easier if you live in an area, like San Francisco, where a wide variety of food is grown nearby and there are like-minded people. Also, the added time and money can make it harder for people who are juggling family and work responsibilities.

“As a single person in San Francisco, I feel like I can’t say to someone with a family, this is something that is worth it to do or that you should do,” Maiser says. “I definitely know many (families) who are doing it, but I would say it’s definitely more something that single people are doing.”

There are plenty of good reasons to eat locally grown food, says Christopher Weber, assistant research professor of civil and environmental engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. But, he argues in a recent research paper, the most commonly cited reason — reducing the environmental impact of transporting food hundreds of miles — may not be all it’s cracked up to be.

Weber and co-author H. Scott Matthews concluded that transportation only accounts for 11 percent of the environmentally destructive greenhouse gas emissions associated with producing food. He says families could more drastically, and perhaps more easily, reduce their carbon footprint by cutting back on or eliminating the red meat and dairy in their diets. That’s because those foods take an inordinate amount of resources to produce compared with fruits, vegetables, eggs, chicken and fish.

But once you start parsing food choices more closely, it gets more complicated. For example, you could reduce your carbon footprint and still eat red meat by choosing grass-fed beef from a local rancher, because it takes a lot more energy to produce grain for conventionally raised cattle. On the other hand, eating fish is generally the better environmental choice for protein, but not if it’s not being flown in from some exotic locale.

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Also, eating locally by actually growing your own food is a better environmental choice than buying food, for a variety of reasons. But, he says, just buying organic food from anywhere in the country does not do much to help reduce the threat of global warming, although some would argue there are other environmental benefits.

Finally, for a person like Weber, who describes himself as “somewhere between vegetarian and vegan,” eating locally could have a big proportional impact since he has already cut back on meat and dairy consumption.

Weber worries that he’s been misinterpreted.

“We’re not trying to say that eating local is bad,” he says. “Eating local is definitely good, and there’s a lot of good reasons to do it.”

It just may not save the planet.

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