“It’s hard to ship stuff out there,” he added. “It freezes on the tarmac.”

Urban indoor farming is blossoming in many seemingly unlikely places around the world. A company in Newark is building a huge urban farm inside a former steel plant. Growers from Japan to Vancouver, British Columbia, to the suburbs of Chicago have found that cultivating compact indoor spaces as close as possible to the consumer — even if costs are higher than at dirt farms farther from town — can pay off.

What makes Alaska different, perhaps especially with food, are the big distances and the knotty logistics. With short growing seasons here, and no roads in many places, fresh produce for much of the year comes from California or Mexico. Because of the lag time in reaching consumers, the produce is picked long before ripening, to reduce spoilage on the way, chefs and agricultural experts here said. That hurts the quality.

Alaska imports about 90 percent to 95 percent of its food, state officials said, putting about $2 billion a year into out-of-state farmers’ pockets.

While locally grown produce has become more common in recent years, farmers and food distributors tend to focus on the state’s biggest cities, especially Anchorage, leaving rural residents out in the cold.

Obesity rates rose faster in rural Alaska than in the urban areas from 1991 to 2012, a state report said, though health experts cautioned that other factors, including access to doctors and high smoking rates, could also have contributed.

“I talk to store owners who said they have just stopped even trying to order fresh fruits and vegetables because the transportation systems just don’t work,” said Danny Consenstein, the executive director of the Department of Agriculture’s Alaska Farm Service Agency. Even in many of the stores that try to stock fresh produce, Mr. Consenstein added, the fruits and vegetables that are offered “look terrible.”