Should we go “home” to eat?: toward a reflexive politics of localism

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Abstract

“Coming home to eat” [Nabhan, 2002. Coming Home to Eat: The Pleasures and Politics of Local Foods. Norton, New York] has become a clarion call among alternative food movement activists. Most food activist discourse makes a strong connection between the localization of food systems and the promotion of environmental sustainability and social justice. Much of the US academic literature on food systems echoes food activist rhetoric about alternative food systems as built on alternative social norms. New ways of thinking, the ethic of care, desire, realization, and vision become the explanatory factors in the creation of alternative food systems. In these norm-based explanations, the “Local” becomes the context in which this type of action works. In the European food system literature about local “value chains” and alternative food networks, localism becomes a way to maintain rural livelihoods. In both the US and European literatures on localism, the global becomes the universal logic of capitalism and the local the point of resistance to this global logic, a place where “embeddedness” can and does happen. Nevertheless, as other literatures outside of food studies show, the local is often a site of inequality and hegemonic domination. However, rather than declaim the “radical particularism” of localism, it is more productive to question an “unreflexive localism” and to forge localist alliances that pay attention to equality and social justice. The paper explores what that kind of localist politics might look like.

Introduction

Books such as “Coming home to eat” (Nabhan, 2002) and “Eat Here” (Halweil, 2004) represent the current clarion call among alternative food system advocates. US food activist discourse, with its growing discussion of “foodsheds” and the problems of “food miles,” has been making increasingly stronger connections between the localization of food systems and the promotion of environmental sustainability and social justice. In activist narratives, the local tends to be framed as the space or context where ethical norms and values can flourish, and so localism becomes inextricably part of the explanation for the rise of alternative, and more sustainable, food networks. In Europe, localization has become integral to a new E.U. system of devolved rural governance to enhance rural livelihoods and preserve European heritage. In both cases, although for different reasons, the local has become “beautiful,” as was “small” (“pluriactive” in Europe) in the 1970s and 1980s, “organic” (“multifunctional”) in the 1990s or—at least in the US—“wilderness” early in the last century.

In many cases, academics also have embraced localization as a solution to the problems of global industrial agriculture. In the US, the academic literature on alternative food systems emphasizes the strength of an embeddedness in local norms (Kloppenburg et al., 1996; Starr et al., 2003; DeLind, 2002), such as the ethics of care, stewardship and agrarian visions. This normative localism places a set of pure, conflict-free local values and local knowledges in resistance to anomic and contradictory capitalist forces. In Europe, the encouragement of local food systems has different roots. It has emerged in the context of new forms of devolved rural governance in parallel with the slow process of reform of the EU's Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). The CAP is undergoing a gradual transformation from a strongly centralized, productivist sectoral policy towards a more decentralized model in which a multi-functional agriculture is a key element of an integrated, more pluralistic approach to rural development (Gray, 2000; Lowe et al., 2002). In addition, at the meso-level, episodic food ‘scares’ and heightened consumer health and food safety concerns in Europe have stimulated a ‘turn’ to quality in food provisioning and reinforced support for multi-functional agriculture. Supporters of local food systems in Europe, while arguably less prone to the radical transformative idealism of US social movements, regard relocalization and re-embedding as strategies to realize a Eurocentric rural imaginary and defend its cultural identity against a US-dominated, corporate globalization.

Our own work certainly supports the view that global industrial agriculture has succeeded through the creation of a systemic ‘placelessness’, and that place has a role in the building of alternative food systems (DuPuis, 2005, DuPuis, 2002; Goodman and Watts, 1997). Yet, also based on our past work, we are cautious about an emancipatory food agenda that relies primarily on the naming and following of a particular set of norms or imaginaries about place (Goodman and DuPuis, 2002; DuPuis et al., forthcoming; See also Gaytan, 2004). As the following discussion will show, an “unreflexive” localism could threaten a similar romantic move to the “saving nature” rhetoric of environmental social movements. Unreflexive localism, we argue, can have two major negative consequences. First, it can deny the politics of the local, with potentially problematic social justice consequences. Second, it can lead to proposed solutions, based on alternative standards of purity and perfection, that are vulnerable to corporate cooptation (Guthman, 2004; DuPuis, 2002).

