What is local food? (original) (raw)

1 Introduction

Local food has been championed for a variety of reasons. For example, some argue that consuming local food is more environmentally sustainable than consuming non-local foods. The reason is that local food travels fewer “food miles” from the location of its production to retail. Therefore, some contend, it has less of an environmental impact (Cleveland et al., 2014; Noll, 2014; Pollan, 2006). Local food has also been defended on the grounds that it supports the culture and economy of the local community (Thompson, 2012). Furthermore, some argue that local foods that are expressive of a particular region have certain cultural or aesthetic values (Adams, 2018; Agyeman et al., 2017; Sandler, 2015; Schnell, 2013, p. 624).

But the local food movement has not been without its critics. Such critics argue that local foods are not usually more sustainable than non-local foods because food miles are a bad proxy for environmental impact (Cope, 2014; de Bres, 2016; Desrochers & Shimizu, 2012). Moreover, buying local food, some critics contend, is a privilege reserved for the rich and should not be mistaken for a sign of virtue (DeLind, 2011). And some argue that calling a product “local” is a protectionist move that insulates that product against price pressures otherwise brought on by competition (Navin, 2014). Sceptics about the value of local food may further defend global supply chains by arguing that they increase resilience by protecting against the impacts of local disasters (Desrochers & Shimizu, 2012). In summary, local food, critics say, does not live up to any of the values associated with it.

In its present form, the dispute between supporters and critics of the local food movement is hard to adjudicate. A major reason for this is that, as Feldmann and Hamm’s (2015) meta-analysis demonstrates, the term ‘local food’ possesses no standardized definition, and consumers in different contexts use it with very different senses. Some mean to refer to foods produced within a certain radius, others mean to refer to food produced within certain political boundaries, yet others have specialty criteria in mind, or more holistic approaches that also include emotional and/or ethical dimensions such as personal relations within a region (Feldmann & Hamm, 2015, p. 156). Given that the term ‘local food’ is used with all these different senses, it is hard to assess the arguments marshalled for and against local food. Some of these arguments may apply to ‘local food’ in some senses of this term, though “local food” when defined differently may stay immune. The upshot is a scope problem: it is unclear whether the arguments marshalled for and against local food apply to all senses of the term, or only some.

It also isn’t clear whether the scope problem is the only problem. Or whether at least some disambiguated senses of local food are defective rather than merely ambiguous in the sense that they “… run counter to the interests of their users” (Borghini et al., 2021b, p. 12,226). There are different ways in which concepts might be defective in this sense. One elaboration that we will explore is that concepts might not track the values that they are thought to track sufficiently well or clearly.

Our central aim in this paper is to lay out the theoretical groundwork so that the respective arguments both for and against local food can be clearly assessed. We do so by distinguishing six concepts of local food that are implicit in the extant umbrella term ‘local food’ that more clearly track the main reasons that consumers value local food. For example, we forge a concept that we call “local-sustainable food.” This refers to foods that are made with ingredients that are grown or produced in the geographically proximate environment, which are more environmentally sustainable than the same imported foods. Strawberries that are grown in season in California are an example of such foods. Local-sustainable food is designed to track the value of environmental sustainability.

This is a project in conceptual engineering, insofar as we are disambiguating the concept of ‘local food’ with the goal of improving it. If the goal is to improve a concept, a crucial question concerns the ends for which we improve it. Our aims in this article are nonpartisan. We aim to improve the concept of local food with the goal of providing a clear framework for adjudicating the debates about whether the local food movement serves sufficiently clear and valuable ends. We remain neutral about whether the added clarity will ultimately help or hinder the local food movement.

The remainder of our paper has the following structure: We begin by surveying existing work on the topic (Sect. 2). After that, we present and defend a new way of engineering the concept of local food into six concepts (Sect. 3). We show how this engineered concept can serve as the theoretical foundation for adjudicating several disputes between supporters and critics of local food (Sect. 4). We close by arguing that our engineering of the concept of local food helps to diffuse Strawson’s challenge to the value of conceptual engineering in a novel way (Sect. 5).

