Lays It On Thick

Are large food producers stretching or manipulating the real meaning of "locally grown" or "locally sourced"? From an article in the N.Y. Times:

When Jessica Prentice, a food writer in the San Francisco Bay area, invented the term “locavore,” she didn’t have Lay’s potato chips in mind. But never mind. On Tuesday, five potato farmers rang the bell of the New York Stock Exchange, kicking off a marketing campaign that is trying to position the nation’s best-selling brand of potato chips as local food. Five different ads will highlight farmers who grow some of the two billion pounds of starchy chipping potatoes the Frito-Lay company uses each year. One is Steve Singleton, who tends 800 acres in Hastings, Fla. “We grow potatoes in Florida, and Lays makes potato chips in Florida,” he says in the ad. “It’s a pretty good fit.”

Puh-lease.

Well, at least it suggests that the mass-producers of processed food realize that more and more Americans are thinking a few seconds more than they used to about what they put in their mouths.