How Locavores Brought On Local-Washing

This summer, Starbucks , the world's largest coffee shop operator, reopened one of its Seattle locations under the new name 15th Avenue Coffee and Tea, with faux rustic décor, beer and wine on the menu, and plans to host live music. If 15th Avenue and two other uniquely named stores do well, the company plans to expand its go-local strategy to other cities.

The idea of tailoring global brands to local markets isn't new. McDonald's has been doing it forever: Outlets in mountain towns were built of rough-hewn beams, Australian stores served burgers with sliced beets and fried eggs, and in India the company dispensed with beef, instead dishing up the all-mutton Maharaja Mac.

Common-sense marketing strategy or evil plot? To some members of the buy-local movement, who dub this sort of thing "local-washing"--a play on "green washing," itself a play on "whitewashing"--it's the latter.

Over the last decade or so, the U.S. has seen a strong consumer movement toward eating and buying local. Big brands cottoned on, and looked for ways to cater to this new consumer desire. Wal-Mart started selling veggies grown by nearby farmers in some stores, hanging a "local" banner over the produce aisle. HSBC started marketing itself as "the world's local bank." The locavores are now jumping up and down and saying, "That's not what we meant!"

To be fair, some local-washing corporate initiatives have been ridiculous. Mayonnaise-maker Hellmann's, owned by London-based corporate behemoth Unilever , has launched an "eat local" branding campaign in Canada, apparently based around the notion that you should eat Hellmann's mayonnaise with your locally grown produce. It's confusing on many levels, not least in implying that "eating locally" is the same thing as "eating nationally" in a country of some 3.9 million square miles.

Localists like Donna Ladd, editor in chief of the Jackson Free Press, are meanwhile incensed by a company called ShopLocal, owned by the news chain Gannett , for purporting to promote local businesses to consumers. Whether ShopLocal does that or not depends on your definition of local. Go to ShopLocal.com and it will direct you to outlets of national chain stores located in your area.

But the absurdity of these language-abusing corporate responses to localism highlight what's been wrong with the movement all along, namely that it has no coherent intellectual underpinning. Locally grown food is sometimes, but not inherently, higher in quality than food from farther afield. Locally run businesses do sometimes, but not always, make more genial employers. Locally grown food is sometimes, but not intrinsically, easier on the environment: The energy it takes to grow tomatoes in a northern climate can easily exceed the energy it takes to truck them in from a warmer place. (Economist Tim Harford crunches some of the numbers here.)

Most of the values the locavore movement claims to embrace--healthier food, environmentalism, good treatment of labor--actually have little to do with whether or not a producer is located in one's own ZIP code. So why not just tackle the issues themselves, rather than using localism as a proxy?

Ah, says the local movement, but the point isn't to be absolutist, it's simply to be conscious of where my stuff comes from. But consciousness leads different people to different conclusions. The branch of a national chain located in my neighborhood does, in fact, employ my neighbors. That brand that sources materials globally is providing livelihoods to people somewhere else. Shouldn't I be conscious of them? Why this parochialism that only seeks prosperity for those in my immediate midst?

What localism does have going for it is aesthetic appeal. Fresh fish and berries do often taste better. The eye grows weary of seeing the same chains and brands, the same décor and packaging labels, everywhere one turns. And producers should make no mistake: The feel-good aesthetic of localism is a real consumer demand, even if its definitions are fuzzy.

But by never coming up with a coherent argument, the locavore movement invited corporations to do what they do best. Localism is mostly style over substance, an area where big companies with big marketing departments excel.

This summer produced an apparent groundswell in what used to be known as the alternative press. Stories decrying corporate local-washing ran in Mississippi's Jackson Free Press, the Sacramento News & Review, Buffalo's Art Voice, Burlington's Seven Days and Detroit's Metro Times.

On closer inspection, it turns out that they were all written by the same person, Stacy Mitchell, a senior researcher with the New Rules Project, which encourages local self-reliance. Different versions of the story are tweaked for local markets--the Burlington text contains a passage on Vermont that doesn't exist in other versions; the Detroit text tacks on a paragraph about where to buy Michigan-grown produce. Selling nationwide and tailoring for local markets--sounds like a smart strategy for the writer and her organization. I guess that's why corporations do it too.

Elisabeth Eaves is a deputy editor at Forbes, where she writes a weekly column. Follow her on Twitter here.