2 Surveying the existing literature

Borghini et al. (2021a) were the first to argue that the concept of local food is ambiguous and should be engineered. We begin by surveying their account, with the goal of highlighting both its merits and its limitations. In doing so we ultimately pave the way for our original argument.

Borghini et al. (2021a) argue that ‘local food’ should be engineered into a “robust” concept. To flesh out what a robust concept is, they argue that the concept of local food must be gradable, negotiable, fallible, and wide.Footnote 1 In more detail:

  1. a.
    ‘Local food’ should be “gradable” in the sense that it should be possible for a particular food to be more or less local. For instance, a food produced 5 miles away is more local than a food produced 95 miles away (Borghini et al., 2021a, p. 18).
  2. b.
    ‘Local food’ should be “negotiable” in the sense that what counts as local food should emerge from a negotiation of individual or collective values (Borghini et al., 2021a, p. 19).
  3. c.
    ‘Local food’ should be “fallible” in at least two different senses. First, it should be in-principle possible to assess in a public and non-partisan way whether it has been applied correctly in a particular instance (Borghini et al., 2021a, p. 20; following; Reed, 2002). Second, speakers engineer concepts with particular goals in mind. It should then in principle be possible to assess in a public and non-partisan way whether the newly engineered concept serves the purposes for which it has been devised (Borghini et al., 2021a, p. 20).
  4. d.
    ‘Local food’ should be “wide”, in the sense that it should accommodate all of the different folk conceptions of local food. Crucially, Borghini et al. do not presuppose that a wide concept of local food will consist in a single conception of local food. Indeed, they conclude that local food is a complex concept which we cannot understand as “one generic category” whereby everything could be regarded as either local or non-local on the basis of one standard of measurement (Borghini et al., 2021a, p. 19).

Borghini et al.’s theory is valuable in two major ways. First, their theory highlights some core theoretical assumptions that must be made for the project of engineering the concept of local food to be viable. In particular, negotiability presupposes that people can refine concepts through their intentional actions (perhaps with limitations). This assumption is not universally accepted. For example, social semantic externalists believe that the meaning of words is fixed by large-scale use patterns in a speech community, such as the huge community of English speakers. A single speaker or even a group of speakers has in most cases very little control over large-scale use patterns (see for instance, Cappelen, 2018). So, if we want to undertake the project of engineering the concept of local food, we need to assume that, either, this version of semantic externalism is mistaken, or else that speakers can, in principle, influence large-scale use patterns of terms through their intentional actions.

The second way in which the theory of Borghini et al. (2021a) is valuable is that it highlights some problems with certain existing conceptions of local food. Some people conceptualize local food merely in terms of relative spatial distances, using the metric of food miles (see, for instance, Smith & Mackinnon, 2008). But as Borghini et al. (2021a) persuasively argue, this is not comprehensive and inclusive enough because it misses out other important meanings associated with the term. Thus, the condition of wideness illuminates that some existing conceptions of local food are insufficient to capture everything that is valuable about local food. And, accordingly, the concept of local food needs to be engineered to make it sufficiently comprehensive and inclusive.

But despite the value of Borghini et al. (2021a) argument, it faces certain important limitations. Their four desiderata are very general. As such they don’t do much to limit the scope of possibility for the concept of local food. All concepts subject to conceptual engineering—not merely the concept of local food—should be negotiable and fallible in the sense that Borghini et al. (2021a) specify. Identifying that ‘local food’ is gradable distinguishes it from other concepts that aren’t gradable, such as citizenship. But this doesn’t give us much insight into the nature of local food: gradeability is a very general feature that many concepts share, including height, freshness, health, etc. Finally, the concept of wideness rules out certain restrictive conceptions of local food from providing a complete account. But it doesn’t do much to determine which possible wide concept of local food we should select.

