"Food" v. "Environment"

I've been stewing over this article for days. In short, Time Magazine claims that the environmental movement is dying off and being supplanted by the food movement: You blew your chance, environmentalism. Screw off. Long live the food movement! To quote:

Even as traditional environmentalism struggles, another movement is rising in its place, aligning consumers, producers, the media and even politicians. It's the food movement, and if it continues to grow it may be able to create just the sort of political and social transformation that environmentalists have failed to achieve in recent years.

Part of me wants to celebrate the fact that a mainstream publication like Time is trumpeting the food movement's broad success... while my earnest inner hippie wants to muster a flustered defense of the environmental/green movement, and the (occasionally pedantic) stickler in me wants to split hairs. Part of me just wants to stomp my foot, because dammit didn't we already have this conversation back in 2004?

Let's go with splitting hairs for now. (I already covered the foot stomping IRL several days ago.) You can't talk about a rising food movement supplanting a dying environmental movement, because there is no precise distinction between the two. To do so is both inaccurate and ahistorical: concerns around food have been embedded in progressive politics generally and in environmentalism specifically for a long time.

"Environmentalism can trace its origins to the establishment of America's first national parks in 1899, but until recently, food wasn't really on the radar for progressives, beyond the mission of coping with world hunger," claims the author. This is patently untrue. What about organics? What about the back-to-the-land movement? Biodynamic agriculture has been around since the 1920s. Rodale started Organic Gardening in 1942. DDT, environmentalism's Ur-issue, was after all an agricultural pesticide. Here in SF, the seminal 1960s progressive group the Diggers were very focused on food. Chez Panisse opened in 1971, spawning California cuisine in all its green glory. In fact, of the progressive young people that migrated to rural areas in the '60s and '70s to take up small-scale organic farming, many are still at it today; they are the foremost heroes and instigators of what might be termed the modern food movement.

The Time article mentions Shellenberger & Nordhaus' much-debated 2004 essay The Death of Environmentalism, but then goes on to use the terms "environmental movement" and "green movement" interchangeably without comment. But (as flawed as it was) the Shellenberger-Nordhaus essay was notable for being the loudest manifestation of a greater identity crisis and debate within the environmental movement, which was fomenting at that time on multiple fronts. Coming off of the widespread policy failure that was the 1990s, environmental advocates in the early oughts began to both consciously evolve their own terms and to align themselves more explicitly with broader progressive issues. Green politics (with a capital G) had long been associated with environmentalism, but "green" now increasingly became the term of choice (along with sustainability).

So today the language and the focus has changed a bit, sure. But that is nothing new! The current prominence of good food is environmentalism's success (or one of them). Let's not obscure the complexity of this history for the sake of a good headline.

Local v. Organic? Some thoughts on the semantics of good food advocacy.

My boss at the sustainable ag nonprofit that pays my rent recently sent out an email to my program team that essentially posed the above question. As he put it, how and why should you make the choice for local, non-organic produce from Bentwood versus say organic from Chile? He's a bit of firebrand and a bit of an anomaly in the nonprofit world for his brassy Brooklyn attitude and for-profit professional background. He's new to the organization and the sector, and was seemingly brought on board to shake things up around here (generally a good thing).

Anyway, no one responded to his email for several weeks, until I basically replied with the below. This silence was less an indication that my team hadn't thought of it so much as a sign that we'd all thought about it too much to wrestle those thoughts into email format. Because it's a good question, albeit one that typically gets asked by those who are just beginning to investigate the wide and noisy realm of good food...

Local & organic are two very different sets of criteria (apples and oranges, so to speak), and each is a messy collection of factors and considerations that are in turn embedded in a hugely complex issue. So I think we -- as in, local food advocates -- should actually make a point of not answering the question of "local v. organic" whenever it's stated simplistically. We should push back on that and tease out the issues.

It's largely a matter of semantics, so the first step in any such argument would be to define the terms. Are we talking about Certified Organic? Certified by whom? And what about "local"? When we say local we don't just mean produced within 'x' number of miles. Our organization, and the local food movement at large, are advocating for a lot more than a reduction in food miles. We're advocating for a holistic system of good food and sustainable agriculture. I don't know of a single player in the local food movement that is only concerned with food miles, which is why anti-locavore arguments (such as those put forth by James McWilliams) tend to be mere straw men.

The implied attributes of "local food" are many: that it comes from a "small family farm", that the farm employs growing practices that are "sustainable", "natural", "environmentally sound", that the labor practices aren't exploitative, that meat is from animals that are "humanely" raised.

"Organic" used to imply a lot of those attributes as well, but the codification of that word into the label we have today meant that most of that was whittled away. "Organic" has been defined down to something very specific and measurable, for better or for worse. But as advocates rather than certifiers, we have the luxury of defining the word "local" out rather than defining it down. And we should take advantage of that luxury, because all of these sub-issues under the greater issue of "sustainable agriculture" (farmworkers rights, ethical animal husbandry, corporate ownership, etc.) are going to have their day in the sun very soon, and it will be hard to remain relevant if we stand for just one sliver of the larger picture.

So then the question becomes even harder to answer as stated. You can't say "buy local over organic in 'x' and 'y' cases, and buy organic rather than local in 'z' case." You have to ask, "well, in this specific instance, which product meets more of these attributes that we've identified as good?" And when we talk about local food generally, we need to make explicit that holistic picture of a distributed, small scale, equitable, healthy, sustainable, beyond-organic food and farming system that we are all working so incredibly hard to build. The Ethicurean, for example, promotes the idea of SOLE food: sustainable, organic, local, and ethical. (I don't necessary support such a deepening of alphabet soup syndrome, but the idea is good, I think.) If we don't make these things explicit, then I fear the wonderful, radical idea of "local food" will be captured by corporate marketers trying to maintain the status quo. It will be defined for us, defined down, and driven out of usefulness. And then we'll have to find a new word and start over.