Nearly All Americans Could Eat Locally

For years and years, we've been told to eat local food. This act makes sense for all sorts of reasons, from trying to put a kink in global warming (the current supply chain logistics use tons of fossil fuels) to the positives that come with supporting small businesses. Yet, despite knowing the importance of eating locally, is there enough local food for everyone to actually do this?

Researchers from UC Merced attempted to answer that question with a new study.

"Right now, local food is less than one percent of the food consumed in the U.S.," said Elliott Campbell, an environmental engineering professor who led the study. "It's growing rapidly, and whenever you're trying to grow something like this, a good question to ask is what is the scale. Is this always going to be a niche market, or could this be something worth growing because it is something that can grow to a significant size?"

That question led to a study titled "The Large Potential of Local Croplands to Meet Food Demand in the United States," which concludes that 90 percent of all Americans could be fed entirely from food grown and raised within 100 miles of where they live.

To get this result, researchers combined USDA yield data, population survey data, and a land-use model that was developed at UC Merced. "The first step is to know how many people are in each city," Campbell said. "Then we used a diet model to find how many calories would be needed to maintain all the basic food groups for each person in those cities."

From there, they determined how much food could be produced by surrounding farm lands -- many of which are currently being used to produce crops that enter the vast supply chain -- and whether or not the yields would meet the balanced diet needs of the adjacent city. "The final stage is to determine which city to allocate it to," Campbell said.

This investigation led to the 90 percent of Americans that could be fed entirely from locally sourced food within 100 miles. But what about the other 10 percent?

According to the study, that area is made up of almost entirely of large coastal cities, in the Northeast region of the country as well as, yes, Southern California. "This is where we have the biggest cities and relatively little cropland around those cities," Campbell said. But even these areas showed promise. "If you look at New York, at 50 miles with the standard diet, we're at about 5% fed. But up to 100 miles, 30% could be fed. That's a huge amount of people."

While Campbell doesn't see an extreme shift happening in our lifetimes, he's also quick to point out that we may not necessarily have the same opportunity in the future. "As agriculture land has been abandoned around those cities, we've lost capacity for local food production." Campbell said.

"Doing the things we're currently doing, adding more markets or trying to develop regional and local distribution networks, those things are really important," Campbell said, before stressing that a diet heavily plant-based is a huge step towards helping in that respect. "But going into the future it might be also important to think about demographics. How big should our cities get? How much land do we want to preserve around those cities?"