Of course, this isn’t to criticize Borghini et al. per se. They are clear that they do not aim to provide “an axiological evaluation of specific perspectives on eating local”, but rather the “formal desiderata any value-laden perspective on locality, be it carried forward by individual agent or a community, should fulfill” (Borghini et al., 2021a, p. 18). But it does indicate that much is left unsaid by Borghini et al.’s approach even if everything they say is correct. Accordingly, by building on their background formal desiderata we will develop an engineered concept of local food that is axiological and substantive. Thus, whereas Borghini et al. are concerned with general formal features of local food concepts, we are concerned with their meaning in specific value-laden contexts.

3 Engineering ‘local food’

As we argued above, the folk concept of local food is used in different contexts to track different values. Thus, it is unclear whether the arguments marshalled for and against local food apply to all senses of the term or only some. To put people in a better position to discuss the topic of local food clearly, we will engineer the concept. Our proposal is guided by a key idea shared by many philosophers who have contributed to the conceptual engineering literature: to engineer a concept is to change it with the goal of improving it (see, for instance, Dembroff, 2016; Haslanger, 2000). So, to engineer a concept, we need to think carefully about the values and goals that we want it to serve. And the success of the engineering operation depends on whether the new concept serves the goals for which it is needed better than the extant concept.

There are different ways of going about this project. One option is to engineer the concept of local food so that it is improved on the basis of values that we identify through armchair philosophical reflection. This approach is coherent although it faces a charge of hubris: perhaps philosophers aren’t in the best position to specify independent of actual usage the values that the folk use of local food should serve.Footnote 2 Another option is to engineer the concept of local food so that it better captures the values that are already recognized in the local food movement. We will take this approach because it avoids the charge of hubris. Footnote 3

More precisely, we will distinguish between different concepts of local food, each of which is designed to better track certain values held by members of the local food movement. By a concept that “tracks a value”, we mean a concept which is such that the elements in its extension are likely to exemplify the value. For example, the concept of a piglet tracks the value of cuteness since piglets are likely to be cute. To identify the relevant values that the newly coined concepts will track, we will rely on empirical research.

A meta-analysis of 73 publications by Feldmann and Hamm (2015) established that consumers value ‘local food’ for six main reasons:Footnote 4

Consumers may value local food for reasons not on this list. But these are the most common values cited in the studies surveyed by Feldmann and Hamm (2015). Thus, for the sake of simplicity, we will focus on these values.

The following table explains how these values can be used to engineer the concept of local food. Specifically, we disaggregate six distinct senses of local food, each of which tracks one or more of these values more precisely than the umbrella term allows:Footnote 5

Distinguishing between these six different types of local food is a type of conceptual engineering. For, standardly, the distinctions between these six types of local food are elided in natural language: they are all lumped under the umbrella term of local food. Introducing these more fine-grained distinctions would reform the current practice by equipping people with more circumscribed and precise concepts.

The first two of these concepts, local-sourced and local-produced food, represent the most general categories. The other concepts are sub-categories of one or both of the first two. For example, any local-sustainable food is also a local-sourced or a local-produced food.

These different concepts of local food are unified insofar as they all construe relative physical proximity to the consumer as a necessary condition. Consequently, each of these local food concepts is relative to a location. Accordingly, a food that is local in Los Angeles (in any of the above senses) is not local in New York in exactly the same sense.

These concepts of local food are all gradable in the sense that they can be realized to various degrees. For example, local-sourced and local-produced foods are more local in their respective senses the nearer to the consumer they are grown or produced. A final clarification is that the degree to which multi-ingredient foods are local-sourced foods is determined by the proportion of their ingredients that have been grown in the geographically proximate environment. In this regard, our argument builds on the formal desiderata that are provided by Borghini et al. (2021a, pp. 2, 7, 18).

