The Social Vision of the Alternative Food Movement - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 531

the non-Western world. An example from popular culture serves to illustrate how this
phenomenon works in practice. James Cameron's blockbuster 2009 movie Av atar is a
story about progress and scientific and technological development plundering nature
and bringing death and destruction to an indigenous people. In this movie, set in the
year 2154, a space-faring multiplanetary corporation, driven by greed and armed with
the latest technological tools, is seeking to mine a distant planet for a precious metal. The
indigenous humanoid people of the planet, interested only in preserving their natural
environment and their traditional way of life, oppose the corporation, refusing to suc-
cumb to the temptations of material prosperity and development.
Much like the portrayal of Third World peasants in the alternative food move-
ment, the indigenous Na'vi people in Av atar are depicted as pure, innocent, authentic,
and close to nature. They are also depicted as being utterly devoid of such uniquely
human qualities as ambition, curiosity, or initiative. While space exploration is taken
for granted by industrialized human beings, the Na'vi are depicted as being perfectly
content in their small village. While humans are depicted as being intensely curious
about the Na'vi, even mounting organized scientific efforts to learn more about them,
the Na'vi demonstrate absolutely no curiosity (except of a certain romantic kind)
about human beings. And eventually, it is not a Na'vi but an alien human being from
the industrialized world who takes the initiative to organize the Na'vi into an effective
fighting force.
The indigenous people in Av atar could well have been replaced by goats or cows,
and (except for the boy-loves-girl romance) the storyline would hardly have needed
any change. And this is also how many in the alternative food movement tend to view
farmers and peasants in the non-Western world—in a romanticized but deeply dehu-
manizing manner. They are viewed almost as part of the flora and fauna, rather than as
distinctly human beings.
Environmentalism and the Alternative
Food Movement
If the vision of Western pastoralism and the vision of the heroic Third World peasant are
two important pillars supporting the intellectual edifice of the alternative food move-
ment, environmentalism is a third—and possibly even more important—pillar. For
many, environmentalism has become virtually synonymous with the alternative food
movement. The need to rescue nature is often presented as the raison d'etre for the alter-
native food movement. And the alternative food movement is often portrayed as indis-
pensable for environmental sustainability.
This chapter is devoted to the social vision of the alternative food movement. An
in-depth exploration of this movement's vision of nature is outside the scope of this
chapter. However, given the central importance of the environmental justification in the
alternative food movement narrative, this chapter questions whether the ideology of the