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, factor y-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.6 What 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 level, the proponents of local food raise serious questions about the specific “hardware” and techniques integral to the industrial food system, including, for example, synthetic pesticides and fertilizers, genetic engineering, large-scale crop monocultures, and all the transportation and refrigeration apparatus necessary for extended supply chains to function properly. While I lack the space to deal with each of these issues in depth, their relevance to the local-food debate should be readily apparent in the following discussion.
The local-food debate also reveals much about the sustainable agriculture movement itself, particularly with respect to its ambivalence toward the state. Like many other movements shaped by the political culture of the 1960s, the sustainable agriculture movement has long regarded the federal government as both a destructive force and, under the right circumstances, a potential ally. The main obstacle to such an alliance has been the federal government’s overwhelming commitment to industrial agriculture, particularly with respect to regulatory policy and the allocation of crop subsidies and research funding. Pollan and his supporters are acutely aware of this commitment and its resulting policy failures, which they offer as their principal rationale for establishing local-food systems that would obviate our reliance on ineffective federal regulations. While Pollan’s critics in the sustainable agriculture movement agree with him that the federal government has been too friendly to industrial agriculture, they worry that if localism is taken too far, it will play into the hands of free-market ideologues seeking to weaken the regulatory powers of nation-states in the name of economic globalization. Federal regulations may be weak and even irrational, they argue, but the solution is to reform the state rather than abandon it.
Finally, the local-food debate underscores the sustainable agriculture movement’s deepening concern over issues of social equity, particularly those related to race, class, and ethnicity. The charge of elitism—which usually implies indifference to the dietary needs of millions of people who lack access to affordable organic (and now local) food due to poverty, discrimination, and/or the alleged inability of either form of agriculture to “feed the world”—has been a persistent theme among both internal and external critics of the sustainable agriculture movement. If, as Pollan and his supporters argue, we must move toward a more locally oriented food system, how will this affect the world food supply? While one expects this question from the defenders of industrial agriculture, it comes just as readily from sustainable agriculturalists leery of Pollanesque localism.
To put the debate over localism in historical context and clarify its relevance to the history of technology and the sustainable agriculture movement, it will be helpful to begin by tracing the main contours of the broader food debate as it has unfolded in the United States over the last century or so. The central theme of that debate—the enduring, if marginalized, resistance to industrial food—is arguably the most appropriate context for deciphering the historical significance of the local-food phenomenon. It is here that historians of technology will find meaningful connections between their discipline and what may, at first glance, appear to be little more than an ephemeral obsession of effete, bi-coastal foodies. Upon closer examination, food localism turns out to be an issue with deep resonance in both the history of technology and American political culture.
The defenders of industrial food have tended to dismiss its costs as unfortunate but acceptable externalities of a highly efficient system. From their perspective, the industrial food system has successfully tapped the power of mechanization, chemicalization, large-scale monocultural production, regional specialization, and long-distance transportation technology, and in doing so has substantially underwritten the unprecedented expansion of the American economy since the end of World War II. Economies of scale resulting from industrialization, proponents explain, have held food expenditures to a small percentage of the average consumer’s overall budget and have thus made possible the purchase of all sorts of other goods.8 Those purchases, in turn, have kept our mass-production/mass-consumption economy humming. Farmers, too, have benefited from industrializing their operations, advocates argue. Those who chose the industrial path—or at least those able to survive its relentless cycle of consolidation and attrition— could leave behind the hardscrabble life of small-scale family farming in pursuit of the material benefits and prestige associated with capital-intensive agribusiness. And if all these benefits are not enough to convince us of the superiority of an industrial food system, proponents also contend that it is the only system capable of “feeding the world.” In short, the defenders of the industrial food system view its ascendancy as an unqualified economic and humanitarian success story.
In contrast, the proponents of sustainable agriculture regard the costs of the industrial food system as both unacceptable and unnecessary. Industrial agriculture may be immensely productive, they argue, but this productivity has come at the expense of polluted ecosystems, loss of biodiversity, massive soil erosion, improvident use of fossil fuels, immense greenhouse-gas emissions, exploitation of farm workers, concentration of landownership, the demise of the family farm (along with the beauty and functionality of the rural landscapes and communities associated with it), and increased vulnerability to terrorist attack. These costs, moreover, have been displaced onto society as a whole rather than being absorbed by industrial agriculture interests, leading sustainable agriculturalists to conclude that the comparatively low prices of industrial food, which have long been offered as proof of the industrial food system’s superiority, are largely an artifact of spurious accounting. Equally important, sustainable agriculturalists regard the impressive productivity of industrial agriculture as neither sustainable nor unique to industrial practices. The industrial system’s high rates of soil erosion and heavy dependence on fossil fuels (for petroleum-based farm inputs as well as long-distance shipping) alone throw into question its long-term viability, and a number of studies have begun to demonstrate that sustainable agriculture can be just as productive as its industrial counterpart.9
Given the limitations of the industrial food system, the sustainable agriculture movement has long advocated an alternative system based on diversified small- and medium-scale production for local and regional consumption, and the substitution of ecological intelligence (and even full-blown biomimicry10) for off-farm inputs.11 In other words, instead of purchasing chemically based soil fertility and pest control from gigantic agribusiness corporations, farmers are encouraged to model their operations on natural ecosystems. The resulting agro-ecosystems, proponents argue, sponsor much of their own fertility and pest control by cycling wastes and providing enough biodiversity to protect crops from the diseases and insects that threaten highly vulnerable industrial monocultures. Widespread adoption of such a production model, they argue, would be healthier for the environment, our bodies, and our society. On a global level, it would better meet the dietary needs of developing nations while obviating their debilitating dependence on capital-intensive and unsustainable forms of agriculture imported from industrialized nations, often under pressure from international development lenders, who are in turn under pressure from commercial lenders.12
While this debate over the optimum design of the nation’s food system emerged at the turn of the twentieth century, it remained on the fringes of public discourse until the political and environmental upheavals of the 1960s, in the wake of which sustainable agriculture came into its own as a broad social movement. Up to that point, the agro-industrial-university complex had succeeding in stigmatizing dissenters as anti-modern crackpots.13 While that tactic has certainly remained in play, and while the Reagan administration expressed active hostility toward organic farming during the 1980s,14 the sustainable agriculture movement has nevertheless been pushing its way toward scientific, political, and economic respectability, as evidenced by its increasing influence on food-related public policy.15
In the private sector, meanwhile, the demand for organic foods has grown so dramatically in recent years that giant, vertically integrated agribusiness corporations have begun to industrialize the organic sector. Their ability to do so, many argue, increased significantly when the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) undertook the task of establishing uniform national standards for organic food during the 1990s.16 Critics, including Pollan, have since complained that these standards are overly lenient and have thus allowed large corporations to enter the organic sector on a scale that threatens to submerge the local-food networks favored by the sustainable agriculture movement in a sea of cheap, long-distance, and irresponsibly produced food.
