Towards a unified definition of local food Brune, Sara; Knollenberg, Whitney; Barbieri, Carla ...
Journal of rural studies,
October 2023, 2023-10-00, Volume:
103
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Despite the growing popularity of local food, there is still no unified definition used across the board. The lack of unified definition of local food can prevent effective marketing, policymaking, ...and research efforts. Given the inconsistencies on local food definitions, we sought to fill this gap by surveying consumers’ understanding of local food in North Carolina (NC, USA) departing from three categories of definitions found in the literature; local food defined in terms of: (1) market outlet (e.g., food bought directly from the farmer); (2) locality or political boundaries (e.g., food produced within the country); and (3) distance (e.g., food produced within 100 miles of commercialization). Informed by our study results, we propose defining local food in terms of the specific locality where is produced (e.g., county or state) as opposed to defining local food in terms of distance or market outlet. While the meaning of local food will remain contested among activists, governmental entities, and researchers, this study confirms that a shared meaning among consumers is emerging that should be incorporated across policy making, marketing, and research efforts.
•Assessment to contribute towards achieving a unified definition of local food.•Compares three categories of definitions of local food among consumers.•Incorporates sociodemographic and psychographic characteristics in the assessment.•Definitions based on locality or political boundaries are the most popular amongst consumers.•A unified local food definition can advance marketing, research, and policymaking.
Demand for local food in the US has significantly increased over the past decade. In an attempt to understand the drivers of this demand and how they have changed over time, we investigate the ...literature on organic and local foods over the past few decades. We focus our review on studies that allow comparison of characteristics now associated with both local and organic food. We summarize the major findings of these studies and their implications for understanding drivers of local food demand. Prior to the late 1990s, most studies failed to consider factors now associated with local food, and the few that included these factors found very little support for them. In many cases, the lines between local and organic were blurred. Coincident with the development of federal organic food standards, studies began to find comparatively more support for local food as distinct and separate from organic food. Our review uncovers a distinct turn in the demand for local and organic food. Before the federal organic standards, organic food was linked to small farms, animal welfare, deep sustainability, community support and many other factors that are not associated with most organic foods today. Based on our review, we argue that demand for local food arose largely in response to corporate co-optation of the organic food market and the arrival of ‘organic lite’. This important shift in consumer preferences away from organic and toward local food has broad implications for the environment and society. If these patterns of consumer preferences prove to be sustainable, producers, activists and others should be aware of the implications that these trends have for the food system at large.
The majority of food in the US is distributed through global/national supply chains that exclude locally-produced goods. This situation offers opportunities to increase local food production and ...consumption and is influenced by constraints that limit the scale of these activities. We conducted a study to assess perspectives of producers and consumers engaged in food systems of a major Midwestern city. We examined producers’ willingness to include/increase cultivation of local foods and consumers’ interest in purchasing/increasing local foods. We used focus groups of producers (two groups of conventional farmers, four local food producers) and consumers (three conventional market participants, two locavores) to pose questions about production/consumption of local foods. We transcribed discussions verbatim and examined text to identify themes, using separate affinity diagrams for producers and consumers. We found producers and consumers are influenced by the
status quo
and real and perceived barriers to local foods. We also learned participants believed increasing production and consumption of local foods would benefit their community and creating better infrastructure could enhance efforts to scale up local food systems. Focus group participants also indicated support from external champions/programs could support expansion of local foods. We learned that diversifying local food production was viewed as a way to support local community, increase access to healthy foods and reduce environmental impacts of conventional production. Our research indicates that encouraging producers and consumers in local food systems will be more successful when support for the local community is emphasized.
•Tourists’ local food consumption value is effective on generating tourists’ positive attitude toward local food.•Attitude toward local food positively affects food destination image.•Both attitude ...toward local food and food destination image positively affect tourists’ behavioral intentions.•Taste/quality value and emotional value can be further emphasized to Chinese and Western tourists in Hong Kong.•Epistemic value needs to be further stressed to other Asian and Western groups in Hong Kong.