We are therefore joining a growing number of agro-food scholars who have acknowledged with David Harvey (1996) that the local is not an innocent term, observing that it can provide the ideological foundations for reactionary politics and nativist sentiment (Hinrichs, 2000, Hinrichs, 2003; Hassanein, 2003). We agree with the many recent thoughtful critiques that have called for a closer examination of “the local” of local food systems, to “explore the ambiguities and subtleties of the ideas of ‘localness’ and ‘quality’” (Holloway and Kneafsey, 2000, p. 296 quoted in Winter, 2003. See also Allen et al., 2003). In common with these scholars, our critique is meant to be cautionary, not destructive of the alternative food agenda (against global, big, conventional, environmentally degrading food systems). The intent of our critique is to put localist actions on a better political footing, one that can contribute to a more democratic local food politics. In this vein, we will question a localism which is based on a fixed set of norms or imaginaries. In particular, we show how an “unreflexive” localism arises from a perfectionist utopian vision of the food system in which food and its production are aligned with a set of normative, pre-set “standards.” This kind of food reform movement seeks to delineate ‘alternative’ food practice standards and pre-determine their ‘economies of quality’ rather than to engender the alternative political processes by which local decisions about the food system could come about democratically.

With these aims in mind, we begin with a brief overview of the a-political (anti-democratic, anti-reflexive) bent in current food localism discourse in the US (brief because the critique has largely already been covered, particularly by Hinrichs, and Allen et al.). This is followed by a more substantial review of localist “value-chain” rural development studies in Europe, which we believe have strong parallels with US localist perspectives, particularly in their lack of reflexive attention to local politics. We then explore ideas from human geography, political sociology and political science that we believe provide useful pointers on how to bring politics into analyses of local food networks. This will also enable us to understand the claims for and against localism as a normative solution to globalization. We will use these conceptual tools to examine both the US localism literature and the European scholarship on the quality ‘turn’, ‘alternative agro-food networks’ (AAFN) and ‘short food supply chains’ (SFSC).

There are strong parallels between the academic literature on alternative, localized food systems and the rhetoric of food activism built on alternative social norms or a kind of “alternative ethic.” Norm-based and ethical narratives also have become one pillar of a questionable scalar binary of global-local relations, as we observe below. Many of the arguments speak about “relocalizing” food systems (Hendrickson and Heffernan, 2002) into local “foodsheds” (Kloppenburg et al., 1996), thereby “recovering a sense of community” (Esteva, 1994) by “reembedding” food into ‘local ecologies’ (Murdoch et al., 2000) and local social relationships (Friedmann, 1994, p. 30). For example, Holloway and Kneafsey (2004) argue that alternative food networks resist capitalism through a substantively rational form of norm-based action. Localist food politics, therefore, “implies that food production–consumption is undertaken within an ethical framework” and that this “ethic of care” is intrinsically spatial: “These spatialities are often associated with the desire to foster relations of ‘closeness’ or ‘connectedness’” (2004, p. 1). Hartwick argues that a geography of consumption entails “a greater realization of connections between consumers, places, and networks [which] allows an ethical politics of consumption” (1998, p. 424).

In their study of alternative visions of food and farming among alternative food producers and activists in the Upper Midwest, Kloppenburg et al. (2000, p. 182) found that one key definition of sustainable food involved production in a “proximate system” which emphasized “locally grown food, regional trading associations, locally owned processing, local currency, and local control over politics and regulation”. Similarly, in their analysis of a local Kansas City Food Circle, Hendrickson and Heffernan (2002, p. 362) state that “the Food Circle's perceived role is to connect all actors in the food system in a sensible and sustainable way that sustains the community, is healthy for people and the environment, and returns control of the food system to local communities”.

These positions are based in a counter-logic to the political economy of agriculture arguments about the rise of capitalist agriculture as a global corporate regime (McMichael, 2000). As Hendrickson and Heffernan (2002, p. 349) describe it:

As people foster relationships with those who are no longer in their locale, distant others can structure the shape and use of the locale, a problem that is being explicitly rejected by those involved in local food system movements across the globe. This compression of space and the speed-up of time are key components of accumulation in the modern era. In the global food system, power rests with those who can structure this system by spanning distance and decreasing time between production and consumption. This reorganization of time and space indicates a great deal of power on the part of just a few actors that are able to benefit from the restructuring of the food system.

