Saturday, October 11th, 2008...12:15 pm
Random, Sketchy Thoughts on Buying Local
Owners of a San Francisco grocery store consider local food too global; they’re growing their own.
Bi-Rite has long been recognized for its commitment to local, seasonal produce, but it may be the first market to actually grow its own food. Though Rainbow Grocery in San Francisco, Monterey Market in Berkeley, Draeger’s on the Peninsula, Whole Foods and other Bay Area markets buy some produce directly from farms, Richard and Bi-Rite’s owner Sam Mogannam are taking the farm-to-table philosophy a step further, growing their own produce on one-third of an acre in Sonoma.
Here in Iowa City, food miles are the primary form of measurement. Food’s essential goodness is thought to be a function of its proximity to you at the moment it was harvested. Back to the SF market:
Produce clerk Matt Serrecchio, who has worked at the store for four months, has already been to the farm twice.
“Being out in the field and understanding what it’s like to farm definitely kicked up my confidence about explaining to our customers where our food comes from,” he explains.
Trends in ethical consumption often start with the idea of transparency, kunkelfruitiness. The hope is that products will wear their histories; looking at a radish will tell you where it was grown, how the farmers and land were treated, whether MNEs were involved at any point along the way. The products will present themselves for moral judgment by wealthy consumers.
The desire for transparency motivated the fair trade coffee movement and dozens of other international labeling initiatives. Yet I rarely see Fair Trade activists anymore. They seem to have taken a back seat to buy localists.
Fair Trade promised consumers second-hand knowledge of products produced by Rwandan and Guatemalen farmers living lives obscured by distance. The stories always involved some amount of complexity and required trust on the part of the consumer. But if you buy a squash from my neighborhood food co-op, you can probably drive to the farm of origin and look at little squash yet to be born. You can meet the farmers themselves at the farmers’ market down the street, buy an eggplant right out of their hands. The story behind the food is less byzantine, more easily traced.
What else? Perhaps priorities have changed. The goals of Fair Trade and local food activists are in direct tension; the former stresses poverty alleviation, the latter environmental sustainability. Whether they actually constitute progress toward those goals is irrelevant.
Buy localism feels more puritan; it’s imbued with an ethos of restraint. Grant McCracken talks about the sentiment of “just enough.” Buy localists want you to have just enough. Fresh peaches, but only when peaches are in season. Fair Trade was never about restraint.
Is the war in Iraq the best thing that ever happened to the local food movement? By definition, buy localism is insular. It’s more rugged in its quest for self-sufficiency, less cosmopolitan. It’s a rejection of the same interconnectedness that Fair Trade was trying to purify.
UPDATE: Jim Henley advances an eminently sensible idea: “Locovorism gives you something to do.” He seems to think I’m anti-locovore and pro-animal torture, but I’m really just interested in understanding the shift from one mode of fashionable consumption to another.
7 Comments
October 12th, 2008 at 11:47 am
[…] Howley at least avows some puzzlement as to why, in her personal experience, "locovorism" seems to have […]
October 12th, 2008 at 3:05 pm
Based on the locovores I know, I suspect that for at least some of them, it has to do with insecurity or fear: if all of your food comes from thousands of miles away, there are many more opportunities for a supply-line disruption to leave you hungry than there would be if your food comes from your own backyard or the farmer within easy walking distance of your house. I’d bet that the percentage of locovores who keep large stashes of food in their basements is greater than the percentage of non-locovores who do.
October 12th, 2008 at 6:12 pm
Jennifer, when - pray tell - is the last time that a “supply-line disruption” left you or any other American hungry? I mean, outside of American combatants who were left hungry in the European or Pacific theaters during WWII or Korea when their “supply lines” were “disrupted”? Do you really think that people get into the “locovore” thing because they are worried about naval blockades preventing Chiquitas from getting to harbor in the U.S.? I doubt it. No, I would imagine that Kerry’s onto something here: it’s fashionable. People are locovores because it gives them a movement to belong to, and that movement has a patina of social responsibility associated with it, however spurious. Locovorism is a great way to exercise exclusive social and economic privilege while at the same time feeling good about yourself for doing so. It reminds me of the people I knew in high school who were straight edge and/or vegan. In fact, I think it’s a lot of the very same people.
October 12th, 2008 at 6:21 pm
Jennifer, when - pray tell - is the last time that a “supply-line disruption” left you or any other American hungry?
When was the last time civilization collapsed overnight and threw us back into the Stone Age? That doesn’t prevent survivalists from stockpiling in preparation for it. Fear need not be rational to be genuine.
Do a Google search for “3,000 mile Caesar salad” and you’ll find examples of the fear-driven locovorism I’m talking about. And you’ll note that I said some locovores are driven by this fear, not all of them.
October 12th, 2008 at 9:19 pm
And of course, ironically, it is the local food supplies that are more likely to be disrupted. If your area had a drought and all the farmers at your local market had a bad season, that would be a serious supply disruption and would affect only those people who wanted to eat locally produced food.
October 13th, 2008 at 6:27 am
Being South African I don’t know how this is presented in the American media, but I don’t understand why people worried about food miles don’t emphasise veganism more as a way to decrease your carbon footprint.
Leaving the TV on standby is moralised by Al Gore et al, but I haven’t noticed the carbon side (of course the animal torture side is plenty moralised) of animal products much in the MSM.
But like I said I don’t live in the US.
October 17th, 2008 at 11:52 pm
I’m not so sure your description of your “neighborhood food coop,” the New Pioneer Food Coop, is exactly right. I shop there regularly and can assure you that there is as much emphasis on the sale of local food products as more far-flung items. (The cheese selection, for instance, includes much of the best stuff produced in Europe and North America; and there’s plenty of fair-trade coffee.) Locally oriented and fair trade retail, in other words, aren’t mutually exclusive, at least in Iowa City.
And while I’m sure there are many shoppers and employees who care about local produce because it somehow seems more just, there are just as many, if not more, who like it because it’s the freshest you’ll find and therefore the best tasting. There are plenty of organic and “progressive” grocery stores that sell crap; New Pioneer isn’t one of them.
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