Local Food Movement Faces Growing Pains MOSCOW, ID (N3) - Many Northwest communities have made sustainability a key part of their plans for the future. They want to provide for their own needs and shrink their carbon footprint. "Locavores," as they're called, can be found in large cities and small towns across the region. Moscow, Idaho has long had a co-op that sells produce from nearby farmers. But its local food movement is having growing pains, now that a large university is getting more involved. KPLU's Doug Nadvornick has the story.

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This is not your father's college dining hall. We're in the main campus cafeteria at the University of Idaho. It's called Bob's Place. Mike Thomsen is our guide. He's the director of operations for Sodexho, the company that runs the campus dining service. He's showing us all the options students have: pizza, cereal, desserts. The vegetarian station is more popular than ever.

Mike Thomsen: "This now represents about 10-percent of our total entrees being consumed. We used to do 20 or 30 a meal. Now we're more like up to 80 or 100."

Thomsen says, in all, the university serves more than 5,000 meals every day.
Now, the University of Idaho is dipping its big toe into the local food movement. As part of its push for sustainability, it set a goal of buying up to five percent of what's served here from local sources. Thomsen says that's why he buys some of his milk from the campus dairy and leftover produce from an organic farm at the university. But those sources aren't enough.

Mike Thomsen: "Last December they came to us and said, We have 300 pounds of carrots left. Can you get rid of them? Is there any way?' And it was like, In a day, yeah.'"

That illustrates the problem facing Moscow's growing local food movement. Most of the farming around this north Idaho city is done on small plots. It's very early in the growing season, but farmer Kate Jaeckel already has lettuce ready. She pokes her head in one of the two greenhouses on her small family farm. There are three long, densely packed rows.

Kate Jaeckel: "My daughter helped plant this. She is eight years old. She planted really heavily, so what you see here is a lot of arugula and radishes and mustard greens and we've got spinach and lettuce coming up in there."

Jaeckel has already clipped some of her bounty and sold it to the local food coop. As the season goes on, she'll sell tomatoes and other vegetables at the coop and the Moscow Farmers' Market.
Jaeckel's farm is strictly small-scale. She says she'd love to expand, but there's no adjacent land available. She says growing for the university would require some creative thinking.

Kate Jaeckel: "I am more than willing to find ways to make it happen, but our costs are a little bit higher, being a small producer and so that makes the food costs for the university a little bit higher, which is maybe not always what they're looking for. They're looking for a bottom-line cost."

She says, if a large institution like the University of Idaho starts to demand more local produce

Kate Jaeckel: "There is a great need for a big production farm around here."

Even if there were that big production farm, Jeannie Matheison says there isn't a system in place to reach the university's local food goal. She works at the university's Sustainability Center.

Jeannie Matheison: "I think we're going to look at the food supply chain. Does it actually have the capacity to feed the university? That's a big question around here that we want to answer."

Matheison says the university is looking into whether it can grow more vegetables at its own organic farm. It's also studying whether its dairy can afford to build a processing plant. Right now, the university has its own cows, but it has to send the milk two hours away, to Spokane, to be pasteurized.
The big questions about local food aren't limited to the Northwest.
James McWilliams has written a book about the local food movement in the US. He's a history professor at Texas State University.

James McWilliams: "The local food movement is, on the whole, an overwhelmingly positive trend, primarily because it's encouraging more Americans to think carefully about where their food comes from."

But he also criticizes it for being what he calls "too fundamentalist." He says some locavores are too restrictive in defining "local." McWilliams says it's very difficult for most regions of the country to supply all the food their people would need for well-rounded diets.

James McWilliams: "You know, there is this question of we like the idea of taking our diet local, but when the rubber hits the road, are we ready to make some radical dietary changes and give some things that are fairly integral to our diet because they simply cannot be produced in the environment that we live in?"

Mike Thomsen is taking that message to heart. The University of Idaho food service director says he's open to expanding the definition of local to include more of the Northwest.

Mike Thomsen: "You know what? We're going to buy from as many local, whether that's in the immediate area or in the region. We just need to reduce the carbon footprint and move forward."

As the local food movement grows, University of Idaho officials believe other institutions will follow their lead. They hope that means, in the long run, it will become easier to find food from closer to home.
I'm Doug Nadvornick in Moscow, Idaho. © Copyright 2012, N3