Selling Local: Why Local Food Movements Matter
223
Selling Local: Why Local Food Movements Matter
223eBook
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Overview
In an era bustling with international trade and people on the move, why has local food become increasingly important? How does a community benefit from growing and buying its own produce, rather than eating food sown and harvested by outsiders? Selling Local is an indispensable guide to community-based food movements, showcasing the broad appeal and impact of farmers' markets, community supported agriculture programs, and food hubs, which combine produce from small farms into quantities large enough for institutions like schools and restaurants. After decades of wanting food in greater quantities, cheaper, and standardized, Americans now increasingly look for quality and crafting. Grocery giants have responded by offering "simple" and "organic" food displayed in folksy crates with seals of organizational approval, while only blocks away a farmer may drop his tailgate on a pickup full of freshly picked sweet corn. At the same time, easy-up umbrellas are likely to unfurl over multi-generational farmers' markets once or twice a week in any given city or town. Drawing on prodigious fieldwork and research, experts Jennifer Meta Robinson and James Robert Farmer unlock the passion for and promise of local food movements, show us how they unfold practically in towns and on farms, and make a persuasive argument for how much they deeply matter to all of us.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253027092 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 12/22/2021 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 223 |
| File size: | 7 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Jennifer Meta Robinson is Professor of Practice in the Department of Anthropology at Indiana University where she teaches courses in communication, culture, and pedagogy. She has been formally studying local food since 2005, publishing numerous articles, book chapters, and The Farmers' Market Book: Growing Food, Cultivating Community.
James Farmer is Assistant Professor of Recreation, Park, and Tourism Studies in the School of Public Health at Indiana University where he focuses his scholarship and service on community food systems and natural resource sustainability.
Read an Excerpt
Selling Local
Why Local Food Movements Matter
By Jennifer Meta Robinson, James Robert Farmer
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2017 Jennifer Meta Robinson and James R. FarmerAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-02709-2
CHAPTER 1
Why Local and Why Now?
"Local" has emerged as one of the hottest food and cultural concepts in the United States in the nascent twenty-first century. Many people choose to buy local, read books written or published or bound locally, wear clothing made from homespun fiber or fashioned nearby, ride locally made bicycles, recreate locally, and build homes with locally sourced materials. Three-quarters of Americans say that they are highly influenced by labels that indicate food is "locally grown." Food industry giants that regularly source from around the world, such as members of the National Restaurant Association, the largest food service trade organization, and Walmart, the largest US grocer, identify "locally grown" as a top food trend in recent years. The term's ubiquity alone begs examination.
Benefits and Constraints
Our research — individually over the past two decades and more recently in collaboration — has involved hundreds of interviews, visits, and observations, and thousands of surveys with locally oriented farmers and customers in the United States. Our focus has been especially on people associated with farmers' markets and CSAs in the Midwest and in the central Appalachian regions, but our own work and our reading of other scholars has ranged far beyond. We can identify several root reasons for the increase in interest in local food.
Economic Factors
Local food venues help to provide a measure of economic stability to a community. Farmers' markets, for example, which are essentially an assemblage of small businesses, tend to boost nearby commercial enterprises: a study in Ontario, Canada, found that 50 percent of market customers also shopped at other businesses while en route to or from a market. Other communities in the United States, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia have also recognized that farmers' markets can be tourist attractions that draw outside money into local economies. They promote markets as a way to experience a community's unique agrarian surroundings, history, climate, and cuisine. Studies in Athens, Ohio, and the North Carolina Highlands, among other places, have found that their farmers' markets can attract up to half of their customers from outside the immediate area. CSAs, too, strengthen the rural economy, stabilizing farmers' incomes by creating ongoing purchasing relationships with consumers nearby. Similarly, food aggregation hubs, a new addition to local systems, help to build capacity by allowing farmers to grow more and sell more. Moreover, while the United States continues to produce prodigious amounts of commodity crops (such as corn, soybeans, wheat, and pork bellies), the country also benefits from the diversification of the local economy that occurs with demand for specialty agricultural products. Because these marketing arrangements decrease the likelihood that farmers will subdivide or sell their property, they also help preserve agricultural land and the force of people who know how to farm it.
