I love the local food movement — well, make that the local wine movement. All the rest, from tomatoes to goat cheese, is a bonus. And it appears that I am in the right place. The locavore movement is taking off here in Richmond and in other locales across Virginia. Indeed, the June 2011 issue of Forbes referred to Charlottesville as the “locavore capital of the world.”
It’s hard to measure the consumption of locally grown foods, but a good proxy is the number of entrepreneurs who espy a business opportunity. If someone is willing to commit their time and capital to a venture, they either see existing demand for locally grown food or are willing to proselytize the population in order to create future demand. In the current issue of the Virginia News Letter, Tanya Denckla Cobb lists many of the start-ups, food festivals and regional initiatives that are popping up all over the state.
Virginia now boasts niche slaughterhouses like True & Essential Meats in Harrisonburg, Blue Ridge Meats in Front Royal (founded by by local sheep farmers), Donald’s Meat Processing in Lexington (founded by local cattle farmer) and EcoFriendly Foods in Moneta. Likewise, reports Cobb, custom butcheries are gaining a foothold: the Belmont Butchery in Richmond, the Organic Butcher in McLean and Charlottesville, Two Fat Butchers in Front Royal, Red Apron Butcher in Arlington, and Let’s Meat on the Avenue in Alexandria.
Meanwhile “food hubs” and “aggregation hubs” are proliferating across the commonwealth. There are least eight — two in Charlottesville, two in Richmond, and one each in Virginia Beach, Warrenton, Roanoke, the New River Valley, Abingdon and Floyd. And there are more on the way. One of my friends is pursuing a locally grown food distribution venture here in Richmond.
Aside from the obvious virtues of superior taste, quality and responsiveness to consumer demand, locally grown food is great for economic development. Replacing food transported from hundreds or thousands of miles away, it creates local jobs and local profits. It help preserves farmland and rural view sheds from the encroachment of development. And it contributes greatly to the quality of life. All those wine and food festivals are fun!
A political offshoot of the locavore movement is the idea of “food sovereignty,” the notion that people have the right to produce and sell local foods without the oversight of state or federal regulation. In June the Maine legislature declared the state’s food sovereignty, stating that “food is human sustenance and is the fundamental prerequisite to life,” and that the “basis of human sustenance rests on the ability of all people to save seed, grow, process, consume, and exchange food, and farm products.”
Virginia hasn’t gone quite so far as to declare food sovereignty — there are public safety issues to consider, as the German e coli outbreak traced to organically grown bean sprouts reminded us — but in the 2008 “home exemption law,” the General Assembly did exempt candies, jams, jellies and certain baked goods from inspection, if those items are sold at a farm or at a farmers’ market and labeled not for resale. The “pickle bill” earlier this year would have extended the inspection exemption to pickles made from the produce of one’s own garden, but did not pass. On the other hand, the dairy industry is fending off a proposal to require homestead raw goat milk cheese makers to build expensive pasteurization and milk-handling facilities.
At the local level, the city of Richmond has adopted an ordinance that will enable nonprofits to obtain permits to develop city property into community gardens. Virginia cities and counties, predicts Cobb, also “may find themselves considering policies that would bring banished animals back into urban neighborhoods, such as ordinances to allow people to raise backyard chickens, goats, and bees.” (Incidentally, some 28,000 honeybee hives in Virginia produced over 1 million pounds of honey annually. A neighbor in my suburban neighborhood manages three hives in her back yard!)
Ten years ago, I might have poo-pooed the locavore movement. But the older and the more health conscious I get, the more I obsess about the quality of the food I consume. We are, after all, what we eat. Here in the Bacon household, we already make fruits and garden salads part of our everyday diet. Given the choice, why not eat local?
