The SAGE encyclopedia of food issues (original) (raw)

When used in discussions of contemporary food issues, the term agrarianism most commonly refers to a cumulative mix of philosophy and ethics, political platform and critique, the social critique of industrialization, the environmental critique of industrial farming, and a prescribed normative way of life. It takes as its central premise that humans are inherently tillers of soil and that they need to produce and thus consume products of photosynthesis and their derivatives, including especially livestock, in order to survive. Given this human role and the 10,000-year history of humans as agriculturalists, agrarians believe that the healthiest way to produce food for land, soil, and culture, and the healthiest way to structure society, is as self-sufficient, internally reliant farming communities that are built around the art of agriculture. For contemporary agrarians, this art should ideally employ sustainable farming practices, and there is an implicit recognition that scale-of farm acreage, of human settlement patterns, and of consumptive lifeways-matters ecologically, politically, aesthetically, and culturally. Thus, ideal agrarian communities are smaller in scale, largely independent, and based on face-to-face interaction and sharing, and they cultivate the virtues of thrift, fidelity to place, ingenuity, independence, holism, and frugality. In its most recent manifestation, agrarianism criticizes industrial agriculture, industrial culture, and the politics of consumption and perceived corporate takeover of food supplies and politics that such industrial lifeways generate.