Can Everyone Eat Local?

Guest: Elliott Campbell, PhD, Associate Professor of Environmental Engineering, UC Merced The “local food” movement has gone beyond a handful of hip, progressive towns to touch nearly every city in America. Farmer’s markets and locally-grown produce are fairly easy to find these days. But even the most devoted locavores have to get some of their diet from beyond the 50-mile radius generally considered the boundary of “local.”  If one day all Americans decided they wanted to eat only local food, would anybody starve? University of California-Merced’s Elliott Campbell analyzed food production and population trends across the country and found that, surprisingly, about 90 percent of the country could be fed by food grown nearby.