Despite the importance of understanding food consumption value from tourists’ perspectives, few studies have explored how experiencing local food in a destination shapes tourists’ consumption value. This study explores the effect of tourists’ local food consumption value on their perceptions and behaviors. Tourists’ cultural background is used as a moderating variable. The findings show that tourists’ local food consumption value effectively explains tourists’ attitudes toward local food, food destination image, and behavioral intentions. In addition, the cultural background of tourists partially moderates the relationships between the proposed constructs. This study is the first empirical application of consumption value theory to the context of tourists’ local food experiences. It provides insights into appropriate marketing strategies for the restaurant and food tourism industries and offers practical suggestions to destination marketing organizations (DMOs) for using local food as a destination marketing tool.
In the contemporary era, food plays a key role in balancing environmental, social, and economic balances, not only due to its primary identity as a resource that nourishes living beings and the ...planet but also through the processes triggered by stakeholders who act at the internal local food systems. In the latter, an orientation towards sustainability is increasingly urgently required, capable of achieving a widespread creation of shared value. In this scenario, the International Slow Food Association operates, which also, through the Terra Madre Salone del Gusto initiative, coordinates communities and events located throughout the world on the theme of “good, clean and fair” food. This article aims to analyze, through the lens of the systemic approach, the interesting and multifaceted impacts of this event, as an opportunity to disseminate and contagion of ideas, attitudes, and behaviors around the themes of sustainability and biodiversity, but also as a moment of consolidation and creation of relationships between and within local food systems and local communities. The research project presented, entitled “SEeD for Change”, was coordinated by the University of Gastronomic Sciences of Pollenzo with the University of Turin and helped to focus on the actors, relationships and contexts that actually and virtually hosted the event: places in which through a common and shared language, change has been generated.
This paper examines how food planning policies address the reterritorialization of agricultural activities (RAA), a crucial component of local food systems. While food planning as an integrated local ...policy promoting local food systems has gained increasing research attention, most of the research has been urban-centric, resulting in a limited understanding of how it includes RAA. This paper fills this research gap by assessing 39 food planning projects in France, where the state defines food planning by national law and supports local projects. Through document analysis and semi-structured interviews, RAA-associated food planning policy goals, instruments, and agri-food professional actors' involvement are identified. The empirical findings highlight the central role of RAA in French food planning projects; it either serves as the primary motivation behind these projects or evolves into a substantial component as the projects develop. A wide range of policy instruments with local innovation to support RAA are identified, with more frequent use of informational and economic than regulatory and coercive instruments, and more focus on economic development than on ecological transition. Minority and majority farmers’ organizations are involved in food planning processes with varying degrees of engagement across territories, reflecting local governance strategies. The analytical methods in this study may contribute to future research to better comprehend RAA in local food policymaking. The systematic overview of RAA-associated food planning measures also offers insights to policymakers in other contexts regarding food policy design. The paper concludes by arguing that food planning extends beyond urban food supply; it also presents an opportunity to leverage RAA for rural revitalization and transformation, in terms of production models, rural-urban links, and local governance.
•Systematic analysis of 39 projects offers an overview of French food planning.•French food plans favor economic and informational over regulatory measures.•Food planning instruments prioritize economic development over ecological transition.•French food planning engages diverse actors; both major and minor farmer groups participate.
