The practice and politics of food system localization

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Abstract

As an apparent counterpoint to globalization, food system localization is often assumed to be a good, progressive and desirable process. Such thinking rests on a local–global binary that merits closer scrutiny. This paper examines the social construction of “local”, by analyzing the practice and politics of food system localization efforts in Iowa, USA. It argues that desirable social or environmental outcomes may not always map neatly onto the spatial content of “local”, which itself involves the social construction of scale. These contradictions in turn relate to differing political inflections discernible in food system localization. Localization can be approached defensively, emphasizing the boundaries and distinctions between a culturally and socially homogeneous locality needing protection from non-local “others”. But through the experience of new social and gustatory exchanges, localization can also promote increased receptivity to difference and diversity. More emergent, fluid and inclusive notions of the “local”, however, may challenge the very project of crafting and maintaining distinctive food identities for local places. These themes are explored through a case study of food system localization efforts and activities in Iowa, an American state that has been a stronghold of conventional commodity agriculture. Demographic and agricultural histories are drawn on to understand recent food system localization practice that has come to emphasize a definition of “local” that coincides with sub-national state boundaries. The emergence and popularization of the “Iowa-grown banquet meal” and the shifting meaning of “local Iowa food” further illustrate the potential tension between defensiveness and diversity in food system localization.

Introduction

What is the transformative potential of current efforts to promote the production and consumption of foods earmarked by locality or region? Should such changing production and consumption relations be seen as a diffuse, but growing form of opposition to the apparent homogenization and evident harms of industrialization and concentration in the globalized food system? Is food system localization a liberatory project—or instead a reactionary response? The easy answer to all these questions is that food system localization is, of course, good, progressive and desirable. The less comfortable answer nudges us to reconsider the very idea of “local”. If we do, we may realize that “local” often serves as a talisman. But behind that pleasing magic, shapes shift. The term “local” appears to amalgamate these shifting shapes into a stable, coherent concept. When we look more closely, the actual scope and meaning of either “localization” or “local foods” are rarely transparent. Although the process of localization is often seen as neat antithesis to globalization, this can be an overdrawn and problematic dichotomy. Similarly, as both matter and symbol, and one crucial marker of localization, “local food” can hold multi-faceted and sometimes contradictory meanings.

In this paper, I examine the practice and politics surrounding “local food” through an analysis of food system localization efforts in Iowa, USA. “Local food” has recently emerged as a banner under which people attempt to counteract trends of economic concentration, social disempowerment, and environmental degradation in the food and agricultural landscape, but it may differ from a bio-politics centered more explicitly on either organic or sustainable agriculture and food (Goodman, 2000). I first review academic and activist understandings of localization, which continue to reinforce the local–global binary, even as they call it into question. I show that the spatial relations of “local” may not always map in consistent ways onto specific social or environmental relations. As a recent incomer to Iowa, an eater of Iowa food, a participant in food system localization work, and also an academic, I analyze the sometimes contradictory politics of food system localization I have witnessed in a state still largely (although increasingly fitfully) defined by conventional commodity agriculture.

Researchers, particularly in Europe, have suggested that localization via niche and specialty agro-food markets holds particular promise for rural development of peripheral agricultural regions (Ilbery and Kneafsey, 1999; Kneafsey et al., 2001). Core sites of intensive commodity agriculture, so-called “agricultural hotspots” (Murdoch, 2000), are presumed to offer little space, capacity or inclination for such development. In the US context, however, Iowa provides a contrasting and very instructive case. An unquestionable “agricultural hotspot”, it is dominated by and highly identified with conventional commodity agriculture centered on the grain–livestock–meat complex (i.e., corn, soybeans and hogs). Iowa prides itself on “feeding the world”. But whatever its past productivist accomplishments, Iowa agriculture now faces crisis, one bound up in the profound structural and technological changes facing the sector—including concentration, vertical integration, biotechnology and pressures to rectify alleged environmental transgressions.

