Ok, It’s time to get this thing back running, that’s to say, time to get my 3 posts in for the new year. Ideally this time I will keep it up, we shall see. In fact this post isn’t even new, and it’s certainly not very entertaining.
Last year I was invited to give a talk about food culture at a small, progressive liberal arts college. I figured the best thing for the kids was not for me to puff-up their already inflated sense of self righteousness but to actually give them something to think about. What follows is an abbreviated, updated, linked up and slightly humor-fied version of that talk. Enjoy. I will return in time with more goofiness.
Ours is an age of food culture. From Michael Pollen’s pithy pamphlet of the moment to arcane and theoretically inclined academic writing, we write about food. From cell phone snaps to highly elaborate “food porn,” we photograph and film food. And from PBS to Japanese game shows, we watch others prepare food – often in elaborate and unfamiliar ways. Increasingly, we also flex our personal (some go as far as saying political!) muscle through how we spend money on food – or perhaps better said: we are increasingly aware of this muscle. These days organic, grass-fed, line-caught, non-GMO, heirloom products have become so diffuse that we can find them – if we so choose – on the shelves of our local Wal-Mart. Indeed, the emergence of “Big Organic” shows us both how far our knowledge of food has come and how fragile and ill-defined this knowledge is.
And there have been many positive developments in this food culture, but I would like also to see a larger discussion of the complicated and often contradictory nature of our contemporary foodscapes. I am specifically interested in the emergence of locavorism within our current culinary scene. Is this movement the panacea for the ills of our global, industrialized food systems, or is it just more embroidery for our bourgeois blankies?
With perennial food contamination scares, claims of higher nutrients of organics, and the rise of the farmers market, the emergence of the locavore seems creepily conjunctural. We need to remember, however, that a desire for sanitary, nutritious, and convenient foods also motivated the food system against which the locavore movement pushes – instant dinners were the organic ramps of their time! And just as the industrialization of last century’s food chain bore unseen and harmful costs, so must our current localization of food contain consequences we vaguely understand. Who is at the other end of this globalized food chain and how do our choices effect them? May we simply “go local” without considering the global ramifications of such a move? How can local be both redefined and expanded so as to become more relevant to urban, poor, and otherwise marginalized communities; communities in which a local “foodshed” may contain only processed foods and liquor stores? Lastly, how do we position a politics of food consumption within a larger network of social and environmental activism? I am certainly not the first to ask these questions, I hope however to chart the topography of this discourse, to begin to understand its discordant and at times unsettling tones.
In his 2008 book The Green Collar Economy, former White House special advisor Van Jones discusses how food politics may fit into a larger green political movement. Jones quotes Peoples’ Grocery of Oakland founder Brahm Ahmadi as saying that he desires,
"completely localized food systems that are regionally based, with the majority of food consumers consume coming from within a few hundred miles of where they live, so that consumers have direct knowledge of the farms and farmers, and how and where that food was produced. A revolution in terms of environmental stewardship and reducing the carbon footprint in the food system. And finally, dignified job creation and wealth creation rooted in social justice and environmental sustainability."
Ahmadi’s vision basically sums up the locavore ethic – even better coming out of urban Oakland as opposed to the foodie mecca of Berkeley. (More on Oakland below.) So we have a “revolution in terms of environmental stewardship” that would also help local job creation! Sounds groovy. But not so fast. We need to interrogate the unsaid in the above statement; what lies on the other side of the deep-rooted desire to stay local or regional, to see the farmer and have knowledge of the farm?
In Ahmadi’s world, knowledge of where food was produced, how and by whom is power, power over the products one consumes and the way in which they are consumed. In this world knowing and seeing are all-important. Knowing who produced what, seeing them and what they produced in person – knowledge and sight are prime movers of the new locavorism. But what is un-seen and un-known under this ethic is exactly where our attention is most desperately needed. When our gaze shifts to the farmer at the local market it shifts away from the migrant laborer in the Salinas Valley. When we purchase local we don’t give our money to the farmer in Guatemala. The proper rejoinder to this claim may be that choosing local is also not choosing the industrio-capitalist system which may exploit the migrant laborer and the Guatemalan farmer. Fair enough, but how does this choice effect change in the system? On its own it doesn’t. Taking your chips off the table doesn’t mean you’ve changed the game – it means you are no longer playing. As I see it, on its own locavorism can go one of two directions:
1. As a standalone ethic, at best, locavorism ignores that the Guatemalan farmer couldn’t give a shit about his carbon footprint. He or she (or more likely he and she and their children) make a living because far away people buy their products. At the end of the day, and despite the nasty corporate intermediaries, we can choose or choose not to purchase from them. And while it is not the pastoral ideal of the local farmers’ market, farming may be their only source of income. (Much of this discussion is inspired by this excellent book.) As part of a globalized food chain our decisions effect others, a turn towards the local is always a turn away from somewhere else.