4 The value of our engineering project

In this section we demonstrate the value of our engineered concept of local food by showing how it can provide a clearer theoretical foundation for adjudicating debates about whether the local food movement serves sufficiently clear and valuable ends. Our aim isn’t to reach all things considered judgements. Rather it is to show how our engineered concept can provide a clearer theoretical foundation for framing and clarifying the complex nuances of the debate in a way that moves things forward.

The most straightforward argument for the value of our approach is that it is necessary to distinguish these six concepts of local food, because they are each associated with different values.Footnote 6 Valuing foods because they are composed of locally grown ingredients is, for instance, a different thing entirely from valuing foods because their production takes place on farms that are physically accessible to local consumers. The former (which we have called “local-sourced food”) might be valued for quality and taste whereas the latter (which we have called “local-accessible food”) could be valued for reasons concerning animal welfare. Drawing these distinctions allows us to get at these different underlying values more clearly and directly. Consider an analogy: mechanical tools like flathead screwdrivers are effective precisely because they have a limited but clear function. We think that by distinguishing different concepts of local food we can sharpen our conceptual toolbox by allowing different concepts to be used in a more limited but clearer way. This improves the current folk use of the term local food insofar as too many different senses are subsumed under one single concept.

Because our engineered concept of local food provides a clearer conceptual toolbox, it can be used to enhance deliberations about the value of local food—both within the local food movement and between members and critics of the movement. For example, within the local-food movement people can deliberate about how to weigh the value of local-sourced food against local-socially responsible food. Given that the local food movement has limited resources, our engineered concept can therefore facilitate discussion within the movement about pressing questions about which types of local food should be prioritized and for which reasons. Our engineered concept can also be used to achieve a clearer grasp of questions about how the value of various types of local food should be weighed against eating different types of non-local food. For instance, what relative value should be placed on sourcing particular types of local-accessible foods over sourcing the same types of foods non-locally if these non-local versions can be produced with a smaller carbon footprint. This way of framing the point requires both supporters and skeptics to confront difficult tradeoffs about how values like animal welfare should be weighed against the environmental value of emitting a smaller carbon footprint.

Although our engineered concept of local food is clearer than the extant concept it arguably has a limitation. This is because one way in which a food concept can be assessed is epistemic: in terms of the degree to which it is accurate (Borghini et al., 2021b, p. 12,233). Our engineered concept is more accurate than the extant concept of tracking the underlying values in a fine-grained way but the correlation between our different senses of local food and the values that they realize is still imperfect. For example, not every farm that is physically accessible to consumers in the local community implements higher than average animal welfare standards. Consumers, therefore, cannot assume that because a type of food is local-accessible that it necessarily has higher standards of animal welfare than other available options. But although this limitation exists it doesn’t undermine the value of our project: many concepts are imperfect in the sense that they don’t perfectly track underlying values. They can, however, be valuable if they are sufficiently good at tracking the underlying values. For instance, consider the concept of a “fair trade product.” Not every fair-trade certified product perfectly guarantees better conditions for workers. But the concept is arguably nonetheless valuable because it tracks those conditions sufficiently reliably in enough cases (Ehrlich, 2018; cf. Sylla, 2014, pp. 34–57). A question for both supporters and critics of local food is whether the local food concepts are sufficiently reliable. We think that, informed by the clearer understanding that we have supplied through our engineered concept, that this question requires much more extensive investigation.

The foregoing are general considerations about how our engineered concept can better frame and facilitate debate. In the remainder of the section, we will explore in more depth how it can be used to enhance particular arguments both for and against the local food movement.

4.1 Enhancing arguments for the local food movement

One of the most persistent objections to the local food movement is that it isn’t true that consuming local food is more environmentally sustainable than consuming non-local foods. The standard empirical critique focuses on the fact that food miles are a bad proxy for environmental sustainability (Cope, 2014; de Bres, 2016; Desrochers & Shimizu, 2012).

