What is Local, anyways?

My efforts to eat local food, produced on my windowsill

Almost any discussion about eating right these days reviews the importance of eating locally produced food. Eating local is the new hip thing to do, along with shunning Justin Bieber and posting cars with ‘Keep Portland Weird’ stickers. In a place like the Willamette Valley where food is practically effortlessly grown and distributed, it’s easy to see eating local as a simple task and a fun way to engage with your community.

Living in eastern Montana, however, requires an entirely different expectation for eating ‘local.’ Although not impossible, there are major challenges to eating local here. The scarcity of food processing centers makes it extremely hard to find food that has stayed on this side of the state. My efforts to eat local food consist almost entirely of planting spinach in my windowsill garden, which I will eat in a couple months provided that the heat in my apartment kicks in soon. Few Forsythians, however, go to this effort to object to the distance that most of their food must travel to their plate. Farmers have few options for selling small-scale produce, and thus little incentive to grow something besides industrial commodity crops. Consumers who have never had the option of making local purchases don’t know what they’re missing, and so seek out Wal-mart deals rather than Montana-grown foods.

So, how does one eat local in a place where there is no local food?

This required a revision of my understanding of the word ‘local.’ Luckily, the definition is quite flexible. Instead of being a defined distance, local food simply comes from as close as possible. That may be the spinach on my windowsill, or a batch of lentils grown and processed halfway across the state. Eating local is not eating food only produced within a certain distance, which would result in starvation for most eastern Montana ‘locavores.’ Buying local foods represents an opportunity for people to improve their health, revive their local economies and create a more sustainable lifestyle.

Little of this is evident to my neighbors though, who rarely have the opportunity to buy anything that comes from anywhere near here, and they have expressed little interest in it. Several weeks ago the Extension Office mailed out a survey to all Treasure County residents to see if they are interested in starting a grocery store in Hysham. The surprising answer was not really. Hysham residents have thus far been unwilling to listen to the myriad of reasons I came up with that this will be good for the community and the economy. Buying local is such a foreign concept that I can tell it will be an uphill battle to help people understand the opportunities that having a store in town will bring to their tiny town.