This brings us full circle. As we have seen, concerns over both the increasing corporate domination of the organic sector and the industrial food system’s contribution to climate change, fossil-fuel consumption, and food-borne illness have moved the issue of local food into the national spotlight. Yet just as local food has begun to receive unprecedented public attention, it has come under attack from a number of supporters of sustainable agriculture. The question is, why? The answer, it turns out, has a good deal to do with Michael Pollan, who has become the most prolific and effective popularizer of the localist cause.
In addressing the debate over Pollan’s localist politics, it might be helpful to begin by examining the dubious claim that his views on food lack political content, particularly since that claim appeared in the pages of this journal not too long ago. In a review essay titled “The Smallholder’s Dilemma,” Steven Stoll criticized Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma (along with three other recent books dealing with the industrial food system)17 for “leav[ing] out the politics.”18 In Stoll’s view, Pollan’s writing reflects an anti-political trend in food writing, in which scholarly and popular authors alike “recommend organic foods for health, advocate home and community gardens for every good civic purpose, and teach the joys of seasonality,” but sidestep “the connections between relations of power and modes of production.” In contrast to neo-agrarians such as Wendell Berry and Wes Jackson, Stoll argues, Pollan expresses neither “outrage” against nor “insight into” the alarming degree of control that multinational corporations exercise over American agricultural lands—lands that feed enormous numbers of people throughout the world.19
Stoll is correct in asserting that The Omnivore’s Dilemma largely ignores the important issue of land distribution, but his claim that Pollan leaves politics out of the book is puzzling. To begin with, while landownership is an important issue in the politics of agriculture, so also is the heavy consolidation of the processing sector. As Pollan notes (and as family-farming advocates at the Center for Rural Affairs and elsewhere have long complained), Cargill, Archer Daniels Midland, Tyson, and other powerful processing corporations use their economic might to shape agricultural policy in their own interest and to maneuver farmers into disadvantageous contract-growing arrangements.20 Thus processors do not actually need to own the land in order to exploit farmers and ecosystems. More generally, Pollan’s three central arguments in The Omnivore’s Dilemma—that industrial agriculture is socially and environmentally unsustainable; that organic agriculture has been largely captured by corporations and watered down by the USDA’s control of organic standards; and that a truly sustainable agriculture will have to move “beyond organic” into localism—are profoundly political, or at least have profoundly political implications. The question one needs to ask of Pollan is not whether he is sufficiently political, but rather what kind of politics he espouses. The answer, in short, is localism.
But that merely brings us back to our original question. If Pollan is a supporter of localism, why has he drawn so much criticism from proponents of sustainable agriculture who, after all, have been calling for a more localized food system since the 1960s? To answer that question, and to shed light on the broader historical implications of Pollan’s political position, we turn now to the critique of Pollan (and of Pollanesque localism in general) offered by scholars associated with two multidisciplinary groups committed to the development of environmentally sustainable and socially just agro-food systems: the Agriculture, Food, and Human Values Society, and, in particular, the Agro-Food Studies Research Group (AFSRG).21
One of the most trenchant critics of The Omnivore’s Dilemma is Julie Guthman, professor of community studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and member of the AFSRG. Interestingly, her book, Agrarian Dreams: The Paradox of Organic Farming in California, which came out in 2004 (two years before The Omnivore’s Dilemma), lays much of the groundwork for one of Pollan’s main points: that corporations have captured organic agriculture and stripped it of its adversarial potential. In fact, the cover of Guthman’s book features a ringing endorsement from Pollan.22
So, one might wonder, why would Guthman go on to publish an article titled “Commentary on Teaching Food: Why I Am Fed Up with Michael Pollan et al.”?23 Before answering that question, it should be noted that Guthman acknowledges that Pollan “knows his stuff” and “can write his way out of a paper bag.” She also largely agrees “with Pollan’s critique of the food system and the places we must get to.”24 In fact, in a certain respect, it is precisely Pollan’s competence as a writer and critic of the modern industrial food system that compels Guthman to take him on, for his talents have enabled him to reach a broad popular audience with an argument that she believes to be deeply flawed in certain respects.
