Local food
Local food consists of food that is sold close to where it was produced. But how do you define local? What, exactly, is a reasonable distance?
In its narrowest sense, local is easy to define. Most people will agree that if something was grown in your own backyard or your city, that counts as local. Beyond that, though, opinions vary.
The USDA Agricultural Marketing Service, for example, takes a very broad approach, and considers food local if it is sold within 400 miles of where it was produced, or it was produced within the same state, US territory, or tribal land. However, the US does not have a standardized legal definition of local food, and no clear reasoning is offered as to why the specific distance of 400 miles was chosen.
In Vermont, on the other hand, the legal definition of local food is very narrow. To be considered local, food must be produced 30 miles from where it is sold, or within the state of Vermont.
Practically speaking, such a narrow definition of what is local isn’t necessarily feasible or practical when looking at a region’s cuisine as a whole. It’s especially difficult in a commercial setting to source everything you need from such a small distance.
In the US, the vast majority of food reaches its destination by truck (some 70%), so trucking distances are a meaningful way to define what is local. My chosen criteria for this project is anywhere that can be trucked into Portland in one day.
There are two kinds of trucking: short-haul and long-haul. Short-haul is locally based, usually within less than 500 miles from a starting location, and drivers are able to return home on a regular basis. With local short-haul, that can be every night, and with regional short-haul, at least a few times a week.
11 hours is the maximum legal work shift allowed for truck drivers, but I’m going to be a bit more conservative and use a standard 8 hour shift. Driving at a cool 60 mph, a truck can go about 480 miles per shift.
The map below shows a simple 480-mile radius from Portland.
Now, a simple radius is a useful tool to get a general sense of distance, but real-world limitations such as geography (mountain ranges, rivers, borders, etc.) and road networks have an impact on the actual distances that can be reached in 8 hours.
Taking these limitations into account, we are left with the counties in the map below, which encompass all of Oregon and Washington, as well as parts of California, Idaho, and British Columbia.
Obviously, though, a 480-mile radius is a sizeable area. The region in the map above is about the size of France or Spain. Produce brought in from Chico, California, is absolutely not local in the sense that produce from a farm in Multnomah County is.
With that in mind, I think food produced in the region should be further differentiated based on two zones: local and regional.
Local: up to 240 miles away, or 4 hours of travel in one direction. This zone only requires local trucking, and trips can generally be completed in a day.
Regional: up to 480 miles away, or up to 8 hours of travel in one direction. Regional short-haul is necessary, and generally requires an overnight trip.
