The Relocalization of Food Processing

Much attention has focused on food safety in the past year and. Articles on how buying more local food can increase the safety of the food your family eats have been published on blogs, in newspapers, and in magazines like Newsweek and National Geographic. The recommendation to get more of our food from local sources is not new, but there is an companion issue to the localization, or perhaps more correctly, the relocalization of our food supply that unfortunately does not get near the attention of its more mainstream sibling. I think of this as the relocalization of our food processing industry. When it comes to increasing food safety, having food processed locally is perhaps the biggest step that could be taken.

It is however an issue that gets almost no press. A Google searches for either “relocalization of food processing” or “localization of food processing”, return zero results. Break the phrase up and you get some results, but the majority of them are unrelated to this specific issue. This may be because people smarter than me have decided that it is a losing proposition to even consider the idea. Why? Maybe because the average consumer already sees food prices as too high. Localizing food processing facilities may indeed add to these already high costs and families with an already stretched budget can’t be expected to support something that will strain that budget even further. But food safety is an important issue and as the past year has shown us the current methods of food production and processing are often unsafe.

Right now the bagged lettuce that is purchased in San Francisco, Boston, Miami, Chicago, or even Anchorage, may all be processed at one facility in California. The centralization of food processing has occurred almost across the board. If a food is bagged, boxed, canned, or in anyway packaged for delivery to your grocery, it has probably been done at one of a few huge industrial-scale plants and then shipped hundreds or thousands of miles to the place where you purchase it. The problem with the single huge processing facility and our food safety is that a contamination at a single processing facility can become a national or international problem overnight, potentially affecting thousands or even millions of people. When food processing is done on a more local scale, problems that arise have a far less reaching effect.

As mentioned above, the main roadblock to the relocalization of food processing is, like everything in our food supply, the increased cost. Just as the cost of food production is artificially low, kept there by the huge scale of modern industrial-scale farming, the cost of food processing is also artificially low. This may indeed be a losing proposition, but I throw it out for debate. What do you think? Is it even possible that our current food distribution and processing system can be made safer? Are the risks that are involved with our current system more than offset by the lower prices at the grocery store?