Not so long ago, we knew where most of our food came from: out of the garden, or from farmers in the region. But now the ingredients of our suppers are likely to travel thousands of miles to reach our tables. Not just tropical delights like bananas, coffee, and tea—we’re shipping even the basics: potatoes, tomatoes (even in season), meats, and greens, not to mention boxed and canned goods.

While we’ve come to expect all foods to be available year round, the costs of this diet are staggeringly high. Consider heavy chemical use on distant megafarms, the nutrition and taste lost during long-distance travel, and the amount of fuel burned along the way.

But it doesn’t have to be this way.

Contrary to what food industry advertising says—marketers now receive 67 percent of profits in the food business while farmers receive 9 percent—people all around the world are returning to eating food grown near home. In his book Going Local (Routledge, 2000), Washington policy analyst Michael Shuman points out that some '800 million people in the world who live in cities are engaged in urban agriculture, mainly for their own consumption.' One in five residents of Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania’s capital, work as farmers. Two-thirds of the poultry and close to half the vegetables eaten by Hong Kong citizens are produced within the city limits.

Local food is also regaining its rightful place as the center of local econo-mies in the United States. Shuman points out that the growing demand for local fruits and vegetables in the San Francisco Bay Area has expanded the region’s agricultural economy by 61 percent over the past decade. That’s translated into $915 million of agricultural income added to the local economy each year.

Following are some of the brightest ideas in the local food movement.

Athens, Ohio

Athens, Ohio, lies in one of the poorest regions in the nation, at the northern reaches of Appa-lachia. But this sleepy college town of 60,000 has proven the richness local foods can bring to a community. With several organizations working together, Athens has 'one of the most exciting and dynamic local food systems in the country,' writes Mark Ritchie, president of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, in the forthcoming anthology Sustainable Planet: Road Maps for the 21st Century (Beacon, Nov. 2002).

Athens boasts a well-established farmers’ market, but its local food economy really got cooking 15 years ago when ACEnet, an organization that started as a community kitchen, converted an old lumberyard into a wildly successful incubator for local food entrepreneurs. To date, Ritchie reports, farmers who have brought their products and skills together at the center have created more than 120 specialty food businesses and hundreds of jobs. Recently, Rural Action, an Athens organization dedicated to environmental sustainability, began running the National Center for Preservation of Medicinal Herbs, which helps protect—and sell—medicines from the region. Taken together, these initiatives have rekindled the local economy and turned Athens into a national model of sustainable community development.