A limitation of local food, however, is the perception, and sometimes the fact, that its cost is higher. For example, the public perceives farmers' markets to have higher prices than supermarkets, and enrollment in CSAs often requires a big cash outlay. These impressions remain even though prices for in-season produce can be cheaper, some markets now accept government food subsidies, and some CSAs now offer lower-price subscription payments. Surveys show that farmers' market and CSA customers tend to have higher incomes and more formal education than the general population of the area.
On the farmers' side, the economic balance sheet is always a challenge: "I can grow or raise just about anything that we have the climate and soils for — it is the market that is the problem," says Tim Nickels, a fourth-generation farmer in western Kentucky. Although he can produce plenty of peaches and sweet corn, he has to find enough people to buy them at prices that cover his costs in doing business, which are especially high as he works on transitioning to more environmentally sustainable methods. Similarly, Paul Alexander, a local produce farmer in southern Indiana, feels challenged by having to be both farmer and marketer, doing the physical labor of reclaiming long fallow fields while simultaneously building a clientele. Those fields have a twenty-five-year seedbed of grasses and other undesirables that Alexander must battle in order to give his vegetable cash crops a chance. At the same time, he worries that the local population is too sparse to absorb all he can grow.
Social Factors
Such economic factors complement an array of social benefits that local food venues provide for communities, including developing social vitality, local culture and values, and human capabilities. The social nature of markets and CSAs supports new friendships, strengthens old acquaintances, and can enhance a feeling of belonging among vendors and consumers. Aggregation hubs — when they welcome small, local growers and identify their sources as such — support the same kinds of social belonging. Food hubs, though, are new developments in the local food infrastructure — aggregating, storing, processing, and distributing regionally to larger retail, commercial, and institutional customers — so research on them has begun only recently. Hubs that welcome small, locally oriented growers clearly provide a model for access to larger buyers. Still, the public nature of all of these venues means that local crops, crafts, and cuisines can be connected to the identities, creativities, heritages, and collective memory of those who live in a particular region.
On the other hand, local food venues may seem to be inaccessible to people whose ethnicity, class, social position, and cultural preparation for the market experience differs from the majority of those participating. In addition, people with physical disabilities may find the exertion of an open-air shopping excursion at a farmers' market or a pick-your-own farm prohibitive. Thus, certain sectors of the population can be more prepared for and more privileged in local food experiences.
An additional social factor hinges on the homespun notion of having fun on the farm, also known as agrileisure. Many families know firsthand the pleasure gained from picking strawberries, pumpkins, apples, or Christmas trees at a local farm, and the USDA has long promoted recreation as both an outcome of the agriculture experience and a means to diversify farm income. Coining the term, Ben Amsden and Jesse McEntee describe agrileisure as emerging "from the intersection of agriculture, recreation and leisure, and social change." The hybrid word binds the "supply and demand sides of farm-based recreation and tourism with the processes of economic diversification, community development, and environmental and ecological sustainability." In other words, the leisure gained by consumers of agricultural activities — such as regular market shopping, food security gleaning, CSA barbeques, and nose-to-tail cooking lessons — supports the viability of farms and farmers while also fundamentally transforming the economic, social, and ecological world we share. Agrileisure participants, including regular farmers' market and CSA shoppers, act as engaged community members with a keen interest in food, agriculture, community development, or the social experience. Agritourists, on the other hand, are often one-time visitors who enjoy a hayride, overnight farm stay, or walk through a corn maze but who have no ongoing or "internally compelling love" for connecting to the agricultural world.