Dispersal connects spatially separated local food webs at a larger, metacommunity scale, and as a result, dispersal may both influence and be influenced by local food-web dynamics. Here, I focused on ...a rock-pool metacommunity and used a combination of observational, experimental, and theoretical approaches to explore the role of local prey (Moina macrocopa) density on the rate of emigration by their predator (Trichocorixa verticalis) and in turn, the effect of predator emigration on the per capita predation rate experienced by local prey populations. A lab feeding experiment quantified predation rates, demonstrating that indeed adult T. verticalis are voracious predators of M. macrocopa. M. macrocopa densities vary over five orders of magnitude across both space and time in rock pools, and a mesocosm experiment showed that this variation significantly influences T. verticalis emigration: predators emigrated more rapidly when prey were in lower densities. Finally, computer simulations demonstrated that this pattern of dispersal by T. verticalis has the potential to relieve local M. macrocopa populations from predation when the prey are at low densities, thereby reducing the likelihood that local M. macrocopa populations will be driven extinct by predation from T. verticalis. Keywords Corixidae * Density-dependence * Dispersal * Isles of Shoals * Per capita predation risk * Predator-prey metapopulation
Local food systems are comprised of networks of actors that work to ensure the sustainability of food supplies within communities. While local food has typically been promoted through direct ...marketing strategies such as farmers' markets and community-supported agriculture (CSA), retail stores are increasingly carrying and marketing local foods in response to consumer demand and market potential. Given the frequency with which consumers shop at grocery stores, as well as the portion of consumers' food purchases made at these locations, these stores may play a significant role in the success of local agriculture and the shaping of ideology about what is ‘local’. We conducted 27 semi-structured interviews with representatives of food retailers known to source and market local foods in the four major urban centers of Oregon's Willamette Valley. Our results reveal that grocers' perceptions of local food vary significantly from one another. Additionally, our results differed in comparison to the published literature on consumers' and producers' ideas of what constitutes local. Food retailers identified varying distances (frequently a region including several states) that they consider local, as well as diverse reasons for choosing to source and market local foods (most commonly supporting the local economy). Some trends in the variation of responses relate to how the size and form of ownership of the grocery stores influence the level at which decisions are made. These wide-ranging perceptions outline many of the realities of the local food movement, as well as opportunities for change.
•The claim that the expansion of cash crops such as soy promotes development needs unpacking beyond simplified indicators.•Local perceptions from 62 interviews in 18 municipalities inform our ...analyses on soy expansion in Brazil’s Matopiba region.•While grabbing land and water, soy expansion has fostered the social, ecological and relational exclusion of local actors.•Neglecting Matopiba’s local actors’ voices allows agribusiness’ exclusionary expansion’s self-portrayal as “development”.•Inequitable processes of change that worsen the conditions of most stakeholders can rather be understood as maldevelopment.
Cash crops such as soy, cocoa and oil palm have expanded at great speed in developing countries, often at the expense of customary landowners, traditional livelihoods, and biodiversity. These landscape transformations have global drivers, but they are often justified by a dominant rationale that they bring development to otherwise underprivileged regions. Such development claims, however, are either taken at face value or conflated with simplistic macroeconomic indicators that gloss over most social issues. Those claims may, therefore, hide severe inequities. To better analyze these phenomena, we revisit and conceptualize the notion of maldevelopment, here defined as inequitable and exclusive processes of change that deprive most local stakeholders of their social and material capabilities. Using an inclusiveness framework, we then conduct an in-depth analysis of soy expansion in the Matopiba region of Brazil’s Cerrado. This rich biome with a mosaic of land uses forms an agriculture-savanna landscape that is rapidly giving way to soy monoculture – under the guise of development. Through fieldwork and primary data collection in 18 Matopiba municipalities, we have interviewed 62 stakeholders in that landscape transformation from different social groups. We assess how soy expansion has altered access and allocation patterns of key resources such as land and water, as well as participation in the local food systems and governance initiatives. When looking beyond general economic indicators, our findings expose a brutally exclusive process of environmental degradation and resource dispossession. Yet the stakeholders we interviewed do not want to simply be left undisturbed but to experience inclusive development instead, with participation in governance and support for bottom-up initiatives. We conclude that the frequently cited claim that industrial monocultures bring development to underserved regions deserves far greater scrutiny, and that inclusiveness in the design and execution of interventions is crucial for avoiding maldevelopment.
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