But the category of local-sustainable food avoids this critique. It’s true that not all local food is more sustainable than non-local food. For example, because of the need to artificially heat British greenhouses, it is estimated that British tomato producers emit 2,394 kilograms per ton of crop compared to 630 kilograms per ton for their Spanish competitors (DEFRA, [2005](/article/10.1007/s11229-026-05557-2#ref-CR10 "DEFRA. (2005). Validity of food miles as an indicator of sustainable development’, ED50254 Issue 7: http://www.defra.gov.uk

            "); see also Desrochers & Shimizu, [2012](/article/10.1007/s11229-026-05557-2#ref-CR13 "Desrochers, P., & Shimizu, H. (2012). The Locavore’s Dilemma. In praise of the 10, 000-Mile Diet. Public Affairs."), p. 96); thus Spanish tomatoes that are imported into Britain are _more_ environmentally sustainable than the local alternative even though they come with more food-miles. But _some_ local food is more environmentally sustainable than the same foods imported from elsewhere, and it is valuable to have a clear category for such local foods.[Footnote 7](#Fn7) For example, oranges that are grown in season in California will (at least standardly) be more sustainable than an imported alternative.

Here it might be objected that the category of local-sustainable food doesn’t show anything interesting about local food: it merely picks out the subset of local food that—as a contingent matter of fact—is sustainable. And thus, it is no more significant than the subset of _non_-local food that—as a contingent matter of fact—happens to be sustainable. But this objection can be overcome by noting that the connection between the localness of the food (understood in relative geographical proximity) isn’t merely contingent. For it is in virtue of this localness that some foods are sustainable or at least more sustainable than non-local options. For example, returning to the example of Californian oranges: part of the reason why this product is more sustainable in California is that it has to travel less far and thus transport-related greenhouse gas emissions are comparatively low.

The concept of local-sustainable food thus shows that even though the standard food-miles critique of local food has some force, its scope is limited to some but not all categories of local food. By making the more restricted claim that local-sustainable food is more environmentally sustainable this critique can thus be evaded.

4.2 Enhancing arguments against the local food movement

Most obviously our engineered concept of local food provides a clearer framework for critics to articulate their objections—and the scope of such objections. In doing so it will probably help to crystalize more targeted and forceful critiques. In particular, consider the category of local-socially responsible food. Critics can argue that this is a defective concept, in the sense that it runs counter to the interests of its users (Borghini et al., 2021b, p. 12,249). There are different ways in which a concept can be defective in this sense. Most obviously, it can simply serve bad values (Ibid. 2249). But with respect to local-socially responsible food the case is more subtle. It isn’t that the value of providing farm workers with better conditions than standard practices is bad—on the contrary, it is plausibly very good. It is rather that there is no connection between this value and the localness of the food (understood in relative geographical proximity). Thus, in contrast to the category of local-sustainable food there is at most a contingent connection between the localness of food and the value of local-socially responsible food. The concept of local-socially responsible food, therefore, serves no clear purpose and it would be better just to talk about socially responsible food independent of local food.

Although we won’t try to reach an all things considered conclusion about this objection, it seems like evidence against the usefulness of this concept. Of course, even if it is necessary to dispense with this particular concept of local food it isn’t a devastating objection to the local food movement. It just shows, on closer inspection, that there isn’t a sui generis category of local-socially responsible food that can be fixed by one particular way in which consumers value local food.Footnote 8