The central appeal of agriculture, of course, is its emphasis on consumption — food. Indeed, Daniel Thomas Cook argues that the pleasure of consumption alone makes it a leisure activity. The selection, preparation, and consumption of food in ways that strengthen families and friendships and perpetuate traditions are social activities often resulting in the pleasing, intuitively worthwhile, and faithful states of mind associated with recreation and leisure, respectively. James Farmer's studies have found that some customers shop at farmers' markets for recreation even more than for food. And Kallina Gallardo and her colleagues found that the entertainment and festive atmosphere at farmers' markets significantly affect consumers' choice of which market to shop. Further connecting the dots between the socioeconomic features of the farmers' market and the academic notions of research and leisure, leisure scholar Amanda Johnson says that when farmers' market customers buy for leisure, they also help to build and expand community. In short, the pleasurable act of eating, especially when associated with the lively contexts in which local food is found, results in powerful feelings that all health, welfare, and community advocates should appreciate and cultivate.
These connections are so powerful that they can be called "serious leisure" — when one remedies a lack of fulfillment in ordinary occupations (e.g., being a lawyer, homemaker, teacher, clerk) with leisure activities that are more meaningful, substantial, and engrossing to them (e.g., fly fishing, garage band guitar, fantasy football). Local food fans carry on serious leisure when they become deeply engaged with the styles and activities involved — visiting markets on vacation, timing entertaining to CSA deliveries, visiting a u-pick orchard to get peaches for drying, carrying special market totes, wearing a favorite market outfit. Food powerfully knits together discretion, necessity, pleasure, consumption, and context. So the discretionary time and effort spent on serious leisure with food (canning one's own tomatoes, learning to bake bread, sourcing local food for a holiday meal, buying a mechanized apple peeler or cherry pitter) is impossible to disentangle from the necessity of what seems a simple chore of feeding one's self and family. The pleasure and metaphysical sustenance of a Saturday's u-pick apples baked into a fancy pie can "seriously" outweigh the convenient cheapness of one found in the frozen food aisle. These complex intersections help explain why people choose to eat locally, even with the extra time necessary for shopping, cooking, and eating this way.
Environmental Factors
Regional production and distribution mean fewer goods are shipped long-distance. Typically, the shorter supply chain reduces fuel consumption and transportation pollution. In addition, produce grown for nearby consumption requires less emphasis on shelf life, which translates to fewer chemical additives, preservatives, and refrigeration costs. Overall, local food can be an important way to reduce agriculture's carbon footprint.
Local production also promotes more sensitivity to local and regional biodiversity. The demand for standardization by multinational food corporations, restaurant chains, and supermarket conglomerates has resulted in some crops being grown ubiquitously (e.g., wheat, soybeans, and corn throughout the Midwest) and in areas not naturally suited to them (e.g., rice in California's dry Central Valley), while others (e.g., Aquadulce Fava Beans or Red Garnet Amaranth) become scarce. This homogenization process has caused many large-scale farmers to monocrop in only one or two high-yield crops that often require large amounts of synthetic pesticides, fertilizers, and preservatives, with their deleterious environmental consequences. Selling locally, on the other hand, small-scale operators often find their marketing niche by providing items that are not readily accessible at chain supermarkets. Moreover, CSAs that actively involve their shareholders in the process of growing and producing their own food foster knowledge of and affinity for the local landscape, potentially spreading conservation ethics to more people as they become inspired to plug into their local "foodshed."
However, the environmental benefits of buying and selling local can be overstated. The costs and consequences of buying locally but out of season can be substantial. Winter lettuce that is field-grown in California but shipped to New York City may be more environmentally sound than choosing lettuce that is sourced closer to Manhattan but grown in a heated greenhouse. On the other hand, flying pineapples from Hawaii or melons from Argentina in January may never make environmental sense. In addition, sometimes smaller-scale growing can be less efficient than larger operations — by requiring more land or chemical inputs to grow a given quantity of food. To decide if local is environmentally sound requires considering seasonality and efficiencies of scale.