2. As a standalone ethic, at worst, locavorism finds itself an unwitting partner to that ever shifting yet always present American x-word, xenophobia. Ahmadi wants “job creation and wealth creation” but only for local communities. As went the farmer in Central America so goes the migrant laborer in the Central Valley. His labor is not needed, his presence not wanted. Is this the nasty underside of the local foods movement? Can we go as far as to suggest that by patrolling the borders of our bodies, by needing hyper-familiarity with what we let in, we are also complicit in a jingoistic fear of what the nation keeps out? Don’t food scares, in fact, play a proxy role in this move? If E. Coli and Salmonella outbreaks represent the fear of all thing beyond our culinary horizon and our personal control, can we extricate the laborer and the global labor circuits from this fear?
My point in all this is neither to defend globalized industrial agriculture nor to excoriate the local foods movement. Rather, I would like to insist that locavorism cannot exist as a standalone ethic, that a turn towards a local food system must also equally and actively engage a regional and global food system. This is a tall order, but without political engagement outside of local action this movement does little more than grease the wheels of the system it purports to change.
From cars to Kashi bars, green lifestyle options have become roundly normative, that is to say, they are not only the gold standard for “ethical consumption” but also comfortably incorporated into the prevailing mode of production. So if, as Thomas Frank put it more than a decade ago, “the countercultural ideal has become capitalist orthodoxy” how can the locavore movement create a position independent from yet invested in the prevailing networks of food production and distribution? I’m going to make my turn towards home by suggest a new way of approaching the movement and the terms which it applies.
But first a mea culpa (that’s how pricks say “my bad”): I’ve been beating up Brahm Ahmadi throughout this post and, while my critique of the movement has I think been accurate, my use of Ahmadi has not. Ahmadi’s work within the Oakland community and specifically with the West Oakland farmers market may serve as points of departure for reformulating what ‘local’ means. The community of West Oakland contained 137 grocery stores in the 1960s but only 22 in the 1980s. Oakland is not alone in this trend, in Detroit an estimated 550,000 live in what are commonly known as “Food Deserts,” areas in which party stores, gas stations and fast food restaurants are the only food sources. The health consequences of living in such a locale are many including higher rates of obesity, diabetes, and death. The Bay Area Regional Health Inequities Initiative claimed recently that “the average West Oakland resident lives 10 years less than their Berkeley counterparts, and that food access is a significant factor in this disparity.” A survey of Detroit residents contained more conservative but no less alarming figures; Detroit residents losing a combined 11 years of life per 100 residents compared to 7 for the greater metro area.
Yet within these spaces of urban blight also spring the thoroughly local and urgently needed urban gardens. These gardens are an important nodal point not only for the communities they serve but also in a larger constellation of a productive politics of locavorism. Here in Los Angles the South Central Farm Market (or Community Garden) thrived from 1994 until it was forcibly closed in 2006 – this despite a last-minute intervention by Joan Baez.
I use the term ‘nodal point’ and reference the South Central Community Garden for specific reasons. First, as I’ve said it is important not to privilege the urban garden over the distant farmer, or the unseen laborer; all three must stand as free and equal partners on an ethical terrain. The urban garden may address health concerns in the inner city but without existing outside itself it cannot address working conditions in other countries or equitable pay within our own country. Second, I use the term nodal point to reference a group whose existence I have so far only hinted at yet whose absence is everywhere – the upper-middle-class bourgeois liberal. From Alice Waters and Michael Pollen to Peter Singer, the prominent figures of the locavore movement show the pallid face of classic hegemony; Jones and Ahmadi notwithstanding. Let's consider this post from the South Central Farmers’ blog,
"WHAT: The South Central Farmers who starred in the 2008 Academy Award Nominated documentary “The Garden” will [ ] host an organic cooking demonstration; sell and share local organic produce from their new farm in Shafter, CA; and host a roundtable discussion about Locavore community food initiatives....
WHERE: Whole Foods Market, Arroyo Parkway, Pasadena, CA"
How do we parse out locality within this event? Is it found in the farmers, formerly of South Central? In the farm, currently north-west of Bakersfield? Or could it be in the clean, LEED certified, culinary fetish-filled aisles of the Pasadena Whole Foods? The answer is I think obvious, and it is exactly this phenomenon from which the local foods movement needs to break free.
It would seem that locavorism in its current instantiation simply paraphrases Orwell’s famous quote from (where else?) Animal Farm. That is, we’re all local, but some of us are more local than others. The above event vacates the interiority of the South Central farmers, it positions them not as equal partners rooted within a constellation of localities but as heirloom products to be consumed by specific locavores.
This is, I fear, the obscene underside of the locavore movement: that the rules of the game are being dictated by a specific group and others participation in the movement is only validated through translation and dislocation, meaning that viable partners in the global foodscape are only acknowledged if they are moved in (S. Central farmers), moved out (migrant labor), or moved away from (Central American farmers). And it is through these processes that people and places are made into fetish items to be consumed and/or discarded.
What the local foods movement needs is not a new mask on the same old face. As I’ve suggested, what is needed is a constellation of nodal points, of free and equal partners, a system that is rooted in the local yet sees itself as ethically and equitably linked to other localities. What we need is a movement that embraces a paradoxical localism, an ethics of consumption that sees the urban gardener, the migrant laborer, the distant farmer, as well as the urban and suburban consumer as linked. And again, locavorism cannot have a “first among equals” but must be radically democratic. If locavorism can see itself and its choices as emanating from and extending beyond its locale it may traverse more than just culinary concerns, it may in fact help foster a more organic form of social understanding.