Localism becomes a counter-hegemony to this globalization thesis, a call to action under the claim that the counter to global power is local power. In other words, if global is domination then in the local we must find freedom. Friedmann, a trenchant observer of the globalization of food, makes this point forcefully: “[o]nly food economies that are bounded, that is, regional, can be regulated” because they bypass the “corporate principles of distance and durability” (1994, p. 30).

Pointing to Habermas’ idea of the “colonization of the lifeworld” by the instrumental (anomic) reason of capitalism, Hendrickson and Heffernan (2002) correspondingly embrace the local as the normative realm of resistance, a place where caring can and does happen. This echoes much of the US local food system literature, in which care ethics, desire, realization, and a sustainable vision become the explanatory factors in the creation of alternative food systems. In these norm or ethics-based explanations, the “Local” becomes the context in which cultural values work against anomic capitalism (See also Krippner, 2001). In Europe, the local is invested with similar hopes as a redoubt against globalized mass consumption of ‘placeless foods’ (Murdoch and Miele, 1999, Murdoch and Miele, 2002; Murdoch et al., 2000).

But who gets to define “the local”? What exactly is “quality” and who do you trust to provide you with this quality? What kind of society is the local embedded in? Who do you care for and how? As Hinrichs, Winter and others have noted, “the local” as a concept intrinsically implies the inclusion and exclusion of particular people, places and ways of life. The representation of the local and its constructs—quality, embeddedness, trust, care—privilege certain analytical categories and trajectories, whose effect is to naturalize and occlude the politics of the local. The naturalized local then becomes heralded as the incubator of new economic forms whose emergence configures a ‘new rural development paradigm’ for some observers (Ploeg and Renting, 2000, Ploeg et al., 2000).

Food activists in the US and proponents in Europe of agrarian-based rural development both therefore argue that localist solutions resist the injustices perpetrated by industrial capitalism. But is localism in itself more socially just? Along with Harvey (2001), we are concerned that localism can be based on the interests of a narrow, sectionalist, even authoritarian, elite, what we call an “unreflexive” politics. To formulate a more reflexive politics of localism, we draw specifically on the social justice literature, and on the idea of an “open politics” of reflexivity to envision a localism that is more socially just while leaving open a definition of social justice. Unreflexive politics are generally based on what Childs (2003) refers to as “the politics of conversion”: a small, unrepresentative group decides what is “best” for everyone and then attempts to change the world by converting everyone to accept their utopian ideal. Together with other scholars of contemporary democracy, such as Nancy Fraser (1995) and Iris Young (2000), Childs argues that the more democratic (or what we are calling “reflexive” and “open”, what Childs calls “transcommunal” and what Benhabib (1996) calls “deliberative”) politics is the “politics of respect”. Here, the emphasis is not on creating an ideal utopian “romantic” model of society and then working for society to meet that standard, but on articulating “open,” continuous, “reflexive” processes which bring together a broadly representative group of people to explore and discuss ways of changing their society. These processes also take account of the unintended consequences, ironies and contradictions involved in all social change, and treat ongoing conflicts and differences between various groups not as polarizing divisions but as grounds for respectful—and even productive—disagreement (cf. Hassanein, 2003). In other words, we place fully democratic processes squarely at the center of our formulation of an open politics of localism.

From this perspective, the critiques made by Hinrichs, 2000, Hinrichs, 2003, Hinrichs and Kremer (2002),Winter (2003) and Allen et al. (2003) can be seen as raising the problem that unreflexive localism can lead to a potentially undemocratic, unrepresentative, and defensive militant particularism. Hinrichs (2000, p. 301) has made the fundamental point that to assume that locally embedded economic activities necessarily involve non-instrumental, ethics-based interpersonal relations is to “conflate spatial relations with social relations.” In this respect, Hinrichs and Kremer (2002) show that local food system movement members tend to be white, middle-class consumers and that the movement threatens to be socially homogenized and exclusionary. In a case-study of recent initiatives to relocalize the food system in Iowa, Hinrichs (2003, p. 37) cautions that these attempts to construct regional identity can be associated with a “defensive politics of localization,” leading to reification of the ‘local’ and becoming “elitist and reactionary, appealing to nativist sentiments.”

