What’s a locavore?  The word was the 2007 New Oxford American Dictionary’s word of the year, and it means someone that eats foods produced locally.  And there are some that think it’s a big deal to do so in today’s world.

I think it’s a good thing.  The idea is to eat foods that are mainly grown with a certain distance from where you live, like 100 miles.  There’s even a local grocery in Dayton, Ohio, that has foods that are within 250 miles of the store, which is great for a market to do.

The push behind this is that we’ve done a lot of our food is grown and processed for convenience and with the shipping times and methods in mind.  This means picking things upripe, processing in quantities that provide economies of scale, spending a lot of time and money transporting from huge farms or processing centers to markets, and so on.

One of the advantages I see in being a locavore, over and above the “I’m doing something good for the planet” part (which is actually somewhat debatable) is that I get to talk to the people that produced the food that I’m going to eat.  I buy eggs from a farm about 10 miles away, and I’ve seen the chickens that lay those eggs.  I go to a farmers’ market, and I get to talk to the farmers that brought in their meats and produce to sell.  There’s something about that personal interaction that makes me feel good about the foods I’m eating then.

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