Dr Moya Catherine Costello

Bibere vinum suae regionis, to drink wine from one’s own region, was an attempt by me and an academic colleague, Steve Evans, in a 2013 scholarly article, to match the neologism ‘locavore’, meaning local eater/local eating, with one for local drinker/drinking ‘locabiber’. Locavore was the New American Oxford Dictionary’s word of the year for 2007. Locavore comes from the Latin roots of local (locus) and eating (vorare). To drink is bibere. Both terms have been short lived! But one hundred miles (160 kms) was being used in the first decade of this century as the distance within which one could readily access locally produced food, to save on transport costs and emissions at the very least.