A locavore is someone who only eats food that is grown and produced locally, not food that is transported long distances. The word locavore was coined in 2005 by Jessica Prentice, a Berkeley, California chef, to describe someone who is interested in eating and promoting locally grown food. Prentice invented the word in association with a food challenge she and others launched in the San Francisco area in 2005 to encourage people to only eat food grown and produced within a hundred-mile radius of where they lived. Locavore is a combination of the word local and the Latin word vorare which means to devour, styled after other similar words such as carnivore, herbivore and omnivore. Locavore was named the 2007 Word of the Year by the Oxford English Dictionary.
Examples
This is what it looks like to be young and hungry in a city obsessed with food – the locavore life, the scrupulously sourced, the beautifully butchered, the five-star restaurant. (The Guardian)
I am a chef, a food entrepreneur and a locavore – a lover of locally-produced food. (The Kings County Advertiser and Register)
With the locavore movement gaining ground in recent years, an increasing number of New England chefs are sourcing hyper-local — whether that’s hand-selecting eggs from the farm down the road or growing fresh veggies in their on-site garden. (The Boston Globe)
But it is the conference that has helped turn the scattered movement into the next new thing for locavores, and the practical topics discussed this year — building more gristmills, making old farm manuals available — reveal its progress from infancy to adolescence. (The New York Times)
For Chapel Hill is the buckle of the Research Triangle foodie belt, a virtual Valhalla for hard-boiled locavores, iron-fisted organics, no-nonsense vegans, and determined devotees of slow food. (The Wall Street Journal)