BALI, Nov. 8 -- The word "locavore", a portmanteau of the Latin words locus (place), and vorare (to swallow), refers to someone who tries to eat food grown and produced locally.

Though it may sound intuitively similar to "carnivore" and "herbivore", it is much, much younger; those two were adopted into English around the mid-nineteenth century, whereas "locavore" was coined by Jessica Prentice in 2005.

A chef and a writer, Prentice and a group of like-minded women challenged people in the Bay Area to eat only local food for a month. Olivia Wu, a food writer for The San Francisco Chronicle, asked her for a name to describe the people who took it on, and thus, the word was born.

Twenty-one years on, the locavore movement is, ironically, ...