What We Talk About When We Talk About Local: The False Choice
We talk about local food like it only exists at the farmers market.
But some of the most values-driven farms I’ve known sold their greens to chefs on Tuesday, packed CSA boxes on Wednesday, and delivered clamshells of lettuce to the neighborhood grocery store by Friday. Their work wasn’t defined by where it showed up. It was defined by the relationships they built at every step.
Still, the narrative sticks: farmers market good, supermarket bad. It’s clean. Familiar. It gives us a story with clear heroes. But the truth is, it’s not that simple.
When I ran my aquaponic lettuce farm, we sold to a small local grocery store. We didn’t move massive volume, but it was consistent. Something we could count on each week. We included a poster with our product that showed photos of the farm, shared our story, and invited customers to visit. It sat next to our greens and became a kind of farmstand inside the store. People told us they felt more connected to the food just by seeing it. That sign mattered.
Later, with our mushroom farm, we sold to restaurants, grocery stores, and farmers markets. We made a point to tell our market customers, “If you ever run out during the week, grab more at the store.” That wasn’t a fallback. It was a bridge. And it built trust. People felt like we were part of their world. Not just a stall they stumbled across.
This kind of flexibility matters. Many small farms rely on mixed sales channels not just for profit, but for survival. A market may be rained out. A restaurant may change chefs. A school lunch program might need consistent deliveries at odd hours. Without the option to sell through multiple outlets, a single disruption can derail a week—or a season. And when a farm folds, it’s not just a loss of food. It’s a loss of local jobs, soil knowledge, and community relationships.
We also lose something larger when we narrow the definition of local food. These partnerships don’t just support farms. They shape what kids eat at lunch, what seniors find at the food bank, and what working families can pick up with their groceries. When we expand our definition of local, we expand who gets access.
That’s why this idea of a false choice bothers me. Because when we treat local food as something that only counts when it’s sold hand to hand, we erase all the ways it’s working behind the scenes. We ignore school food service directors reworking their procurement plans just to buy from a farm 12 miles away. We overlook small grocers who clear space in their cooler for a farmer’s clamshells because it’s the right thing to do. We miss stories like mine. And probably yours too.
We also ignore the potential of the system itself to change. I’ve seen a grocery buyer go out of his way to source seasonally. I’ve seen an institutional chef ask for a farm tour. And I’ve seen small farms take what they learned at the market and use it to build signage and sampling stations inside the retail aisle. These are not competing approaches. They’re reinforcing ones. And when we treat them that way, everyone wins.
The truth is, I’m not anti-grocery. I’m pro-connection. And wherever that connection can be built, it counts.
If we want a food system that actually feeds people well, we have to stop asking where food was sold and start asking who it served. And how.
Local isn’t a place. It’s a principle. And it lives wherever people make the effort to bring real food a little closer.
Where have you seen local food show up in unexpected places?
What relationships make something feel local to you?