Allen et al. (2003) also demonstrate that localism in current alternative food movements is not necessarily associated with advocacy of more socially just “care ethic” political agendas. In their study of alternative food initiatives in California, the leaders of these organizations articulate a clear preference for ecological sustainability over social justice, and express confidence in entrepreneurial, market-based processes of change in the current food system. (See also Allen, 1999). In Europe, Michael Winter (2003) also situates his empirical analysis of support for local farming in five rural areas of England and Wales within ideologies of ‘defensive localism’, and notes that local consumers can regard conventionally produced foods as equally locally embedded as organic products. On the basis of these findings, Winter (2003, p. 30) concludes that “the turn to local food may cover many different forms of agriculture… giving rise to a wide range of politics.”

These critiques show that the politics of localism can be problematic and contradictory. However, these critiques are not made to de-legitimize localism but to provide a better understanding of the complexity and pitfalls of local politics and the long-term deleterious effects of reform movements controlled primarily by members of the middle class. The social history of middle class reform movements bent on “improvement,” whether of “degraded” urban environments or unhealthy working class families, created a “sanitarian” (Hamlin, 1998) germ politics, which separated the “dirty” from the “clean” and, in the same way, established a welfare system that distinguished between the “deserving” and the “undeserving” poor. Several feminist social historians have critiqued these welfare reform movements for their narrow race, class and gender “maternalist” politics based on a particular norm or “standard” as the “right” way to live (Baker, 1991; Mink, 1995). DuPuis (2002) shows the connection between the rise of US food reform and welfare movements, in which the middle class controlled both reform agendas by universalizing particular ways of living as “perfect.”

As critiques of the US reform movements have noted, this “politics of perfection” stems not only from a class hegemonic politics, but also incorporates the racial representation of whiteness as the ‘unmarked category.’ Lipsitz (1998) calls US white middle class politics “the possessive investment in whiteness.” This possessive investment has a material aspect in the monopolization of resources, with mortgage credit and education being two instances that Lipsitz emphasizes (See also Cohen, 2003). This is accomplished by a sleight of hand in which institutionalized racism is hidden behind a representation of what is “normal”, with all variations from this norm represented as deviations. For example, a coalition of white middle-class reform groups, health officials and farmers elevated milk to the status of a “perfect food” which would improve the general health of all bodies when, in fact, milk is a culturally, genetically, and historically specific food (DuPuis, 2002).

A reflexive local politics of food would entail taking into account ways in which people's notions of “right living,” and especially “right eating,” are wrapped up in these possessive investments in race, class and gender. Such a politics would actively seek to expose and undermine the tendency of specific groups to work from this “politics of perfection”, which universalizes and elevates particular ways of eating as ideal when, in fact, all eating—like all human action—is imperfect and contradictory (Guthman and DuPuis, forthcoming).

The power and effectiveness of white middle class reform movements—from abolition to alar—cannot be denied. These movements have accomplished much, especially in terms of providing US cities with water and sewer systems, without which they would have continued to be places of extremely high mortality (Tarr, 1996; Platt, 2005). However, particularly with the rise of a new, more fractured middle class politics in the US, it is important to pay more attention to the ways in which our possessive investments in our own racial privilege influences how we define problems and solutions.

One way to do this is to consider recent reinterpretations of US history which have put race squarely at the center of the story, particularly those histories that examine the creation of local rural places. For example, Matt Garcia's A World of Its Own (2001) and Herbert's White Plague (1987) show how white middle classes created systems of racial domination in California and Texas rural localities, respectively. In fact, one of the most shocking aspects of Matt Garcia's history of Los Angeles orange production regions in the early part of the twentieth century is the juxtaposition of political rhetoric describing orange growers as democratic yeoman with cheerful pictures of them dressed up in Ku Klux Klan robes. Orange growing communities put Hispanic workers “in their place” in more ways than one, burning crosses on lawns if Hispanic families tried to move into neighborhoods beyond the labor camps and colonias, while allowing them to provide “ethnic” entertainment in exclusive white supper clubs.