What, then, does Guthman find so troubling about The Omnivore’s Dilemma? While she faults the book on a number of counts,25 her main criticism focuses on Pollan’s argument for localism. That argument begins with the premise that our regulatory system—at least the part of it charged with overseeing the production, distribution, and consumption of food— has largely failed to protect public health and the environment and has helped undermine the vitality of the small-farm sector and rural communities in general. Guthman agrees with this premise, noting that our current “neoliberal political climate” has enabled corporations to capture the regulatory system. She is troubled, however, by the tendency of many local-food advocates (especially Pollan) to view the local as an inherent bulwark against the environmental destruction and social exploitation associated with global capitalism. Pollan, for example, contrasts what he sees as the intrinsic integrity of local-food economies with the untrustworthiness of globalized industrial food chains. The latter, he maintains, are based on a lack of transparency—that is, they are tolerable only insofar as their inner workings remain hidden from public view. In contrast, he argues that localized food chains are highly “legible” to consumers and thus trustworthy by definition. And in one of the more provocative sections of the book, Pollan insists that attempts to verify trustworthiness from a distance through labeling or other certification strategies are too easily corrupted.26
In short, Pollan and many other localists argue that in light of the corporate capture of government regulation (and in light of inherent deficiencies in bureaucratic culture itself, as we will see below), consumers should “opt out”—that is, they should turn to direct observation of farmers and processors as the only reliable means of ensuring that our food is responsibly produced. The “glass abattoir,” in this view, takes the place of the USDA inspector in an emerging “culture of audit.”27
Guthman complains that Pollan’s argument for localism reinforces the “neoliberal political climate” that weakened regulatory standards to begin with. By abandoning the fight for a more effective regulatory state in favor of an atomized “culture of audit,” she argues, Pollan and other localists appear to embrace “the idea that the food system can be changed one meal at a time.”28 In the hands of Pollanesque localists, Guthman concludes, “food politics has become a progenitor of a neoliberal anti-politics that devolves regulatory responsibility to consumers via their dietary choices.”29
This sort of localism is doubly unfortunate in Guthman’s view. First, she argues, it is elitist. While Guthman admits to sharing Pollan’s “foodie predilections” and to taking her “personal eating choices seriously,” she views those choices “as ways to opt out” for the individual, not as “a road to change” for society as a whole. In fact, she explicitly rejects “the fantasy that individual, yuppified, organic, slow food consumption choices are the vehicles to move toward a more just and ecological way of producing and consuming food.” In her view, “the structures of inequality must necessarily be addressed so that others may eat well.”30
Guthman also worries that Pollan’s brand of localism romanticizes the local, uncritically attaching to it a number of norms embraced by food activists and thus endowing it with a “pre-political status.” In other words, by conceiving of the local as an inherently ethical space (“a place of both biological and social organicism”), Pollanesque localists remove it from the realm of political contestability, and thus, it might be added, from the realm of history.31
Although Guthman does not elaborate on why this might be problematic,32 two of her colleagues in AFSRG, Melanie DuPuis and David Goodman, do so in an article that appeared just prior to the publication of The Omnivore’s Dilemma. DuPuis and Goodman object to the growing tendency among food activists to embrace an “unreflexive localism” that promotes the local as “a normative realm of resistance” to the “anomic” forces of global capitalism.33 In other words, DuPuis and Goodman reject the dual assumption that the local necessarily embodies such positive attributes as an ethic of environmental stewardship, a commitment to quality, and an overall trustworthiness, and that it is therefore an intrinsic bulwark against global capitalism’s relentless commodification of food. To begin with, DuPuis and Goodman argue that localism is overdetermined—in other words, that while it might serve as a bulwark against the forces of globalization,34 it might just as easily “provide the ideological foundations for reactionary politics and nativist sentiments.”35 They also worry that localists, most of whom appear to be white, middle-class reformers, tend to assume rather undemocratically that their race- and class-based culinary preferences should be the norm for society as a whole. Finally, DuPuis and Goodman argue that unreflexive localism can actually serve as the “handmaiden of neoliberalism.” They frame this argument in terms of the growing literature on “glocalization,” according to which the spread of global capitalism strengthens sub-national and global political structures while “hollowing out” the nation-state and undermining its hard-won (if tenuous) regulator y achievements in the areas of public health, environmental protection, and antitrust action.36 From this perspective, the relocalization of the food system may actually contribute to the erosion of the state and thus play into the hands of free-market ideologues.
So what does one make of all of this? First, Guthman is on solid ground in criticizing Pollan’s implicit suggestion that food activists abandon the fight for a strong regulatory system in favor of constructing a localized “culture of audit.” While Pollan is right that we can learn a great deal by directly observing where our food comes from, we cannot learn everything we need to know in this way. When consumers peer through the glass-walled abattoir with their naked eyes, for example, they will not be able to see the microbial threats to their health. Federal inspectors with proper training and equipment are much more likely to detect those invisible dangers.37 Of course, rejecting Pollan’s libertarian localism does not necessitate rejecting localism in general; in fact, many of the scholar-activists associated with the Agro-Food Studies Research Group argue that we should build local food economies, but that this effort must be coupled with a fight to shore up the regulatory powers of the state.
It should be noted that Pollan’s preference for “opting out” stems not only from his concerns about the corporate capture of regulatory bureaucracies, but also from his frustration with bureaucratic culture itself. Like Joel Salatin, the “beyond organic” farmer who appears in the pages of The Omnivore’s Dilemma as the paragon of food localism, Pollan seems to view as insuperable the “one size fits al l” mentality characteristic of federal bureaucracies. That mentality, as others have noted,38 has indeed imposed overwhelming financial burdens on small slaughterhouses, dairies, and other community-scaled processing facilities by requiring expensive technologies and procedures specifically designed to deal with the daunting challenges posed by large-scale, high-speed production employing unskilled workers. Moreover, if a community-scaled slaughterhouse lacks sufficient throughput, the USDA will simply pull its inspector, effectively shutting down the operation.39 Yet if the critics of Pollan’s localism were to address this issue (which they do not), it is probably safe to assume that they would reject his conclusion that we should “opt out” rather than fight for a regulatory culture more attuned with the needs of local food chains. Whether or not it is possible to create such a culture within a large federal bureaucracy is, of course, an open question. But Pollan’s willingness to discount the possibility without giving it serious consideration raises some uncomfortable questions regarding the feasibility of his preferred alternative to the current agricultural orthodoxy.