What Counts as Local?
On the surface, localism seems to be all about proximity — what is sourced nearby has more appeal than what is transported from far away. But defining local in terms of distance turns out not to be very definitive, even among its advocates. Noted author Barbara Kingsolver and her family experimented with eating locally for a year by growing their own food or purchasing it from a single county of Virginia farmers, an experience she chronicled in her popular book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life. In wider practice, the use of the term varies. The US Food, Conservation, and Energy Act (2008) defined local as products originating within 400 miles or within state lines. On the other hand, Washington, DC, is home to numerous FRESHFARM farmers' markets that define local as grown in "the Chesapeake Bay watershed region (including the states of DE, MD, PA, WV, and VA, and within a 200-mile radius of Washington, DC)." Vendors in the Bloomington, Indiana, market are eligible if they grow anywhere within state lines, which may be as much as 200 miles away, but they are ineligible if they grow their produce just 55 miles away in the state of Illinois. New York City's Union Square Greenmarket locates "our Region" within "a circle extending 120 miles to the south, 170 miles east and west, and 250 miles north of New York City." The national organization Business Alliance for Local Living Economies defines a business as local if the owner lives within 25 miles of it, if it is not publicly traded, and if the owner has sole control over its operations. Proximity, then, clearly provides part, but only part, of what it means to be local.
The lived experience of local also differs significantly from these institutional definitions. For an advocate's view of what the word means and what its practice values, let us turn to a passionate and evocative explanation from a ten-year local grower we will call Sage Goodell. After several years of farming internships and a failed cooperative farming venture, Goodell moved with her husband and two small sons to a small farm in Indiana. There, they grow produce for their CSA and year-round farmers' market sales. Goodell's story is worth more detail, but for our purposes here, her description of her profession provides useful insights into a perspective shared by many local growers. Her comments constitute a verbal performance that, as Richard Bauman notes, strikes a cadence in tone that sets it apart from ordinary speech and, in doing so, instantiates social life through language. Her comments imbue the term "local" with the lived experience of human life — with work, family, food culture, social life, economics, science, affect, and language. In her performance, "local" reflects the multidimensional integration of human experience with its surroundings — both human and nonhuman — even while it seeks to tease factors apart. Jennifer Robinson asked Goodell if it would be appropriate to describe her farm work using adjectives like "local," "small," "alternative," and "sustainable." Instead, Goodell says:
We call this thing that we are doing farmer. We are working hard to create a new definition for farmer. We are working hard to replace the image of big tractors and acres of corn with an image of farm diversity, creative thinker, healthy people, healthy land, life not death, vibrant, nutritious, living food, good land steward, responsible caretaker of this earth. Rather than a worn-out, sick "farmer" sitting in an air-conditioned tractor spraying toxic chemicals on a field, you see a robust, energetic, inspired, loving farmer on her hands and knees hand-weeding the carrots. Rather than going to Kroger and buying lifeless, tasteless, chemical-laden produce, you go to the farmers' market and shake hands with the person who grew your vegetables, harvesting them the day before and sharing with you the latest news on the farm. You develop a relationship with this farmer. She thinks of you as she harvests produce each week. She thinks of you at supper on market day, knowing you have gratitude as you nourish yourself with her produce. You have a relationship with the farmer that grows your food. This is the new definition of farmer.
Sage Goodell's act of self-definition, here, articulates seven notable facets of the ideology of local that enrich a lay sense referencing only distance.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Selling Local by Jennifer Meta Robinson, James Robert Farmer. Copyright © 2017 Jennifer Meta Robinson and James R. Farmer. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. Why Local and Why Now?
2. Understanding Farmers' Markets
3. Understanding Community Supported Agriculture
4. What's Next in Local Food?
5. Growing Capacity
6. A Systems Approach to Local Food
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index