Needless to say, European local food movements stem from a very different history of class, racial and gendered relationships. Calls for the relocalization of food systems appear to stem from a perceived need to protect European rural economy and society from the potentially damaging consequences of international agricultural trade liberalization. These defensive moves include replacement of direct production subsidies by forms of farm income support, notably for agri-environmental and rural development schemes, considered to be non-trade distorting under World Trade Organization rules, the so-called ‘green box’ payments. These changes are reinforced by a growing perception in EU policy circles that the consumer-driven ‘turn’ to quality has created a wider range of farm-based livelihood opportunities for those producers who can adopt conventions of product quality which emphasize territorial provenance in localized socio-ecological processes. A case in point is the UK, where re-localized, embedded food systems are seen as a means to enhance the competitiveness and economic and environmental sustainability of farming. This view of local food systems as the foundation of a more competitive, market-oriented farming sector is articulated very clearly in the 2002 Report of the Policy Commission on the Future of Food and Farming, whose brief was to formulate a new strategy for agriculture following the 2001 Foot and Mouth Disease epidemic in Britain. Although this market-oriented approach is more nuanced and muted elsewhere in the EU, the European academic literature on local food systems places great emphasis on the economic viability of new, farm-based sources of value-added and related processes of territorial valorization, as we discuss below.

However, in Europe, the rural imaginary also embraces a distinctive European “possessive investment” in national traditions, although expressed in an “unmarked” discourse of small family farms, local markets where producers and consumers interact, regional food cultures, vibrant rural communities, and ecologically diverse rural environments. In the words of former French president, Francois Mitterand, these constitute a “certain kind of rural civilization” (The Times, 7 February, 1987). Perceptions that this civilization is now under threat extend across the political spectrum. In the case of France, this threat is identified with globalization by left social movements, whereas for the radical right it comes from immigration. These currents also can be seen in the strange rural compromise forged by the market-based, rural value-added policies of neoliberal governments in both Italy and the UK which, by a stroke of political alchemy, have managed to bring both left and right agendas together around the European rural imaginary. For example, a neoliberal compromise in Italy can be seen in the funding of the Slow Food Movement's recent Terra Madre conference: while the movement itself is led by left-leaning Carlo Petrini, much of the funding came from the neoliberal state and from the right-wing National Alliance (Hooper, 2004).

To varying degrees, this rural imaginary has also had a discernible influence in several recent contributions to European rural sociology. It is particularly salient in the notion of endogenous rural development, which builds on the empirical observation that European agriculture is entangled in a diverse constellation of socio-ecological, economic, cultural, and historical relations. This approach more recently has been transposed into the proposition that the practices, new forms of economic organization, and institutional changes associated with the ‘turn’ to quality in food provisioning constitute a “new” rural development paradigm (Ploeg and Renting, 2000, Ploeg et al., 2000). Its normative content is evident in the view that this new paradigm, unlike its predecessor of agricultural modernization, is “rooted in historical traditions” and indeed “can be understood as a kind of repeasantization of European farming” (ibid, 403, original emphasis).

This diversity is conceptualized in terms of ‘styles of farming’, and it is argued that “Europe's countryside (should) be safeguarded as precious ‘cultural capital’” by promoting “farming styles based on the optimal use of local resources” (Ploeg and van Dijk, 1995, p. xii). This normative position is underpinned by the claim that “Endogenous development patterns tend to materialize as self-centered processes of growth: that is, relatively large parts of the total value generated through this type of development are re-allocated in the locality itself” (Ploeg and Long, 1994, p. 2).

A rural imaginary also infuses the characterization of ‘alternative agro-food networks’ (AAFN) and ‘short food supply chains” (SFSC) as sources of resistance against the homogenizing effects of ‘placeless’, globalized, industrial modes of food provisioning and the ‘McDonaldization’ of regional food cultures (Murdoch and Miele, 1999; Murdoch and Miele, 2002; Marsden et al., 1999; Murdoch et al., 2000). The Slow Food Movement and its efforts to counter the march of the ‘golden arches’ by valorizing regional cuisines and their rural networks of provision arguably is the most prominent expression of this oppositional, ‘militant particularism’.

