If you live in Florida, is a Tropicana orange 'locally grown'?

How do you define 'local produce'?  From the USAToday today:

Nationwide, retailers from Wal-Mart to Whole Foods are increasingly devoting more shelf space to "locally grown" products including such things as fresh produce and Thanksgiving turkeys. Whole Foods, for one, now spends almost 22% of its produce budget on locally grown products, up from 15% four years ago, it says.

The "locally grown" label is part of retailers' push to tap into consumer desires for fresh and safe products that support small, local farmers and help the environment because they're not trucked so far. At least one consumer survey has showed that whether something is locally grown is now more important than whether it is organic (which many local products are not).

But retailers may have far broader definitions of "local" than consumers do. And while freshness is more likely if food isn't trucked so far, food-safety experts say there's no evidence that locally grown products are safer, especially because small producers often lack the food-safety audits more common among big producers.

And yet another reason to hate Wal-Mart:

In July, Wal-Mart pledged to source more local fruits and vegetables and noted, in a press release, that 20% of the fresh produce in its supercenters in the summer was already local, making Wal-Mart the "nation's largest purchaser of local produce."

For a Florida store, that 20% would include any citrus grown in Florida even if it's also sold nationwide, says Wal-Mart spokeswoman Caren Epstein.

"They're not defrauding people, but counting a product that is nationally shipped as local doesn't seem to be within the meaning of locally grown," says Jim Prevor, editor of Produce Business and author of the online Perishable Pundit.

Comments

[dWj]

So if an orange is grown five miles away, but the orange it grew up next to was shipped to North Dakota, this orange isn't "doesn't seem to be within the meaning of locally grown" either? I never intuited "locally grown" to implicate quantum entanglement. It seems strange to me that it seems to someone else like it should.

[WhiteBeard]

While the boxes amid the asphalt seas were still engaged in the process of remaking the shape of the price/choice_quality_service graph into a step function, I had the experience of my locally grown, quite perishable product competing against that advertised in print and on radio as “locally grown” after being shipped a crow flies distance comparable to that between Orlando FL and Minot, ND. The actual distance this product traveled was about 30% more, with a minimum transit time of 4+ days. In my case, quality was self evident and thus no worries.

A fruitful investigation might be quantification of fraud under various permutations of an “environmental” label.

[UrbanWorkbench]

Safeway ran a "Locally Grown" brochure here in Canada - and to them, local meant, grown in Canada. This shows how messed up the food system is.
For those interested in the discussions I had with Safeway, here's a link to my post on the topic.

[superlight]

"If you live in Florida, is a Tropicana orange 'locally grown'?"

Sure, why not.

I think "local" is at best a fuzzy filter for food choices, but if you are in Florida then Florida is more local than Brazil.

[Jeff]

I suppose if Tropicana grows the orange in Florida and ships it to a store in the state, the case for "locally grown" can be made. As someone else said, it's "more local than Brazil." The Wal-Mart part makes my head spin...I'll have to read it after my afternoon cup of (Fair Trade) coffee....

[Andrew]

Tim,

Whilst it may be true that locally produced produce may be a better option from an environmental standpoint, this is not always the case.

Consider, for example the example of Britons purchasing roses. Contrary to popular perceptions, a report in The Economist on February 14 this year, the carbon footprint of roses which are air-freighted from Kenya is six times less than those which are grown in the Netherlands, despite the latter involving less extensive transportation requirements.

The reason for this, according to the report, is that Dutch roses have to be grown in heated greenhouses.

So, whilst local produce is more environmentally friendly in the majority of cases, there are exceptions to this rule, and consumers should not simply assume that local produce is better for the environment.