• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 701 0

industrial agriculture that never managed to do what a food system has to do: feed the nation. By the time of its collapse, more than half of the food consumed in the Soviet Union was being produced by small farmers and home gardeners operating without official sanction, on private plots tucked away in the overlooked corners and cracks of the crumbling Soviet monolith. George Naylor, speaking from deep inside the American monolith, might be onto something when, during our conversations about industrial agriculture, he likened the rise of alternative food chains in America to “the last days of Soviet agriculture. The centralized food system wasn’t serving the people’s needs, so they went around it. The rise of farmer’s markets and CSAs is sending the same signal today.” Of course the problems of our food system are very different—if anything, it produces too much food, not too little, or too much of the wrong food. But there’s no question that it is failing many consumers and producers, which is why they are finding creative ways around it.

So much about life in a global economy feels as though it has passed beyond the individual’s control—what happens to our jobs, to the prices at the gas station, to the vote in the legislature. But somehow food still feels a little different. We can still decide, every day, what we’re going to put into our bodies, what sort of food chain we want to participate in. We can, in other words, reject the industrial omelet on offer and decide to eat another. This might not sound like a big deal, but it could be the beginnings of one. Already the desire on the part of consumers to put something different into their bodies has created an $11 billion market in organic food. That marketplace was built by consumers and farmers working informally together outside the system, with exactly no help from the government.

Today the total economy, astounding in its ability to absorb every challenge, is well on its way to transforming organic from a reform movement into an industry—another flavor in the global supermarket. It took capitalism less than a quarter century to turn even something as ephemeral as bagged salads of cut and washed organic mesclun, of all things, into a cheap international commodity retailed in a new organic supermarket. Whether this is a good or bad thing people will disagree.

Joel Salatin and his customers want to be somewhere that that juggernaut can’t go, and it may be that by elevating local above organic, they have found exactly that place. By definition local is a hard thing to sell in a global marketplace. Local food, as opposed to organic, implies a new economy as well as a new agriculture—new social and economic relationships as well as new ecological ones. It’s a lot more complicated.

Of course, just because food is local doesn’t necessarily mean it will be organic or even sustainable. There’s nothing to stop a local farmer from using chemicals or abusing animals—except the gaze or good word of his customers. Instead of looking at labels, the local food customer will look at the farm for himself, or look the farmer in the eye and ask him about how he grows his crops or treats his animals. That said, there are good reasons to think a genuinely local agriculture will tend to be a more sustainable agriculture. For one thing, it is much less likely to rely on monoculture, the original sin from which almost every other problem of our food system flows. A farmer dependent on a local market will, perforce, need to grow a wide variety of things rather than specialize in the one or two plants or animals that the national market (organic or otherwise) would ask from him.

The supermarket wants all its lettuce from the Salinas Valley, all its apples from Washington State, and all its corn from Iowa. (At least until the day it decides it wants all its corn from Argentina, all its apples from China, and all its lettuce from Mexico.) People in Iowa can eat only so much corn and soybeans themselves. So when Iowans decide to eat locally, rather than from the supermarket, their farmers