Rather than merely targeting problems with particular concepts of local food, a critic might press a deeper type of worry that attacks the clarity and coherence of the local food movement as a whole. Namely, the fact that we engineered the extant concept of local food into so many different concepts reveals that the aims and values of the local food movement are so diverse that they can’t be reconciled. Whilst it’s true that our engineered concepts of local food are unified both in the formal sense that follows Borghini et al. (2021a) and insofar as they treat relative physical proximity to the consumer as a necessary condition, they aren’t sufficiently unified in a deeper axiological sense: this is because the different concepts of local food that we have disaggregated have sufficiently diverse values. Thus, given that no axiologically unified concept can serve the entire community’s purposes it would be sensible for the local movement to fragment into different factions that try to defend particular conceptions of local food like local-affordable food rather than all of the concepts of local food. A similar worry has been rehearsed in the feminist literature about autonomy: some feminists have argued that their divergent political commitments make it difficult to converge on a single engineered concept of relational autonomy (see, for instance, Mackenzie & Stoljar, 2000, for an overview of the core issues).Footnote 9 Essentially, just as feminist attempts to engineer the concept of autonomy have revealed deep disagreements about what social and relational conditions are necessary for genuine autonomy, so too our engineering of local food reveals that the movement’s apparent unity may mask genuinely irreconcilable axiological commitments. Thus, perhaps, our attempt to engineer the concept of local food reveals that the local-food movement should fragment into different movements with different aims rather than be unified.

It might be objected that this isn’t a problem for the local food movement. It merely reflects a problem with our attempt to engineer the concept of local food. For it is helpful to have murky concepts like ‘local food’ that allow people to band together despite their differences. Thus, ambiguity in the concept of local food isn’t a defect. Rather it is valuable because it facilitates coalition-building.Footnote 10 This is a possibility. But in response we would like to reiterate the aim of our paper: it is the neutral claim of supplying clarity rather than the partisan aim of supporting the local food movement. At least from the perspective of this neutral aim, it seems as though if the movement was held together by a sufficiently murky concept that can’t survive conceptual clarification, then its apparent unity was illusory. Disambiguation doesn’t destroy real unity. Rather it reveals that the unity was never there to begin with.

We won’t try to reach an all things considered judgement about whether this more holistic critique undermines the unity of the local food movement to a sufficient degree that it should fragment into different social movements. It seems to turn on complex questions about whether proponents of the local food movement can form sufficient agreement and solidarity despite their disagreements about which types of local food are most valuable.

5 The worldliness of conceptual engineering

We close by arguing that engineering the concept of local food has broader theoretical value. Conceptual engineering as a topic or practice in philosophy can be traced back to Carnap’s seminal work on probability (Carnap, 1971/1950), in which he introduced the idea that concepts can be “explicated”: an unclear concept with no explicit definition can be replaced by a clearly and explicitly defined concept. Carnap considered explication a process by which a “pre-scientific” concept is turned into a “scientific” concept.

From the very beginning, work on conceptual engineering has been dogged by the objection that it’s pointless. Perhaps the most prominent version of this objection is due to Strawson (1991/1963), who argued (against Carnap) as follows:

typical philosophical problems about the concepts used in non-scientific discourse cannot be solved by laying down the rules of exact and fruitful concepts in science. To do this last is not to solve the typical philosophical problem, but to change the subject (505).

Essentially, when we engineer a concept, according to Strawson, we do not get closer to answering an existing question but merely change the topic.

We have sympathy with Strawson’s challenge. Suppose we ask, “what is freedom?”, and respond by saying “let freedom be the ability to do otherwise”. There arguably is a sense in which this stipulation has simply changed the original question. For the folk sense of freedom is arguably broader than the modal ability to do otherwise. Thus, if we now ask again “what is freedom?”, supposing the prior stipulation has been successful, we are asking a different question than before.

However, there is a way of sidestepping Strawson’s challenge. Sometimes, progress is made, not by answering a question, but by abandoning a question and replacing it with a better one. Perhaps the question “why care about local food?” in the extant folk sense of local food isn’t a good question to ask. Since ‘local food’ can mean so many different things, in its extant folk sense. But with the newly engineered concepts in hand, we can ask and answer questions about the value of different kinds of local food much more fruitfully. It may be true, as Strawson argues, that this involves changing the subject. But, even so, this is still compatible with the claim that theoretical progress has been made.