Or at least that is what his critics were left to think until he abruptly changed course in the weeks leading up to the 2008 presidential election. In an open letter to presidential candidates John McCain and Barack Obama, Pollan appears to have relinquished his role as the nation’s foremost journalistic advocate of libertarian food-localism by laying out a detailed set of policy recommendations for the next “Farmer in Chief.”40 As if to answer all the criticisms discussed above (including my own), Pollan made a compelling case for mobilizing the nation’s “vast federal machinery” in an effort to overhaul a dysfunctional food system. Among other things, he urged the incoming Farmer in Chief to promulgate a regulatory strategy “sensitive to scale and marketplace,” one that would place stringent limits on industrial agriculture interests while protecting the economic viability of small producers and processors.41 More fundamentally, Pollan pressed the future president to promote the development of ecologically diverse, solar-powered regional food economies. Federal support for such economies, he argued, would not only help bring ecologically sustainable agriculture into the mainstream, it would also defuse a looming diet-related public health crisis, make us less dependent on foreign oil, diminish global warming, generate green jobs, and render our food system less vulnerable to insect and terrorist attacks, both of which gain considerable leverage by targeting large-scale technological systems.42
Why Pollan suddenly turned to public policy as a tool for restructuring the food system is unclear. Perhaps he sensed an impending leftward swing in American politics that might provide some traction for his preferred package of reforms. If so, he refused to acknowledge as much, instead contending that his proposals transcend conventional ideological divisions. He may be right. On the cultural level, Pollan argued convincingly that countercultural foodies and evangelical home-schoolers alike will find much to praise in a sustainable food system that allows them to “tak[e] control of [the] family dinner and diet back from the fast-food industry.” Whether consumers falling between these two extremes—the vast majority of Americans, that is—would favor such a food system remains to be seen, but the potential for sustainable food to appeal across ideological lines is real, assuming the movement can shed the stigma of elitism.43
Pollan seeks a similar ideological transcendence in the realm of political economy. While calling for the mobilization of the liberal state to help set American society on the right course, he believes the federal government can best accomplish this task by developing and strengthening a multitude of semiautonomous economic networks. This is a liberal vision insofar as it relies on centralized governmental power to achieve social progress. But by defining progress as the dissolution of large concentrations of economic power rather than the use of such power to advance the public interest, Pollan has stepped outside the framework of modern liberalism. The liberal state, in his view, should be put in the service of a decentralized social vision.
In this sense, Pollan bears an interesting if ultimately superficial resemblance to Herbert Croly, who helped lay the intellectual groundwork for modern liberalism at the dawn of the twentieth century. In an era marked by the demise of a discredited laissez-faire order and a groundswell of support for a more activist government, Croly famously called for the use of Hamiltonian means to achieve Jeffersonian ends.44 At a similar historical juncture a century later, Pollan has offered essentially the same prescription, although in his case, the ends would be much truer to Jefferson’s decentralist social vision than those Croly outlined in his “New Nationalism.” Unlike Croly, who saw the regulatory state as a means to harness the power and efficiency of big business to the public will, Pollan wants to use the state to roll back corporate power in order to make room for the development of decentralized economic networks. For Pollan, the engine of social progress—indeed, the very “promise of American life”—is to be found in local and regional economies rather than the large, well-regulated corporations favored by mainstream Progressive Era reformers. In essence, this is a populist—which is to say, anti-monopolist—vision. It seeks to use the federal government to fight the concentration of economic power and establish in its place a smallholder democracy with a wide distribution of productive wealth.45
Pollan’s recent turn to public policy as a tool for restructuring the food system should lay to rest the charge that he has been too quick to abandon government regulation. Whether his newfound enthusiasm for federal intervention catches on among his fellow locavores remains to be seen, but it is clear that Pollan himself has struck out in an overtly political direction. This is not to imply, however, that he was insufficiently political prior to publishing his open letter to the 2008 presidential candidates. Stoll may be right that The Omnivore’s Dilemma fails to address the maldistribution of land, and Guthman and her colleagues are certainly justified in their scrutiny of Pollan’s tendency to reduce food politics to consumer choice and assign normative (pre-political) values to localism. Nevertheless, The Omnivore’s Dilemma is a profoundly political book, although not in the conventional sense of the word. At the core of Pollan’s argument is a call for the proliferation of local-food economies comprised of interconnected local institutions such as Community-Supported Agriculture programs,46 farmers’ markets, farm stores, community-scaled slaughterhouses and processing facilities, small shops, farm-to-restaurant programs, and metropolitan buying clubs. These institutions, he notes, have long worked hand-in-glove with another set of institutions—the Rodale Institute, the Land Institute, and, it might be added, the New Alchemy Institute—that have served as an alternative network for research and development aimed at working out the scientific and technological details of a locally scaled and environmentally sustainable food system.
This sort of institution-building effort is best understood as a manifestation of “prefigurative politics,” not anti-politics. Those who view Pollan as apolitical tend to assume that the only form of politics worthy of the name is “instrumental politics”: the direct confrontation of the powers that be, such as fighting in the streets, courts, and the halls of Congress to loosen the corporate stranglehold on regulatory agencies.47 In contrast, advocates of prefigurative politics seek to create a new culture within the shell of the old, typically by building a set of alternative institutions. In doing so, they aim to prefigure the world in which they would like to live. This countercultural strategy is precisely what animated the original organic movement of the 1960s, whose eclipse by “Big Organic” Pollan laments. While it is certainly legitimate to question whether a prefigurative strategy for social change can provide an effective or sufficient means to address the environmental and social ills generated by our globalized industrial food system, it is a mistake to think of such a strategy as apolitical. As a coordinated, if indirect, effort to alter an existing set of social and economic relations, it is political by definition.
