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11 The local food movement has experienced wide-scale buy-in across the United States with advocates promoting the social, economic, and environmental benefits of local food initiatives. Although these initiatives may have experienced some success in promoting sustainable farming methods and supporting local farmers, they have overwhelmingly disregarded the needs of low-income consumers, especially in rural areas. Some exceptions to this trend exist in urban settings, such as sliding-scale payment options for low-income customers, but the vast majority of local food initiatives operate on capitalist principles, stressing profit, growth, and efficiency. As long as food distribution, regardless of its place on either a local or global scale, is dictated by these principles, marginalized and particularly poor people will be denied access to the food required to live a healthy life. Though the majority of local food initiatives are trending in this direction, what I call traditional localism offers new hope for rural food justice. As local food initiatives grow in number, food access investigations in the United States and the United Kingdom are undoubtedly increasing, the majority of which are urban focused. As a result, methods and outputs emerging from these investigations tend to have an urban slant, thus overlooking the particularities of the rural experience. Academics and policy makers are thus faced with a shortage of rurally focused policy and planning interventions. Like the majority of food access investigations, food justice efforts typically occur in urban areas and target low-income minority populations as well (Wekerle 2004; Alkon and Norgaard 2009; Welsh and MacRae 1998). Employed by food security and food access advocates and increasingly by academics, the concept of food justice supports the notion that people should not be viewed as consumers, but as citizens (Levkoe 2006). These efforts attempt to link populations with alternative Realizing Rural Food Justice Divergent Locals in the Northeastern United States Jesse C. McEntee 240 Chapter 11 modes of food production and consumption, which typically occur at the local level and are grounded in democratic and social justice values (Welsh and MacRae 1998). The argument stands that when profit is prioritized above human well-being and the need for survival, the result is food injustice. The food justice movement represents what Wekerle describes as a movement away from a focus on emergency food sources, which took precedence in the 1980s, to one that focuses on “the right to food as a component of a more democratic and just society . . . and a theoretical framing of local initiatives as both the practice of democracy and as a means of de-linking from the corporate global food system” (Wekerle 2004, 378–379). This represents “more than a name change” departure from conventional food security concerns; rather, it is a systemic transformation that alters people’s involvement in food production and consumption (Ibid., 379). Rural food justice efforts are practically nonexistent and only a small number of references to rural food justice exist in the literature (Gottlieb 2009). Despite the fact that many, if not most, food justice principles (e.g., access to fresh and healthy food, community empowerment, social justice) could apply, in theory, to a rural context, their actual employment would need to first account for the nuances of rural culture, geography , and politics. Using Grafton County, New Hampshire, as a research site, this chapter aims to fill this gap by articulating how food justice efforts could address the food access concerns of a low-income rural community, primarily through an avenue that I have termed traditional localism. Grafton County, New Hampshire, is located in the northeastern United States and has a population of 81,743 with the majority (65 percent) of people living in areas defined as rural by the United States Census Bureau (U.S. Census Bureau 2008a). Of the forty northern New England (Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont) counties, Grafton County’s population density ranks sixteenth (47.7 people per square mile of land) (Ibid.). Approximately 7.7 percent of New Hampshire’s population is food insecure (Nord, Andrews, and Carlson 2008) while 8 percent lives in poverty (compared to 9.4 percent for Grafton County) (U.S. Census Bureau 2008b). At the time this research was conducted, the number of small farms in this area is growing, community supported agriculture (CSA) programs are increasing in popularity, and farmers markets are progressively more common (USDA AMS 2008b). A burgeoning local food movement, the presence of food insecurity, and the county’s rural character...

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