Buying locally is such a hot new trend that you see "local" advertised everywhere.

It’s so hot, that if the choice is between local food and organic food, consumers will take local food any day of the week. Consumers increasingly want fresh food and to connect with who’s growing it. A Farmers Forum poll found 90 per cent of consumers will buy a local, conventional apple over an imported organic apple. (See survey on page 11)

But what is "local"?

An American farm advertised local food to New Yorkers, as long as many of them didn’t mind the five-hour leisurely drive, that included squeezing through Manhattan traffic, to get to the cherry tomatoes 250 miles away. Hardly local.

Loblaws stores have signs announcing "Local freshness" when it comes to fruits and vegetables. That means anything that can get to the store from an Ontario farm in three to six days. That makes a Windsor-area apple local to consumers in Kingston.

A new American concept making its way by word-of-mouth and through the Internet is called the 100-mile diet. That means food grown within 100 miles of where you’re buying. The Canadian government has jumped into the fray with its own standard. "Local" or "locally grown" means that the "domestic goods being advertised originated within 50 km of the place where they are sold."

Ottawa Farmer’s Market manager Andy Terauds said a federal official told him that in his case local means any county adjacent to Ottawa. Terauds’s standard is anything within 100 miles.

But there is no enforced standard. The result sometimes mean misrepresentation and it’s at farmer’s markets where you hear the most complaints. To avoid fraud, Terauds’s Lansdowne Park market is only for vendors who produce their own food or crafts. The new market started last year with 19 vendors, taking advantage of consumer demand for locally grown produce. There are now more than 80 registered vendors.

In June, Ontario Farmers Market association secretary Robert Chorney went to a farmer’s market in Muskoka, in which he said a vendor was selling 18-inch long carrots and four-inches around the top. "They were Chinese carrots and passed off as locally grown," he said. "There’s a lot of that crap going on."

It’s so discouraging that each year real farmers quit selling at markets, Chorney said. For this reason, the association is fighting back. It started two certified farmers markets in Toronto this year, similar to the Lansdowne Park market. Each vendor must be a farmer selling only their own produce.

The Toronto farmer’s markets were launched following a meeting of 131 growers after the association placed ads in a growers’ publication that read: "Tired of competing at farmers’ markets with hucksters and peddlers who do not have a dime invested in a farm?"

"There’s an infiltration of produce jockeys and hotshots and re-sellers who go to the food terminals and buy products and pose as farmers," Chorney argues. He said he has interviewed sellers who tell him bald-face lies about producing their own food. At one Toronto area farmer’s market, only seven of the 12 vendors are actually selling what they produced, he said.

The farmer-certified markets are a huge success story for real farmers. Now a second farmers-certified market is opening in central Ottawa. "This has passed our wildest expectations," said Teraud of the Lansdowne Park market, noting last year vendors grossed on average $1,000 per day.