While the issues raised in these concluding remarks bear largely on the current politics of food, the essay as a whole attempts to elucidate the broader historical significance of local food. Historians of technology in particular will find a rich area for future research in the evolution of food localism and sustainable agriculture in general. And, of course, the public has much to gain from historians of technology bringing their unique analytical tools and insights to bear on these subjects. As with renewable energy, electric vehicles, green building, and other developments at the nexus of technological innovation and environmental sustainability, local and organic food are likely to take on increasing importance in coming years. Historians of technology are well situated to advance our understanding of this phenomenon. We would all benefit, for example, from careful scholarship on the techniques and hardware associated with sustainable agriculture, on the ways in which institutions and technologies have been arranged into food systems, and on the ideological considerations and political dynamics that shape those systems. Conversely, historians of technology have much to gain from a careful examination of local and organic food. To rephrase Wendell Berry, if we are to know “how the world is used,” then we must know something about “how we eat.”
1. Wendell Berry, What Are People For? (San Francisco, 1990), 149.
2. For a prominent example of the former, see Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (New York, 2006); and of the latter, see Marion Nestle, Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health (Berkeley, Calif., 2002).
3. Recent attempts by various supermarket chains to jump on the local-food bandwagon attest to the increasing ubiquity of the trend—or at least to the increasing recognition of its allure as a marketing strategy (Marian Burros, “Supermarket Chains Narrow Their Sights,” New York Times, 6 August 2008). Even Wal-Mart, the paragon of mega-retailing, has begun to position itself as a champion of local food. Claiming to be the nation’s largest buyer of local produce, the firm announced in July 2008 that it intended to spend $400 million on local food by the end of the year (although it defines “local” as food produced within state boundaries, regardless of farm size or production method). Wal-Mart’s corporate website touts the importance of minimizing food miles and announces the availability of a “Food Miles Calculator” to help consumers verify the localness of the firm’s produce (http://instoresnow.walmart.com/food-article_ektid 44214.aspx, accessed 7 August 2008). See also Jon Gambrell, “Wal-Mart Branches Out into Locally Grown Produce,” San Francisco Chronicle, 1 July 2008.
4. Organic and local are not mutually exclusive, of course. Many consumers prefer food that falls into both categories; others, as we will see below, question the rigor of current United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) organic standards and thus seek to go “beyond organic,” in which case they typically elevate local production to a higher priority.
5. See, for example, “The 100-Mile Diet Challenge,” at http://www.100milediet.org (accessed 14 January 2009), and the website of the San Francisco–based Locavores, at http://www.locavores.com (accessed 14 January 2009). For scholarly analysis of the foodshed concept, see Jack Kloppenburg Jr., J. Hendrickson, and G. W. Stevenson, “Coming into the Foodshed,” Agriculture and Human Values 13 (1996): 33–42; Thomas A. Lyson, Civic Agriculture: Reconnecting Farm, Food, and Community (Medford, Mass., 2004), 107n; and Elizabeth Barham, David Lind, and Lewis Jett, “The Missouri Regional Cuisines Project: Connecting to Place in the Restaurant,” in Urban Place: Reconnecting with the Natural World, ed. Peggy F. Barlett (Cambridge, Mass., 2005), 145–47.
6. For the history of the modern sustainable agriculture movement in the United States, which grew out of both New Deal advocacy for “permanent agriculture” and the organic movement, see Randal S. Beeman and James A. Pritchard, A Green and Permanent Land: Ecology and Agriculture in the Twentieth Century (Lawrence, Kans., 2001); Elizabeth Barham, “Sustainable Agriculture in the United States and France: A Polanyian Perspective” (Ph.D. diss., Cornell University, August 1999), chap. 5, esp. 145; Philip Conford, The Origins of the Organic Movement (Edinburgh, 2001), chap. 6; and Richard R. Harwood, “A History of Sustainable Agriculture,” in Sustainable Agriculture Systems, ed. Clive A. Edwards et al. (Ankeny, Iowa, 1990), 3–19.
7. While historians of technology have produced valuable research on agricultural mechanization, pesticides, hybridization, livestock production, food irradiation, and other aspects of the modern food system, few have commented on the central question underlying the debate over local food: Was agricultural industrialization, particularly the rigidly orthodox version that emerged in the postwar era, a wise choice, or were there better alternatives? Historians who have addressed this question usually have something to say about technology but do not tend to identify themselves as historians of technology. Some of the more notable examples include environmental historians Donald Worster, Brian Donahue, and Steven Stoll (whose critique of Pollan is discussed below); agricultural historians Deborah Fitzgerald and Randal Beeman; and American cultural historians Warren Belasco and Harvey Levenstein. Journalists such as Pollan and Eric Schlosser have also played an important role in investigating the food debate and its history.
8. This argument became a mantra of sorts for Earl Butz, secretary of agriculture during the Nixon administration; see “Earl Butz versus Wendell Berry,” in News That Stayed News: Ten Years of Co-Evolution Quarterly, ed. Stewart Brand and Art Kleiner (San Francisco, 1986), 116–29, and, more recently, the documentary film by Ian Cheney, Curt Ellis, and Aaron Woolf, King Corn: You Are What You Eat (2007).
