> produce varieties have been bred to survive longer distance shipping

No, shipping takes very little time. They are bred to survive long storage.

If anything that makes local worse - you have to store the produce to be able to have it for more than a few weeks in a year.

Better to ship it from each area as it grows in season, then you don't have to store it.

The produce up the street may have taken less energy, but the produce grown on a small farm 50 miles from you probably required more energy to reach your door than green grapes from the local supermarket shipped in from Chile. Do not discount the efficiency of the modern transportation network.

In practice importing diminishes options, both for the locations that find their market flooded with the standard supermarket-optimized foods, and the for the poor countries that are compelled to make their land produce the "best" for the sake of profits. In the last century 75% of crop diversity was lost, and in the decades after the Green Revolution poor countries became net importers of food. Simplistic logic that looks at effects completely abstracted from the system, would make such outcome look impossible.

> Because maybe you want your money to pay for the food and not the global transportation networks that brought you the food?

Sure, okay, but...why? Better for the environment? Doesn't seem to be the case. Tighter-nit community? Idealogical opposition to roads? Protectionism?

Serious question. Why?

Local produce usually costs more in transport, not less. Which is why it's more expensive: To pay for that.

If I find local that's actually cheaper then I know it traveled less.

I think food's different. The idea is that transporting food is a waste of energy and thus that local food will be more environmentally friendly. Doesn't seem to hold up, generally, but naïvely, it's a reasonable heuristic. It's usually not a nationalistic thing, but a distance thing.

With manufacturing, however, it is usually nationalistic. There's also a strong protectionalism behind "made in America" movements. To me, those seem to essentially be equivalent to snitching in the prisoner's dilemma: we're better of iff we favor our own products and foreigners don't favor their own.

But nationalism aside, it could definitely be that due to the idea that American-made (or first-world-made) products are better, the target audience is people who value quality over price, and thus quality will be chosen for in manufacturing and the business can still thriv. If you manufacture in newly-industrialized nations, you're doing it to cut price as much as possible, often sacrificing skill/experience=quality.

I should also add a third consideration: a lot of chocolate is produced by slave labor. A lot of t-shirts are made in abusive conditions. A lot of toys are made in emission-unrestricted factories. Choosing an industrialized country means choosing relatively stringent and enforced workers' rights and environmental protections.

This may even hold true with food, despite the way we treat migrant farm workers in the US. Avocados producers in Mexico are often under the thumb of by drug cartels. Those produced in California--probably not so much.

I've always assumed it's more beneficial to buy the cheapest and donate the money you saved to an effective charity. But how many people calculate and apportion out their savings that way? Sounds nice, but if it's not feasible to get people to do it, the rational decision is to advocate for an achievable alternative. Maybe local is that, at least with some goods.

Regarding your first paragraph, that is as likely to be a justification, as people's concern for nutrition and the environment in food exporting countries. Poor countries' net food consumption has been losing its locality since the Green Revolution. It is not hard to imagine that farmers in such countries would benefit from a (local) move towards eating local.