Local Food and the Problem of Public Authority

As Wendell Berry once wrote, “how we eat determines, to a considerable extent, how the world is used.”¹ In this deceptively simple statement, the doyen of neo-agrarianism neatly summarized why we should all take a keen interest in and responsibility for the way we produce, distribute, and consume our food. On one level, of course, the reasons for doing so are obvious. As “foodie” journalists and high-profile academics frequently remind us,² careless eating invites a variety of negative physiological repercussions, ranging from obesity and heart disease to food poisoning, endocrine disruption, and cancer. Yet public concerns over the effects of careless eating reach well beyond health issues. Berry and other advocates of sustainable agriculture maintain that careless eating has played a key role in the relentless industrialization of our food system by creating a sustained and frequently unwitting demand for highly processed foods, factory-farmed meats, genetically modified crops, and blemish-free produce shipped year-round over immense distances. In turn, sustainable agriculturalists argue, the industrial system that has allowed these foods to become a central part of the American diet has incurred a whole array of ecological, social, economic, geopolitical, cultural, moral, and aesthetic costs.

As these costs—especially those associated with food-borne illness and the profligate use of fossil fuel—have become increasingly apparent in the last few years, we have seen a spike in demand not only for organic food, but for local food as well.³ In fact, “locally grown” has begun to compete with “organically grown” as the label of choice among environmentally and socially conscious consumers, particularly now that so much organic food is grown in industrial-scaled monocultures far from the places it is consumed. ⁴ Proponents of local food argue that eating locally allows access to a greater variety of fresher and more nutritious food, enhances the ecological and aesthetic integrity of local landscapes, strengthens regional economies, reduces fossil-fuel consumption, and allows consumers to see firsthand how their food is produced. Personal inspections of this sort are particularly important, they argue, in light of the federal regulatory system’s recurring failure to ensure the quality and safety of our food supply. The logic of local food, which links ethical responsibility to geographical proximity, has gained national attention in recent years, helped along by extensive media attention and a host of new “locavore” organizations touting the virtues of “100-mile diets” and other strategies for minimizing “food miles” and maximizing awareness of our respective “foodsheds.”⁵

While the recent surge of interest in eating locally may seem like just another short-lived food fad, those familiar with the history of the modern sustainable agriculture movement know that local food is hardly a new cause. Indeed, localism has been a defining goal of sustainable agriculture since the movement’s inception in the 1960s.⁶What is new, however, is the contentious debate that the push for localism has sparked among proponents of sustainable agriculture. At the center of this debate is Michael Pollan, whose 2006 bestseller The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals has contributed substantially to the recent burst of enthusiasm for local food. As this essay will demonstrate, critical reactions to Pollan’s localist argument, particularly from scholars who are either self-identified members of the sustainable agriculture movement or sympathetic to its goals, provide historians with a unique opportunity to examine a central issue in the evolving national debate over the way we eat and, by implication, “the way we use the world.”

Historians of technology in particular should find this debate of interest. What is the history of technology, after all, if not the history of “how the world is used”? Moreover, the debate over local food bears directly on matters of abiding interest to historians of technology, including the environmental and social impacts of industrialization, the role of the state in regulating and promoting particular technologies, the decentralist resistance to modern technological systems, and the role of consumers and nonprofit organizations in shaping the direction of technological development. ⁷ On a more concrete...