To elaborate, in the case of local food, the kind of progress we have made through engineering the concept of local food is not merely cognitive or intellectual progress. People care about local food because they have certain values: they value sustainability, they care about community, or they want to support a certain regional economy. Many consumers are willing to support these values with their purchasing power. Our engineered concept of local food allows us to understand much better whether and how our food purchases support our values. In that way, our engineered concept of local food helps us to bring our actions into better alignment with our values. This, we believe, is tremendous progress—even if we have changed the topic along the way.

Moreover, the disambiguation strategy has a further and perhaps simpler virtue in this regard. When we engineer a concept into multiple distinct concepts, we don’t foreclose discussion of any of the original dimensions of the problem. For all the concepts remain available for continued inquiry. This stands in contrast to a single-concept precisification, which risks neglecting the other dimensions of the original problem that a chosen precisification leaves behind. Consequently, the strategy of disambiguation doesn’t merely change the subject to an entirely new subject. Rather it multiplies the subjects available for discussion, all of which were implicitly present in the original folk concept.

Our response to Strawson has certain advantages over earlier responses in the literature. A popular response to Strawson’s challenge attempts to argue that the topic of a conversation can remain constant throughout processes of conceptual engineering. For example, on Cappelen’s (2018) view, conceptual engineering changes the intension and the extension of terms. To clarify, the intension refers to the meaning or rule that determines a term’s application, and the extension refers to the actual set of things in the world to which the term correctly applies. When we engineer the concept of a woman we change both the intension and the extension of the term ‘woman’. But, Cappelen argues, topics are more coarse-grained than intensions or extensions. For that reason, the topic under discussion when we discuss women can remain the same even if the intension and the extension of the term ‘women’ changes. That’s how Cappelen attempts to dodge Strawson’s challenge.

However, we think that Cappelen’s response to Strawson’s challenge is not fully satisfying. Strawson’s main concern is that, when we engineer a concept, we change the topic. Cappelen responds that the topic can remain the same. But this seems a bit like table-thumping. Sundell (2020) aptly expresses this concern as follows:

It’s the worry that if speakers engaged in some inquiry refer to different kinds of objects (because of a change in intension), then they’re not investigating the same thing. […T]he conceptual engineer has, according to this objection, failed to give a theoretical account of how the relevant inquiries could be considered ‘continuous’ […]. Saying that these cases are such that, in certain contexts, we can get away with using the ordinary English phrase ‘the same topic’ is simply not responsive to this worry. (589)

Our account of the kind of progress made through conceptual engineering avoids this concern. We are happy to allow that the topic of inquiry may change when we engineer a concept and are, consequently, under no obligation to explain when or how the topic may remain the same. Conceptual engineering can help us make a kind of progress that’s compatible with changing the topic, for example by allowing us to bring our actions into better alignment with our values.

6 Conclusion

People value local food for various reasons, ranging from environmental sustainability to quality and taste. As a result, it is unclear whether members of the local food movement talk about and value the same thing. In this article, we remedied this unclarity by distinguishing between six concepts of local food, each of which has a different meaning and tracks different values. We do not write this as partisans of the local food movement, but rather as impartial bystanders wishing to improve the debate.

Our engineered concept provides new resources for both friends and foes of local food. Most obviously, for friends of local food, it provides a sharper account of different concepts of local food and their accompanying values. Friends of local food can use these concepts to present and defend the value of local food more precisely. For example, to date, a lot of discussion about local food has revolved around an empirical debate about whether local food is more environmentally friendly than non-local food (Cleveland et al., 2014; Noll, 2014, Pollan, 2006; Cope, 2014; de Bres, 2016; Desrochers & Shimizu, 2012). Although important, this empirical debate threatens to obscure many other dimensions of the local food debate. Our conceptual distinctions facilitate discussion, for example, of whether local-accessible food is valuable, independently of this empirical debate.

But skeptics of local food can also use these concepts to try to sharpen their critique of local food—in a way that goes beyond the empirical claim that local food isn’t standardly environmentally better than non-local food. In particular, it is possible that our conceptual distinctions ultimately will lead to a splintering of the local food movement into various factions, which may weaken its political power.

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