Eating local, thanks in part to a growing number of farmers markets nationwide, is a big trend.

It’s so big, in fact, there’s already been a backlash against it with everyone from The New York Times to The Economist running stories criticizing the thinking behind the movement.

Those stories, and the rebuttal stories that came after them, however, miss a major piece of the local-food puzzle.

It isn’t just your household’s “carbon footprint” or “food miles” that are at stake.

I believe — at risk of using the only word more overused than “sustainability” — it’s about community.

There, I said it.

It’s about knowing not just where your food comes from but about who the heck grew it, why it was hard and the miracle of nature that is whole foods (and you know I don’t mean the Big Organic grocery store chain).

Today, as part of Get Fresh, The Herald’s year-long series on eating local in the Food section, I was lucky enough to interview a philosophically inclined sweet corn and vegetable farmer named Darren Wright.

Wright, who has farmed practically all his life as a first-generation farmer, believes little-guy farms like his Gypsy Rows Co. in Silvana help consumers feel connected to their food again.

“Too much efficiency is just inhuman. Something is lost,” he wrote me in an email. “I remember in an old ‘National Geographic’ from the ’50s there was an artist’s rendering of ‘The Farm of the Future.’ The fields were like airstrips, miles long, with machines that ran on rails that planted, sprayed (chemicals were the answer to everything then) and harvested uniform crops untouched by human hands, with a domed high-rise dairy tower next door that efficiently funneled the slurry into the field, clean, industrial, organized, perfect. Farmers wore lab coats. I remember saying out loud ‘What a (expletive) nightmare!’”

Indeed.

I’m not perfectly green, not even close, actually. And that includes the food I buy every week.

But if guys like Wright and his sidekick sister Hayley Swinney, are willing to devote their lives to feeding people like me for little to no wages, you can bet I’m going to keep trying to hit the farmers market as often as possible, even when it’s not the most convenient or the cheapest.

As Wright, who is president of Snohomish Farmers Market Association, puts it, it’s not just about the food or the final product. It’s about the experience.

In fact, food isn’t a product, Wright told me, standing in a field of beets, kohlrabi and squash: “It is an event,” he said. “It’s a changing event.”

“Folks at market tell me about Grandma’s garden and carrots that just melt in your mouth,” Wright wrote me. “They find out the variety Grandma used and put it in their garden, but just can’t duplicate the experience. What made the aforementioned carrots taste so good was Grandma, not the variety. But how do I explain it?”