Locavore Living: Maybe It’s Good, Maybe It’s Bad, Maybe It’s Even Ugly

This week StateImpact New Hampshire introduces part two of our series “Getting By, Getting Ahead.” As you may have seen, reporter Amanda Loder has a blog post about the hurdles facing farmers in New Hampshire, despite the local food movement. With that in mind, we thought we’d point to two other stories in the news media today.  One, from the New York Times, says the slow food movement has created a slow money movement, which actually as the potential to innovate and grow not just local agriculture, but local economies:

“A looming shortage of migrant workers, with fewer Mexicans coming north in recent years, could create a kind of rural-urban divide if it continues, with mass-production farms that depend on cheap labor losing some of their price advantages over locally grown food, which tends to be more expensive.”

However, the blog Grist has a post today featuring an economist and a geography professor, whose book Locavore’s Dilemma claims that widespread adoption of locavorism “can only result in higher costs and increased poverty, greater food insecurity, less food safety and much more significant environmental damage than is presently the case” [emphasis theirs].

Who’s right? You decide.