"Local tomato’s"

[jac]

I was in our local Co-Op shop during the summer, who like to advertise the fact they try to source local food. I bought some tomato’s that were labled as produced by a farmer not 5 miles from the store.. “thats good I thot”… untill last week that is… Got talking to the neighbour of the tomato grower and he said the tomato’s are lifted from his farm then taken to Manchester… 260 miles away!!!!! then repackaged in shiny Co-Op plasic and reloaded onto a truck to head north again. Over 500 miles round trip !!! This got me to thinking … are all these adverts we see proclaiming that big supermarket chains are sourcing local food a load of croc ?? seems a bit pointless if it has to travel so far.. bang goes the sustainability aspect….
John

[dominiquer60]

Here in the states, a few grocery stores are able to source local produce directly, however many will purchase produce locally, but it must go through the distribution system as you describe first. Whole Foods is a high end grocery chain that has been heavily criticized for switching from direct sales to using the high miles distribution network. They pride themselves on being environmentally conscious, but now as you say, a local product from 5 miles away has now traveled 500. Many grocers are now requiring farmers to be GAP certified before they accept any produce. The Good Agricultural Practices are believed to be a good thing for food safety reasons, but the costs for a small diverse farmer is very prohibitive.

Erika

[near horse]

I think one issue is availability of “certain” types of produce in offseason. While the supermarket(s) here lean toward the “cheapest” – the local food co-op is working to buy as much locally produced food as possible – they’re even promoting Local 100 or Local 50 – stuff produced within a 50 or 100 mile radius of the coop (that’s pretty small distance here).

Erika – does GAP cover farm to table distances? I don’t know much about it but always felt like GAPs were like GLP (good lab practices) – another bunch of folks to come measure/evaluate your practices, good as they might be, and then tell you how to do it better. Even though they aren’t doing it themselves and often, never have done “IT”.

I would like to hear more about GAP though.

[dominiquer60]

GAPs are supposed to reduce microbial food contamination, below is a quote from the UC Davis GAP site. http://ucgaps.ucdavis.edu/

“Assessment Challenge
Determine methods of improving food safety in a hypothetical setting.”

Water quality, manure/compost management, animal encroachment and personal hygiene are big parts of the plan. GAP certification is only required in mostly a commodity/wholesale sized scale of agriculture, but I can picture it being a requirement for farmers’ markets in the future.

erika

[Author]

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