Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Monsanto or Mihigan State, we have new demonstration plots sponsored by smaller
companies, Wal-Mart, neighbourhood organizations and venture capitalists. What
were once considered guerilla gardens are being recast as spaces of entrepreneurial-
ism and community, defined in multiple ways.
The unifying theme of these examples - organics, Slow Food, and home and urb-
an gardening - of the food quality lens focuses on a positive vision of what food
can, and should, look like. Yet, as with all utopic visions, they too are premised upon
certain
oughts.
This is not meant to minimize their argumentative affect. Any and all
positions concerning how food security
should
be ahieved are premised upon value
judgments. We just ask that these value judgments be brought to the discursive sur-
face; that they are not essentialized. The idea, then, of privileging the local suffers
some of the same myopia of the quantitative view - whih in this case is known as
the 'local trap'. The local trap:
refers to the tendency of food activists and researhers to assume something in-
herent about the local scale. The local is assumed to be desirable; it is preferred a
priori to larger scales. What is desired varies and can include ecological sustain-
ability, social justice, democracy, beter nutrition, and food security, freshness,
and quality … the local trap is the assumption that local is inherently good.
Born and Purcell, (2006, p195)
At multiple levels, the assumption of scale is equated with outcome. For many
food activists, global equates with 'bad' and local equates with 'good'. Essentializing
the local in this manner prevents any critical discourse from turning bak onto these
assumptions (whih are taken to be objectivity given). As Polanyi (1965) convin-
cingly argues, markets have always (at least as far as recorded history goes) been
a part of people's lives, regardless of how 'global' or 'local' they looked. In nine-
teenth century Canada, for example, general stores carried a variety of imported
goods. Even in rural Canada in the early 1800s, as one historian noted, 'It is hard,
for example, to picture rural isolation from markets if farm families regularly visited
country stores to purhase routinely consumed goods like tea and tobacco' (McCalla,
2005, p150). Similarly, we're hesitant to ascribe 'goodness' or 'badness' to produc-
tion scale - we've both seen small farms managed terribly (and whose products were
loaded into the bak of a gas-guzzling pikup truk and driven a hundred miles to
a large farmers' market) and large farms managed brilliantly (and whose products
were consumed within a 15 mile radius). Besides, if it's true that the era of a coun-
tryside laced with small farms is over - indeed, as Laura DeLind (2010, p4) points
