No, William, that’s not what it means.  But it’s a good entry into “the new anti-exoticism,” wherein “localness [now challenges] cleanliness as being next to godliness in the food dodge.” 

When words so ensconce themselves in colloquial life that the likes of William Safire start to pick on them, it means they’re truly mainstream.  “Locavore,” one we all now know, was coined by Jessica Prentice, who worked at the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market and began what at first was just a month-long experiment in local foods.  A food writer for the San Francisco Chronicle asked her to come up with a word to describe the project, and Prentice came up with “locavore,” (“[melding] the Latin locus, ‘place,’ with vorare, ‘swallow, devour,’” as Safire explains).  It eventually became the Oxford American Dictionary’s 2007 word of the year.

Safire notes adroitly that ‘local’ has even superseded ‘organic’ (now itself commodified, as Mark Bittman claims in another article in the same issue) in the hierarchy. Wal-Mart jumping on the bandwagon—first organic, then local—is, one could say, another sign of the movement having gone mainstream!

In the headlong rush to market processed or industrial foods as more worthy of consumer dollars, other Frankenwords have been coined.  “Superfoods” and “nutraceuticals” catch Safire’s eye and inspire his ire, as well as “pharmafoods,” like taste-free anchovy paste in orange juice.  He adds with a wink, “home-squeezed, of course, at the fish market.”