Increasing local food procurement in schools is frequently aligned with governments’ desire to improve healthy eating goals among students and their families, as well as reducing malnutrition and food insecurity [e.g., (2)]. It is well-documented that providing meals in schools, and especially healthy meals, supports positive student educational and health outcomes [e.g., (9, 10)], but additional benefits resulting from local procurement are much less clear. Part of the challenge is that conducting research in school settings is notoriously difficult, and, as a result, there are few peer-reviewed studies that employ rigorous methods (e.g., randomized control trials). Those that do provide a rigorous analysis suggest that local food in schools may improve food and nutrition-related knowledge and encourage healthy food selection among children, but the evidence on increasing fruit and vegetable consumption is mixed (11). In other words, the health effects are unclear if differences in knowledge and selection do not result in changes in consumption.

Tradeoffs may result from the fact that locally grown and raised food may be more expensive than nonlocal items (12). Local supply chains may incur higher transaction costs due to decreased efficiency. This issue may be exacerbated if policies prioritize purchases from local smallholders that have higher costs of production (13). As schools are budget constrained, shifts to local purchasing may involve tradeoffs that could negatively impact other procurement decisions and, thus, student health outcomes (12).

The food system is global, concentrated in the hands of major food corporations, and vertically integrated, which enhances its economic efficiency (14). Due to budget constraints, schools use this system to procure most of their local products. In other words, most local food does not move directly from the farm to the school, but through an intermediary, such as a wholesaler or distributor (15). Given the market power of the large-scale supply chain actors—even those that are moving locally grown and raised items—there is insufficient evidence that they pass any price premiums to local farmers. In fact, research on food supply chain consolidation and vertical integration finds economic benefits for consumers, but complex implications for farmers, and negative impacts for smallholders and rural communities (14).

Another potential challenge around “local” strategies centers around the economic concept of “beggar-thy-neighbor” [e.g., (16)]. If there is not an absolute increase in purchasing (and therefore production or the value of production) as a result of changes in school food buying patterns (which is unlikely to be the case other than perhaps in the poorest countries), then local purchases are likely to represent a shift in sourcing. Thus, shifts to local purchasing by schools come at the expense of nonlocal products (17). While there may be a local economic benefit, there may be a disbenefit to other regions. Given that local school food procurement strategies are more dominant in more affluent countries, this strategy may negatively impact the global South and more agriculturally dependent economies (18).

Similarly, as most of the world’s population lives in urban areas (19), and hundreds of cities are enacting food policies [e.g., (20, 21)], gains in urban regions may come at the expense of rural ones. Research from several countries specifically calls for improved regional governance and infrastructure structures to more effectively link urban, peri-urban, and regional areas [e.g., (22, 23)]. As rural stakeholders, and particularly rural farmers, that still represent the majority of food production are often left out of urban food policy dialogues (24), broader opportunities for positive regional impacts from “local” food policies remain limited.

Though not a tradeoff per se, a further area of complexity is that “local” food is often produced by nonlocal workers. As the major food retailers have sought to reduce food costs for their consumers, cost pressures have been passed onto food producers and processors. This has led to shifts in local work regimes, involving more precarious working conditions for farm laborers and the increased use of international migrant workers to harvest, process, and package food. Some research claims that the relocalization of global North food systems may have detrimental impacts on the livelihoods of those farmers and agricultural laborers in global South countries reliant on export markets to sell their produce. Indeed, particular sectors of the farming system are now as dependent on migrant labor as they are on climate, soils and fertilizers. Certainly, there has been little appetite amongst national governments to discuss how the structural conditions of agri-food work could be improved to provide decent local employment opportunities. Instead, there appears to be an acceptance that such work will continue to be undertaken by international migrant workers, with the agri-food sector viewed as an exception to restrictive national migration policies across several Global North countries (25).

Many municipalities are in part leveraging school feeding programmes to incentivize transitions to more environmentally sustainable procurement, but there is little evidence to support that producers selling through local markets use more environmentally sound practices. In the U.S., some studies indicate that producers using conventional markets spend more, on average, for chemical inputs and fertilizers than locally oriented operations, which are more likely to use manure (26). However, the overall use of chemical inputs and fertilizers is declining, with the biggest declines occurring on operations using conventional markets. Conventionally oriented producers are also more likely to use no-till or conservation tillage (26). Further, shifts to local food procurement with additional preferences for environmentally friendly labels, such as organic, can result in additional tradeoffs if the specific context of climate, place, and commodity are not considered [e.g., (27)]. For example, in drought-prone, semi-arid cropland systems there can be negative effects on erosion potential and organic carbon in the soil (28).

The link between local foods and food waste is even less clear. An inverse relationship may exist between the amount of food waste and packaging waste if local foods use less processing and packaging, possibly resulting in more food waste from spoilage and less efficient home preparation (26). The limited research in school settings has mixed results, mostly with small sample sizes using plate waste assessments [e.g., (29)]. Further, some research related to community supported agriculture schemes finds that consumers are more likely to waste products that they are unsure how to prepare (30). Given constraints around seasonality in many parts of the world, this challenge may also apply to school settings, where students may be less familiar with seasonal products and thus less willing to try them.

The literature also suggests that the provision of local foods may actually result in a larger transportation footprint in terms of both greenhouse gas emissions and energy consumption due to transportation inefficiencies [e.g., (31–33)]. Although there are thought pieces and limited research that suggest environmental benefits to localized food systems [e.g., (34)], the overwhelming takeaway is that what you eat may be more important than whether or not it is local (32). In other words, local is not inherently environmentally better; impacts need to be carefully considered within the context of many other factors.