Are local food and the local food movement taking us where we want to go? Or are we hitching our wagons to the wrong stars? (original) (raw)

Abstract

Much is being made of local food. It is at once a social movement, a diet, and an economic strategy—a popular solution—to a global food system in great distress. Yet, despite its popularity or perhaps because of it, local food (especially in the US) is also something of a chimera if not a tool of the status quo. This paper reflects on and contrasts aspects of current local food rhetoric with Dalhberg’s notion of a regenerative food system. It identifies three problematic emphases—the locavore emphasis, the Wal-Mart emphasis, and the Pollan emphasis—and argues that they are shifting local food (as a concept and a social movement) away from the deeper concerns of equity, citizenship, place-building, and sustainability. It is suggested that local food activists and advocates might consider the use of multiple methodologies and forms of expression to explore the integration and reintegration of local food into diverse and redundant place-based practice. A short case study of a low-income, urban neighborhood in Lansing, Michigan, illustrates the value of contextual analysis for more fully enabling the local food movement and a regenerative food system.

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What is local food?

Article Open access 04 May 2026

Local Food

Chapter © 2019

Notes

  1. I’ve chosen Feenstra’s definition of the local food movement because her work is both extensive and thoughtful. It is also the definition that appears in Wikipedia’s entry for local food—arguably a reliable reflection of popular knowledge.
  2. “Civic agriculture is a locally organized system of agricultural and food production characterized by networks of producers who are bound together by place. … Civic agriculture is fundamentally about problem solving. Taken together, the enterprises that make up and support civic agriculture can [be] seen as a part of a community’s problem solving capacity. … Civic agriculture is the embedding of local agriculture and food production in the community” (Lyson 2005, p. 92).
  3. An anonymous reviewer has correctly noted that a wide range of values and goals are embedded within the local food movement today, not all of them consistent or necessarily progressive in nature. The Slow Food Movement, for example, champions indigenous or culturally authentic foods and food ways but has been criticized for its elitist, self-indulgent tendencies. Eating locally, likewise, has become a trope for supporting diversified, small-scale farmers and an agrarian revival that can be parochial, patriarchal, and sanctimonious. To be sure local food and the local food movement have attracted an odd assortment of bedfellows—survivalists, environmentalists, artisans, union labor, the healthy, and the unhealthy alike find answers in the local cause.
    What is being argued here is that the concept of local as popularly presented and applied seems to be losing track of its own self-reflexive, and often contradictory and embodied nature. By becoming something that is easy for everyone to swallow, literally and figuratively, it serves the status quo far more keenly than its many adherents. The ease with which it cleaves to the individual, the industrial, and the generic suggests, to this author at least, that the concept, like sustainability and organic before it, may soon be “cut and controlled” (Burke and Ornstein 1995), losing much of its potential for systemic resilience.
  4. This is not the New American Oxford Dictionary definition but a close approximation. The 2007 edition of the dictionary is not yet available either in hard copy or electronic form.
  5. Credit card companies depend on this argument. Under the guise of being sustainable (socially and environmentally responsibility) a recent commercial for a major credit card allowed (and I’m paraphrasing here): “There’s so much good stuff in this world. And there’s nothing wrong with that. The problem is knowing how to manage it all. We’re here to help.”
  6. Typical among their suggestions are things like grow a garden, eat more chocolate, join a CSA, and shop at a farmers market.
  7. One way corporations can be “local” is to stock a token amount of locally grown produce, as Wal-Mart has done in some of its supercenters. The chain’s local food offerings are usually limited to a few of the main commodity crops of that particular state—peaches in Georgia or potatoes in Maine—and sit amid a sea of industry food and other goods shipped from the far side of the planet. Yet this modest gesture has won Wal-Mart glowing coverage in numerous daily newspapers, few of which have asked the salient question: Does Wal-Mart, which now captures more than one of every five dollars Americans spend on groceries, create more and better opportunities for local farmers than the grocers it replaces?
    “Wal-Mart, like other chains, has learned that consumers increasingly support companies they perceive to be acting responsibly, and that tossing around the word ‘local’ is a far less expensive way to convey civic virtue than the alternatives. ‘Local is one of the lower-hanging fruits in terms of sustainability,’ explains Barry [senior vice president of the Hartman Group]. ‘It’s easier for companies to do than to improve how their employees are treated or adopt a specific sustainability practice around their carbon footprint, for example’” (Mitchell 2009).
  8. I am indebted to Jayson Otto, former manager of the Fulton Street Farmers Market in Grand Rapids, for this observation.
  9. Having said this, it is interesting to note that the Eastside has an identity, a sense of self and self-protection that is not available for the taking by outside agencies or bureaucratic structures. ANC pursues and receives many grants, large and small, public and private, on behalf of the Eastside. At the same time, it resists (and controls) the endless, invasive surveys and other accountability measures required by officials and funders. ANC has turned back funding for just such reasons. As important as economic resources are to this modest community non-profit, they are not seen as synonymous with, nor are they permitted to trump, the common good. As the market master has said, “The USDA (or any other organization) is welcome to visit the market as a guest of the Eastside. We welcome their programs and their assistance, but they are not welcome to appropriate what belongs to all Eastsiders” (DeLind 2008, pp. 12–13).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Anthropology, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, 48824, USA
    Laura B. DeLind

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Correspondence toLaura B. DeLind.

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An earlier version of this paper was prepared for the session, Agrifoodies and Alternative Agricultural Movements, at the joint meetings of the Agriculture, Food, and Human Values Society and the Association for the Study of Food and Society, 28–31 May 2009, Pennsylvania State University.

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DeLind, L.B. Are local food and the local food movement taking us where we want to go? Or are we hitching our wagons to the wrong stars?.Agric Hum Values 28, 273–283 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-010-9263-0

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