Honolulu Star-Advertiser

Thursday, December 12, 2024 81° Today's Paper


Top News

Hawaii among top 5 states for eating local foods, study finds

jamm aquino
@Caption1:Vivian Chau

MONTPELIER, Vt. >> A new index puts Hawaii in the top five states for its commitment to raising and eating locally grown food.

The ranking is based on the number of farmers markets and community supported agriculture programs per state resident. In CSAs, customers pay a lump sum up front and receive weekly deliveries of produce during harvest seasons.

According to the Strolling of the Heifers Locavore Index, Hawaii has 85 farmers markets and 135 CSAs for the 1.3 million people in the state, ranking it fifth on the index.

Vermont tops the list with 99 farmers markets and 164 CSAs for fewer than 622,000 people.

The other top states on the list are Iowa, Montana and Maine.

Louisiana, Nevada, New Jersey, Arizona and, surprisingly, Florida ranked at the bottom.

Florida produces much of the nation’s citrus, strawberries and tomatoes, but the index says it has only 146 farmers markets and 193 CSAs for 18.5 million people.

Nationwide, small farms, farmers markets and specialty food makers are popping up and thriving as more people seek locally produced foods. More than half of consumers now say it’s more important to buy local than organic, according to market research firm Mintel, and Deputy Agriculture Secretary Kathleen Merrigan called the local food movement "the biggest retail food trend in my adult lifetime."

But with no official definition for what makes a food local, the government can’t track sales. 

"The whole purpose of this is really to stimulate the conversation about locavorism, which fits into the mission of Strolling of the Heifers," said Martin Cohn, a spokesman for the group, which works to save farms in New England.

USDA spokesman Aaron Lavallee said the definition of local varies from state to state and region to region depending on the season. In small New England states, food from 100 miles away could be from another state, while food could travel hundreds of miles in Texas or Montana and still be within the borders.

In cases where produce is labeled "local," with no point of origin, he advised consumers to ask sellers where it was raised.

The locavore movement grew out of consumer concerns about how and where food is produced, following episodes of contamination in spinach, meat and other foods. People committed to it buy locally produced foods to support farmers, because the food is fresher and to reduce the environmental effect of trucking it across the country. 

But there’s more to it, said Jessica Prentice, a San Francisco Bay-area chef who coined the term locavore.

"Really what it’s about is moving into a kind of food system where you’re connected to the source of your food," Prentice said. "You’re buying from people that you know or can meet and you’re buying food grown in a place that you can easily drive to and see.

"This is more about creating an oasis really in the context of a globalized food system that’s completely anonymous," she said.

But James McWilliams, a Texas State University professor who has written a book critiquing the local food movement, said people often think it solves more problems than it does.

"There’s this sense that because a food is local there’s automatically nothing wrong with it, and the fact is even on a local level certain foods are more energy intensive to produce than others," said McWilliams, who is a vegan. "Specifically, animal-based products, even on a local level, while they may be more efficient, pound for pound are still significantly more energy intensive to produce than plant-based products."

The local food movement also doesn’t address problems with agriculture on a global scale or the expected increase in demand for food over the next 40 to 50 years, he said.

"I guess the pragmatic side of me thinks well, these locavore values are great and they work really well in places such as Vermont, but they don’t work everywhere," he said. "And it’s not a universally shared ethic."

Comments are closed.