Chances are you haven't heard the word (I hadn't until this weekend), but you know what it means: eat local, think local and you'll be greener, healthier, live longer, and get to go to that great garden patch in the sky. Many of the presentations over the past weekend were explicitly connect to, tracing, or critiquing certain food politics. Not surprising, locovorism, the new darling in the food world, was at the heart of many scholar's research. More surprising was the critique of locovorism posed by many of the historians, sociologists and biologists.
The current mantra, inspired by the Slow Food movement (another movement that is the current darling of foodies but scoffed at as problematic at this conference), is that if you eat locally grown produce it'll be fresher, hopefully be organic, taste better, reduce your carbon footprint, allay your modern environmentally-tinged guilt for even living much less breathing on the planet's surface, and you'll be a better person and custodian of the planet. The major critique of the movement, although most scholars recognized the aforementioned benefits, is that on the whole they seem to be little more than the current way of assuaging rich to upper class white Americans that they are not in fact responsible for the planet going to shit if they are willing to buy light orange tomatoes at $3 a pound, and in fact that locovorism habits act as a sort of environmental indulgence - buy local, get in to heaven faster. Suzanne Friedberg, the keynote spoke about her recent research on the topic of "fresh" - what is it? what does it actually mean? and is it a creation of the food industry trying to sell frozen and canned foods in the 1920s and 1930s? How old is something when it passes the line over freshness - and can freezing, which does stop the decay process - produce fake freshness? No doubt, green beans picked fresh and never frozen or canned taste better, but even those "local beans" are several days old by the time they get to your farmer's market. Hell, as she realized in her dissertation research/first book, French Beans and Food Scares, the prized peasant grown, "fresh" haricot vert were grown by African peasants in Zambia and flown into farmer's markets.
Regarding recent diet trends to eat fresh and multiple whole grains - to return to the hearty peasant diet or our ancestors before the invention of wonderbread. Yes, whole grain diets sometimes taste better, and do give you a more fiberful, more diverse diet, but the appeals to diets in history is little more than total bunk. The imagined past ahs always played a role in how we think about what we eat today - whether it's to demonstrate our progress and civilization ( we use the fork where our ancestors didn't), or our desire to justify diet choices by appealing to an imagined "authentic" past where everyone was strong, healthy, and robust. The fact is that we are better fed, perhaps over fed, in the first world. In Europe, there never was a real past where one family grew everything they needed in their mega-garden and ate only of their own sweat and toil. Most peasants ate monotonous foods and gruels based on what was available seasonally (no oranges in the winter, no apples after december, and put down those kiwi fruits). not to mention the paradox of modern diets which lean towards "health" (sometimes actual health, but more frequently a code word for thin (just listen to Oprah)), where in the past diets have had the general goal of avoiding thinness in favor of robustness if not plumpness (but not obesity or over-fatness) as a marker of health and being well-nourished.
Finally, several scholars pointed out the troubling classism of many of today's food politics. At the Davis farmer's market, locally grown tomatoes and apples cost $3 and $2.50-5 a pound. A head of red leaf lettuce cost $2.50, mixed salad greens (which, b/c it's Feb were looking sad) were $5/lb. At the Safeway grocery store, tomatoes were $1.20/lb, apples were $1.50/lb, lettuce was $1.40, and TJ's salad greens are about $2. Farmer's markets, locally grown produce, organic everything costs more. One of the presenters gave a talk on the politics of the Berkeley and West Oakland Farmer's Markets - both of which sell their produce at bulk prices to schools and other organizations so that they can sell it at reduced cost to the populations who need it most (who, shocking I'm sure, tend to be working and lower class black and Latino populations of the adjacent neighborhoods). But that they seem to be in the minority of farmer's markets.
This isn't to say that shopping at farmer's markets or for local produce isn't good - for local farmers, for reducing carbon footprint - but that is maybe isn't as "good" as some might think, and has a lot to do with what you can afford.* Several scholars noted moving into a world in which who has access to what food is becoming more differentiated. If you can afford it, you can buy everything local at premium prices for food that sometimes tastes better than what you can find at your local grocery store.* If you can't, too bad for you, eat your McDonald's, wallow in your unhealthy non-whole grain diet, and feel guilty that you are single handedly contributing to the environmental collapse of the planet.
*you can really see this in restaurant prices.
**tomatoes in CA, whether from the farmer's market, organically grown, or the plain old hot house variety, are generally sour, watery, and flavorless.
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