Unlike its US counterpart, however, the normative idealization of the ‘rural local’—the re-localization and re-embedding of agro-food practices in local eco-social relations—is obscured, at least in part, by a complementary discourse of economic performance and competitiveness, which has attracted policy support. As noted earlier, the gradual re-orientation of the EU's Common Agricultural Policy towards a wider notion of rural development involving more decentralized policymaking, multifunctionality, and territoriality has enhanced receptivity to this discourse (Lowe et al., 2002, pp. 14–15). In this respect, the claims articulated earlier to buttress the concept of endogenous rural development re-emerge with AAFN/SFSC seen as new sources of value added that can be retained locally and hence as catalysts of rural economic regeneration and dynamism. As argued elsewhere, “The ability of quality food products to secure premium prices and so generate excess profits is a central plank of (this) market-led, value added model” (Goodman, 2004, p. 8). However, as discussed at length below, formulations of this market-oriented, ‘economic’ localism also occlude place politics, not least the struggles to appropriate and sustain the flows of economic rent arising in the ‘new economic spaces’ created by AAFN/ SFSC (Ploeg and Renting, 2000, Ploeg et al., 2000; Marsden et al., 2002; Ploeg and Renting, 2000; Renting et al., 2003).

In keeping with this economistic analysis, the local is framed as a site of new opportunities for value-added generation. Thus producers are encouraged to ‘short circuit’ industrial chains by building “new associational networks” and creating “different relationships with consumers” through engagement with “different conventions and constructions of quality” that evoke “locality/region or speciality and nature” (Marsden et al., 2002, p. 425). With “their capacity to re-socialize or re-spatialize food,” SFSC are in a position to valorize those qualifiers of ‘the local’ and its socio-ecological attributes—terroir, traditional knowledge, landrace species, for example—that can be translated into higher prices. In this instrumental context, ‘the local’ becomes a discursive construct and is deployed to convey meaning at a distance, and thereby becomes a source of value. Bluntly stated, from this perspective, the local and SFSC are empirically and theoretically conjoined principally in the form of economic rent, though without explicit attention to the politics of its appropriation.1

As we have noted previously, some authors discern the contours of a new rural development paradigm in the processes and practices that are (re-)valorizing the local as a site of new value streams and accumulation (Ploeg and Renting, 2000, Ploeg et al., 2000). This paradigm change is predicated on a transition from the agricultural modernization logic of economies of scale to a focus on economies of scope (Ploeg and Renting, 2000) and a re-emphasis on non-commoditized circuits characteristic of the “old and well-known ‘resistance paysanne’” (Ploeg and Renting, 2000, Ploeg et al., 2000). The integration of new and traditional rural development practices is regarded as the source of significant ‘synergies at farm enterprise level’ as farm households reduce their dependence on mass markets by mobilizing on-farm resources and diversify output by re-integrating value-adding activities into the farm production process.

These analyses usefully remind us of the dynamism of valorization processes. However, they do not address the political driving forces behind the reconfiguration of space and scale and the new forms of commodification of territoriality. The local as an arena of political-economic struggle and socially constructed scale of accumulation remains an opaque category, conceptually and empirically, a veritable black box. Territoriality, a cipher for the local, similarly is unexamined, figured by landscape, habitat or craft knowledge in ways which naturalize the social relations underlying its production and reproduction.

Section snippets

Rethinking the idea of the local: taking politics seriously

The purpose of our critique is not to deny the local as a powerful political force against the forces of globalization. Our real goal is to understand how to make localism into an effective social movement of resistance to globalism rather than a way for local elites to create protective territories for themselves. This requires letting go of a local that fetishizes emplacement as intrinsically more just. We have to move away from the idea that food systems become just by virtue of making them

Conclusion: local politics as the new politics of scale

The largely apolitical approach to place construction in the agro-food literature on the quality ‘turn’ and local food systems contrasts vividly with the lively debates on the politics of space and place found in human geography. These debates bring out the importance of spatial and scalar political processes in the social construction of place, emphasize the contingent nature of sociospatial structures and scalar orderings, and direct analytical attention to the ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ in these

Acknowledgements

We would like to acknowledge the Agro-Food Studies Research Group at UCSC (particularly Julie Guthman, Margaret Fitzsimmons, Patricia Allen, Mike Goodman and Bill Friedland) and its discussions of localism. The paper also benefited greatly from the comments of participants in the Local Development Strategies in Food Supply Chains at the XI World Congress of Rural Sociology, Trondheim, Norway, where portions of this paper were first presented. We would like to thank Terry Marsden who initiated

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