9. While much research remains to be done in this area (thanks in part to the USDA Land Grant System’s meager support for such work), evidence demonstrating organic agriculture’s productive potential has been steadily accumulating. The roots of this research can be traced at least back to the seminal 1970s study conducted by Washington University’s Center for the Biology of Natural Systems under the direction of Barr y Commoner. See Robert Klepper et al., A Comparison of the Production, Economic Returns, and Energy-intensiveness of Corn Belt Farms That Do and Do Not Use Inorganic Fertilizers and Pesticides, CBNS Report AE 4 (St. Louis, 1975). More recent studies include Catherine Badgley et al., “Organic Agriculture and the Global Food Supply,” Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems 22 (2007): 86–108; Joshua L. Posner, John O. Baldock, and Janet L. Hedtcke, “Organic and Conventional Production Systems in the Wisconsin Integrated Cropping Systems Trials: I. Productivity 1990–2002,” Agronomy Journal 100 (2008): 253–60; and UNEP-UNCTAD Capacity-Building Task Force on Trade, Environment, and Development, Organic Agriculture and Food Security in Africa (New York and Geneva, 2008).
10. See, for example, Wes Jackson’s work on “Natural Systems Agriculture” at the Land Institute in Salina, Kansas.
11. For the sake of brevity, I have offered something akin to an ideal type of sustainable agriculture. It should be noted, however, that the movement is home to a variety of political and technological perspectives; see Barham, “Sustainable Agriculture,” chap. 5.
12. For a pointed analysis of this dynamic, see Walden Bello, “Manufacturing a Food Crisis,” Nation, 15 May 2008, 16–21.
13. See Barham, “Sustainable Agriculture” (n. 6 above), 147–48.
14. Ibid., 143, 171–73.
15. The movement’s most noteworthy policy victory to date came in 1987, when its well-coordinated lobbying effort convinced the USDA to establish the Low-Input Sustainable Agriculture program (LISA), the federal government’s first major sustainable agriculture initiative. Sustainable agriculturalists have also begun to exert increasing (though hardly decisive) influence over the farm bill by leveraging mounting public concern over such issues as food safety, oil consumption, pesticide contamination, and habitat conservation. See ibid., chap. 5, for an excellent account of the LISA saga.
16. This process began with the passing of the Organic Foods Production Act under Title 21 of the 1990 Farm Bill, which established the USDA’s National Organic Program (USDA-NOP) and instructed it “to set national standards for the production, handling, and processing of organically grown agricultural products.” The USDA-NOP also “oversees the mandatory certification of organic production.” See Mary V. Gold, “Organic Production/Organic Food: Information Access Tools,” USDA National Agricultural Library’s Alternative Farming Systems Information Center, June 2007, http://www.nal.usda.gov/afsic/pubs/ofp/ofp.shtml (accessed 5 August 2008). After a decade of vigorous debate with the organic movement, the USDA-NOP published its final standards in February 2000.
17. The others are Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s Eye View of the World (New York, 2001); Samuel Fromartz, Organic, Inc.: Natural Foods and How They Grew (Orlando, Fla., 2006); and Marion Nestle, What to Eat (New York, 2006).
18. Steven Stoll, “The Smallholder’s Dilemma,” Technology and Culture 47 (2006): 808–13.
19. Ibid., 808. In contrast to Pollan, Fromartz, and Nestle, Stoll praises George Pyle’s Raising Less Corn, More Hell: The Case for the Independent Farm and Against Industrial Food (New York, 2005) for including the anger and political content of the neo-agrarians.
20. See Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma (n. 2 above), 52, 63, 69. For the perspective of the Center for Rural Affairs (CRA) on processors and contract-farming, see Marty Strange, Family Farming: A New Economic Vision (Lincoln, Neb., 1988), 19; CRA, Spotlight on Pork (Walthill, Neb., 1994), 1; and CRA, Spotlight on Pork II: Corporate Farming Update (Walthill, Neb., 1995), 5–6.
21. The Agriculture, Food, and Human Values Society publishes a journal, Agriculture and Human Values, and holds an annual conference; the Agro-Food Studies Research Group (AFSRG), based at the University of California, Santa Cruz, sponsors a seminar series. Both groups have useful websites: http://www.afhvs.org/ (accessed 14 January 2009) and http://www2.ucsc.edu/cgirs/research/environment/afsrg/index.html (accessed 14 January 2009). Several scholars in the AFSRG have been particularly vocal on the issue of localism, among them Melanie DuPuis, Julie Guthman, Margaret Fitzsimmons, Patricia Allen, David Goodman, William Friedland, Elizabeth Barham, Thomas Lyson, and Jack Kloppenburg Jr. See, in particular, E. Melanie DuPuis and David Goodman, “Should We Go ‘Home’ to Eat? Toward a Reflexive Politics of Localism,” Journal of Rural Studies 21 (2005): 359–71, discussed below; and Kloppenburg, Hendrickson, and Stevenson (n. 5 above), 33–42. The AFSRG website defines the group’s purpose as follows: “The intellectual project of the Research Group is to develop theoretical resources to inform critical engagement with trajectories of change in conventional agro-food networks from ‘field to table.’ This project is complemented by a strong commitment to ‘alternative’ agro-food production and consumption logics in promoting socially just and environmentally sustainable patterns of rural development.” This program is indicative of the late-twentieth-century shift within the sociology of agriculture away from what Barham, Lind, and Jett describe as a narrow focus on “agricultural policy and corporate interests” toward the broader conceptual framework of food, which includes “issues of hunger, quality, unemployment, community relations, and ecological sustainability”; see Barham, Lind, and Jett (n. 5 above), 144.
22. Pollan’s endorsement, which is located on the inside flap of the hardcover edition, reads: “Agrarian Dreams throws a cold shower of reality over the dream of organic agriculture in California, demonstrating all that is lost when organic farming goes industrial. This is a challenging book, and until we can answer the hard questions Julie Guthman poses, a genuinely sustainable agriculture will elude us.”
