Did anyone hear the npr commentary that was part of All Things Considered on December 31? It was by Amy Stewart, and it was called “It’s Time for ‘Locavores’ to Shut Up and Eat.” Ah, sounds like a straight-shooter! I wonder how delightfully *refreshing* this take on local food is going to be!
Basically, she rambles on for a while (with the occasional interruption so she can chuckle at how very sly and witty she’s being) about how sick she is of hearing about local food, and seeing articles and books about it, and watching celebrity chefs take trips to farmers markets. Fine. Then:
Our obsession with local food has gone far enough. We’ve heaped all our fears and anxieties onto the dinner plate. Climate change, globalization, agrichemicals, animal rights, food insecurity. These are heavy burdens to place on a lettuce leaf.
Well, I have to agree with her there. I also think that agrichemicals, climate change, the consolidation of our food supply, failing family farms, and degradation of our land are very troubling factors to have to have to take into account when grocery shopping. However, what she somehow missed is that it’s not the local food advocates that created the link between our deranged, poisonous food system and the food that we eat. All those Big Global Problems are already contained within our food- most of us just managed to remain blissfully unaware until recently. She ends the piece with:
I’d like to go back to consuming my food, rather than letting it consume me. Next year, I think that we should all just shut up and eat.
This completely reminds me of the little trick that anti-feminists and racists and other assholes love to play when confronted with the suggestion that their thinking or behavior is wrong-headed. Comments like, “well, I just don’t know when it became a problem to give my secretary a friendly tap on the ass,” or “When I was a kid, we all called each other names, and no one minded. And now we can’t call them spics?” fall into this category. It’s when people use the symptoms of the tangle of really troubling, evil systems in which we live as evidence of those systems not existing, or not being problematic. Homophobia didn’t become a problem with Stonewall , racism didn’t become a problem when race riots started to erupt, and our food system didn’t become problematic when The Omnivore’s Dilemma came out. (Well, we haven’t rioted for local food yet.) You aren’t allowed to smugly announce that the cracks in our world just don’t apply to you because you’re sick of hearing about them, and doing so is not evidence of being superclever and cutting. It’s evidence of being a douche.
You probably don’t want to hear the entire piece, because you can hear her slobbering all over herself the entire time. Plus, I don’t know how to make pretty little links.
