What is local food and why does it matter?

‘What do you mean, local food?’

This is, without a doubt, the most common question we’ve been asked over the last two years, while putting together a growth plan for local food.

And no wonder. There are 80+ different definitions of local food in academic literature, according to a review conducted by our friends at the Sustainable Food Trust. And there are, no doubt, countless more definitions experienced in everyday life in different places round the country.

Two years ago, we were commissioned by the Rothschild Foundation to find out what the local food sector needs to grow. To stop this topic becoming quickly very confusing, we needed to be as clear as possible about what we mean by local food. So here’s our definition:

Local food is food that is produced, processed, sold and eaten within the same region (or local administrative area) through transparent, SME-focused supply chains.

There are two important aspects to this

Firstly, the geography of ‘local’ must flex

We use ‘region’ loosely. That’s because what local means is different across the UK. For example, local in Wales means Welsh food, while local in London might mean produced in reasonable proximity to the city and not necessarily within it.

And food type matters too. While herbs can be produced hyper-locally almost everywhere in the country, pulses can only be produced in certain geographies and at certain scales, making ‘British’ a reasonable definition of local for them.

Second, we mean local businesses, not corporations

We believe that local food is food that delivers local benefits and it’s for this reason we talk about SMEs. Whilst it’s of course possible for large supermarkets to source and sell food that is geographically local (though they mostly don’t), supermarket spending doesn’t deliver the value to local economies that local businesses do.

Research by the New Economics Foundation into ‘money trails’ gives many examples of how spending with local food businesses has a ‘multiplier effect’ on the local economies. That is, money spent with local businesses tends to be re-spent in the local area, while money spent with supermarkets mostly leaves. For example, they found that income from organic box schemes generate about twice as much for the local economy as supermarkets.

So why does local food matter?

Over the last two years, we’ve consulted around 500 people working in local food to inform Local Food Growth Plan. As part of that, we asked them why local food matters and what benefits they see it delivering on the ground.

The answers revealed eight main benefits, falling into two broad camps:

Resilience

• Climate and nature friendly food production: farming that supports a stable climate and biodviersity
• Food security: our ability to feed ourselves well in a crisis
• Stronger local economies: enabling local business, residents and communities to prosper
• Fairness for producers: including fair pay, contractual agreements and agency in the system

Quality-of-life

• Fresh, healthy, delicious food: food that supports health and enjoyment for all
• Community connection: strong social connection in the places where we live
• Local sovereignty: the ability of a local people to have a say over how their area is
• Placemaking: creating places that are meaningful and enjoyable to those who use them

Of course not all of these apply in every local food situation. But this starts to paint a picture of the incredible value that local food can and does deliver, through amazingly skilled and dedicated people, all around the country.

The Local Food Growth Plan that Sustain developed with other partners aims to grow the local food sector in order to deliver more of these resilience and quality-of-life benefits that we know local food can.