23. Julie Guthman, “Commentary on Teaching Food: Why I Am Fed Up with Michael Pollan et al.,” Agriculture and Human Values 24 (2007): 261–64.
24. Ibid., 263.
25. Among other things, Guthman criticizes Pollan’s “simplistic explanations of obesity, for example—too much food, too cheap—does [sic] a disservice to understanding and confronting a society where we are both encouraged to consume and scolded for showing the signs of it”; his “messianic” tone; his penchant for a “Manichean ethics” that focuses on extremely bad and extremely good farmers while ignoring those who have adopted sustainable practices in piecemeal fashion; and his resort to naturalistic explanations (he argues, for example, that we are predisposed to an omnivorous diet because of our “omnicompetent teeth and jaws” rather than our culturally mediated desires) (ibid., 262, 263; cf. Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, 6). With respect to the last criticism, it should be noted that Pollan does qualify his argument; the full quote reads: “The fact of our omnivorousness has done much to shape our nature, both body (we possess the omnicompetent teeth and jaws of the omnivore, equally well suited to tearing meat and grinding seeds) and soul” (emphasis added).
26. For Pollan’s views on legibility and labeling, see The Omnivore’s Dilemma, 9 and 13. While I lack the space to elaborate, it is worth noting that a number of activists—particularly those advocating “domestic fair trade” standards and “values-based labeling”— have challenged the push to move “beyond organic” and the associated skepticism over labeling. Elizabeth Henderson, for example, argues that rather than giving up on the organic label, the sustainable agriculture movement should stand by it and fortify it by establishing additional labels indicating fair-trade practices, local production, and so on. On domestic fair-trade standards, see Elizabeth Henderson et al., “The Agricultural Justice Project: Social Stewardship Standards for Organic and Sustainable Agriculture,” http://www.cata-farmworkers.org/ajp/ (accessed 14 January 2009). For an important analysis of “values-based labeling,” see Elizabeth Barham, “Towards a Theory of Values-Based Labeling,” Agriculture and Human Values 19 (2002): 349–60.
27. Guthman, 263. According to Guthman, Pollan couples this political argument for localism with a “naturalistic argument” that assumes that humans are “naturally predisposed to unite [the consumer and producer] sides of ourselves” (p. 263). She suggests that this assumption helps explain Pollan’s fascination with hunter-gatherers and gardeners and argues that while he stops short of calling for either a mass reversion to hunting and gathering or a Jeffersonian smallholder democracy, his proposal for a localized agricultural economy built on direct farmer-to-consumer sales (through farmers’ markets, CSAs, and the like) is really just a “proxy” for his deep desire to reunite the functions of production and consumption in accordance with the (alleged) intentions of nature.
28. Ibid.
29. Ibid., 264.
30. Ibid., 263. To be fair, while Pollan certainly seems to embrace farmer-activist Joel Salatin’s notion that consumers who “opt out” by buying locally are engaging in “a kind of civic act” or “a form of protest,” he also suggests that “feeding the cities may require a different sort of food chain than feeding the countryside” (The Omnivore’s Dilemma [n. 2 above], 260–61). Unfortunately, he neglected to outline (at least in The Omnivore’s Dilemma) what that urban-oriented food chain might look like. More importantly, his one-sentence qualification does little to counterbalance what is essentially a 450-page argument that we are best served by a “culture of audit.”
31. Guthman, 263.
32. Guthman does, however, note that it parallels the longstanding and problematic tendency to romanticize the concept of community (ibid., 263).
33. DuPuis and Goodman (n. 21 above), 361.
34. While DuPuis and Goodman warn (ibid., 364) that unreflexive localism can play into the hands of global capitalism, they argue that localism pursued with proper vigilance can become “an effective social movement of resistance to globalism.”
35. Ibid., 360.
36. Ibid., 367–68. On “glocalization,” see, for example, E. Swyngedouw, “Neither Global nor Local: ‘Glocalization’ and the Politics of Scale,” in Spaces of Globalization, ed. K. Cox (New York, 1997), 137–66. On the “hollowing out” of the nation-state, see Bob Jessup, “Narrating the Future of the National Economy and the National State: Remarks on Remapping Regulation and Reinventing Governance,” in State/Culture: State-Formation after the Cultural Turn, ed. George Steinmetz (Ithaca, N.Y., 1999), 378–405.
37. Their effectiveness in doing so is contingent, of course, on the strengthening and restructuring of the federal system of food regulation; see Marion Nestle, Safe Food: Bacteria, Biotechnology, and Bioterrorism (Berkeley, Calif., 2003).
38. Wendell Berry, for example, has long complained that regulations mandating expensive dairy and slaughterhouse equipment in the name of sanitation have made it impossible for small-scale farmers to sell their surplus milk and meat locally; the small volume of such sales cannot support the expense of the required equipment. The principal beneficiaries of such “one size fits all” regulations, Berry argues, are the large producers. See Berry, The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture (1977; rept., San Francisco, 1986), 41; Berry, The Gift of Good Land: Further Essays Cultural and Agricultural (San Francisco, 1981), 98–103; and Berry and Gene Logsdon, “Sanitation Laws Squeeze Out Small Producers,” Organic Gardening and Farming, October 1977, 43–46. For a movement insider’s account of the outlaw response to such regulations, see Sandor Katz, The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved: Inside America’s Underground Food Movements (White River Junction, Vt., 2006).
39. Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma (n. 2 above), 246, 250.
40. Michael Pollan, “Farmer in Chief,” New York Times Magazine, 12 October 2008.
41. Further on, Pollan even characterizes this regulatory program as anti-regulatory: “There is a strong libertarian component to the sun-food agenda, which seeks to free small producers from the burden of government regulation in order to stoke rural innovation” (ibid.). His ambivalence toward the regulatory state is unsurprising, given his previous libertarian proclivities and the emphasis that many sustainable food advocates place on decentralization.
