Around Des Moines

What would Christmas dinner be if it were prepared from locally-grown food? What would your neighborhood look like if land were protected to provide a varied locally-sustainable diet? What would your larder look like if you could order locally-grown food online? The first question is one I have been pondering over the past week. The third question is one that Practical Farmers of Iowa is hoping to answer. They all return to the main question of what is locally grown food?

In terms of distance, 100 miles is the number often used to define local. However, does that mean grown, raised, and processed within those hundred miles, or is it sufficient merely to be grown, raised, or processed locally? In addition, how far should component parts travel, such as fertilizer for crops or fuel for tractors?

Applying the hundred-miles rule to Des Moines, food would need to come from no farther than Clear Lake; Denison; Maryville, Missouri; Fairfield; the Iowa City-Cedar Rapids corridor; or Waverly. This includes many good choices. There are goat cheeses, the Maytag Dairy Farm, the Barilla pasta plant, Grady’s hydroponic tomatoes, and cattle and hog operations. There are vineyards and farms offering a variety of tubers and squash. Soybeans, the vegan protein staple, are plentiful but peanut oil is not. Blue Bunny ice cream, located in Le Mars, is not within the hundred miles, either. As a child, peaches bought from a nearby orchard in summer and then frozen were a tradition at breakfast on Christmas morning. That, too, is a possibility in Des Moines.

In a sustainable local diet, how much food is allowed to be brought in from greater distances? How is that food measured? Is it counted by calories or by tonnage or by nutritional value? Iowa is not wheat or rice country. Would we need to give up bread and crackers? From where should we get salt and how many bananas or how much chocolate can we allow ourselves?

Transporting delicacies great distances is not new. The trade in Asian spices is but one examples. There was also trade among American Indian tribes. In Victorian England ice shipped from the Hudson River in New York state was praised for its purity of taste. Cheap fuel and private automobiles merely made the movement of food easier.

For some people, local purchasing is simply about how it can help sustain family farmers or the taste of truly fresh food. Practical Farmers of Iowa is looking at launching an Iowa Food Cooperative based on programs in Oklahoma and in Nebraska. Consumers would place orders online and then collect the food at a central location. This would occur monthly or at other regular intervals. For an extra charge, the products could be delivered directly to your home. Before the cooperative is launched in 2008, Practical Farmers is soliciting input from potential users of the service through an online survey as to what they might purchase and what type of pick-up location they would prefer.

M.R. Field is editor of Leading Voices: Iowa and went with a traditional theme for this year’s holiday dining.