42. For terrorists, these include such things as mass-transit systems and skyscrapers; for insects, they include large-scale crop monocultures.
43. Pollan offers two main arguments in support of his claim that such a stigma is misplaced. In The Omnivore’s Dilemma, 242–43, he notes that cheap food (as opposed to ostensibly elitist organic and local food) turns out to be quite expensive once all the subsidies and externalities (environmental, social, and geopolitical) are factored into the price. Then, in his open letter to the 2008 presidential candidates, Pollan channels the agrarian outrage of the sustainable agriculture movement, arguing that for the “[fastfood] industry and its apologists to imply that it is somehow more ‘populist’ or egalitarian to hand our food dollars to Burger King or General Mills than to support a struggling local farmer is absurd” (Pollan, “Farmer in Chief ”).
44. Croly made this argument in The Promise of American Life (New York, 1912).
45. To be clear, when Croly espoused Jeffersonian ends in The Promise of American Life, he was referring not to Jefferson’s decentralist social vision, but rather to his equalitarianism. Croly embraced the latter goal but rejected the notion that it could be achieved through Jeffersonian means, which he characterized as a combination of limited government and individual liberty. With the onset of massive economic consolidation during the nineteenth century, he argued, those means had become so ineffective that continued reliance upon them threatened to undermine “the promise of American life.” Under such circumstances, Croly concluded, the achievement of Jeffersonian ends would require a Hamiltonian approach emphasizing administrative centralization; yet he regarded Hamilitonianism as insufficiently attentive to the preservation of Jefferson’s cherished democratic liberties. His solution took the form of an ideological accommodation that owed far more to Hamilton than to Jefferson. In particular, Jefferson’s emphasis on local autonomy would have to be jettisoned to make way for a centralized response to the economic and social realities of the times. For Croly, together with Theodore Roosevelt and other progressive reformers taking such an approach, this meant establishing a vigorous national government that would rely heavily on disinterested experts to maximize the productive efficiency of giant corporations and ameliorate social inequities. As historian Christopher Lasch has noted, the triumph of this social-democratic vision among progressive reformers (along with the eclipse of syndicalism and guild socialism by statist versions of socialism) significantly narrowed the terms of political debate from this point forward. With a few important exceptions, Lasch lamented, those on the liberal and radical Left now agreed that any suggestion of abandoning economic concentration in favor of a decentralized system of proprietorship “betrayed a failure of nerve, an inability to come to terms with modern life, a sentimental fixation on the past, a ‘petty bourgeois’ sensibility, an outlook hopelessly clouded by ‘romantic,’ ‘populistic,’ ‘individualistic,’ ‘nostalgic,’ and otherwise contemptibly retrograde illusions of self-sufficiency” (Christopher Lasch, The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics [New York, 1991], 208). Among the exceptions to this rule were John Dewey, Mary Parker Follett, and Croly himself, who by 1914 had abandoned his earlier preference for technocratic centralization in favor of a political philosophy emphasizing democratic participation and industrial self-governance (Herbert Croly, Progressive Democracy [New York, 1914]). See also Robert B. Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca, N.Y., 1991), 189–93; and Lasch, 340–42, 345. Left-wing populism—or the notion that centralized governmental power should be used to promote a decentralized and democratic economy—was relegated to the margins of American political life during the Progressive Era and has remained there ever since. Yet as Pollan’s open letter indicates, it has managed to avoid the dustbin of history.
46. Community-Supported Agriculture (CSA) is an arrangement in which a farm sells shares of the harvest to raise capital prior to the growing season. In return, CSA members (shareholders) receive a basket of produce every week or so and often have an opportunity or requirement to work a designated number of hours on the farm or at the distribution point. This arrangement is advantageous to farmer and consumer alike. The farmer is able to raise capital during the slow season and distribute the risk of a weak harvest over a multitude of shareholders; the CSA member gains access to local, responsibly produced food at a discount and helps build a sustainable local food system in the process. See Elizabeth Henderson and Robyn Van En, Sharing the Harvest: A Citizen’s Guide to Community Supported Agriculture (White Rover Junction, Vt., 2007); Steven M. Schnell, “Food with a Farmer’s Face: Community-Supported Agriculture in the United States,” Geographical Review 97, no. 4 (October 2007): 550–64; Jack Kittredge, “Community Supported Agriculture: Rediscovering Community,” in Rooted in the Land: Essays on Community and Place, ed. William Vitek and Wes Jackson (New Haven, Conn., 1996), 253–60; Laura B. DeLind, “Considerably More than Vegetables, a Lot Less than Community: The Dilemma of Community Supported Agriculture,” in Fighting for the Farm: Rural America Transformed, ed. Jane Adams (Philadelphia, 2003), 192–208; and Claire C. Hinrichs and Thomas A. Lyson, Remaking the North American Food System: Strategies for Sustainability (Lincoln, Neb., 2007).
47. The concept of prefigurative politics is borrowed from Doug Rossinow, who discovered it in Winifred Breines, Community and Organization in the New Left: The Great Refusal, 1962–1968 (South Hadley, Mass., 1982). On the New Left’s prefigurative politics and the distinction between prefigurative and instrumental politics in general, see Breines, 6–7, 30, 47–50; Rossinow, “The New Left in the Counterculture: Hypotheses and Evidence,” Radical History Review 67 (1997): 85; Rossinow, The Politics of Authenticity: Liberalism, Christianity, and the New Left in America (New York, 1998), 248, 422n; and John Case and Rosemary C. R. Taylor, eds., Co-ops, Communes and Collectives: Experiments in Social Change in the 1960s and 1970s (New York, 1979), 4.
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