Since the mid-1990s, this “agricultural hotspot” has become a crucible for innovation and vigorous practice in food system localization. Indeed, the legacy of conventional commodity agriculture has helped to shape how “local food” in Iowa is defined, produced and consumed. Tracing the initiation and development of interrelated food system localization initiatives in Iowa, and focusing on one distinctive recent practice—the Iowa-grown banquet meal—I show how the politics of food system localization can assume a complex flavor. On one hand, food system localization may involve defensive, perhaps subtly exclusionary protection of a region constructed as discrete, homogeneous, static and beleaguered. But on the other hand, the very experience of localization can foster social and gustatory exchanges that demand new receptivity to difference and diversity.

Section snippets

Framing the (re)localization of food systems

Through the 1990s, globalization provided a leitmotif for agro-food studies (see Buttel (2001) for a recent overview). However, due to their deterministic flavor, accounts focused on the rise and uniform reach of an industrial, capitalist, concentrated, and globally integrated agro-food system have recently lost much of their luster. They now share the stage with countervailing accounts exploring the emergence and revitalization of local difference in agro-food systems. As Ward and Almås (1997,

Complicating the spatial: divergent facets of “local” in agriculture and food

“Globalization” and “localization” still tend to serve as conceptual shorthand for movement towards two opposed poles. Selected attributes generally pegged to “global” and “local” are summarized in Fig. 1.

The overarching assumption is that these various attributes map neatly and consistently onto “global” and “local”. But as with other binary oppositions peppering intellectual and public discourse (e.g., nature vs. culture; primitive vs. modern; real vs. ideal; art vs. science to name only a

Tendencies in the politics of localization

Local, then, is much more (or perhaps much less) than it seems. Specific social or environmental relations do not always map predictably and consistently onto the spatial relation. Indeed, fractures between the spatial, the environmental and the social feed into the sometimes contradictory politics of food system localization. The differing political inflections in food systems localization begin with the spatial referent for “local”, but vary in their assumptions about the boundaries between

The historical context of agriculture and food in Iowa

Situated between the Mississippi and the Missouri Rivers, Iowa is seen by many Americans, and indeed proudly casts itself as the quintessential agricultural state in the US. Early white settlers to this region of tallgrass prairie were beguiled by the richness of its soils, the suitability of its climate, and hence the seemingly limitless potential for farming. They rapidly plowed up the prairies and drained the abundant wetlands. Historian Dorothy Schweider notes how natural characteristics of

Food system localization in Iowa

In Iowa, the flowering of food system initiatives cast as alternatives to more conventional relations of food production and consumption is relatively recent. The number and variety have both increased rapidly since the mid-1990s. Such efforts have tended to emphasize the valorization of “local Iowa food”, more than explicit ecological and health quality markers, such as “organic”.4

The practice and politics of the Iowa-grown banquet meal

To explore further the politics of food system localization, I discuss in detail a specific recent phenomenon—the Iowa-grown banquet meal. Consonant with the strategic turn to institutional procurement, these dining events have developed a momentum that far exceeds their initial aim of generating a few more markets for struggling producers. As both promotional event and celebratory enactment of “local” Iowa foods, the Iowa-grown banquet meal illustrates the potential tension between

The matter and meaning of local Iowa food

This discussion of the politics of food system localization through the Iowa-grown banquet meal still begs several important questions. What exactly is authentic local Iowa food? Who decides? How does the matter and meaning of Iowa-grown food influence the politics of food system localization? In the gastronomic landscape of fast foods and homogenized diets, “local food” is sometimes reduced to mere quirky exotica, to be sampled when traveling or ordered by mail (Engel and Engel, 2000).6

Local: the social construction of scale

The practice and politics of food system localization in Iowa have been distinguished by a growing discursive focus on Iowa as the context for “local”. A recent appraisal in the state's most prominent newspaper makes this clear:

Perhaps the most exciting trend in Iowa's food system is the growing local food movement. Five years ago, you would have been hard-pressed to find “Iowa-grown” food on a menu or in a store. But that is changing. The proliferation of farmers’ markets, the producers

Conclusions

In this paper, I have examined the practice and politics surrounding local food, by focusing on various initiatives in Iowa which together contribute to a process of food system localization. Despite some recognition that globalization and localization are related and mutually conditioning, many analysts continue to compartmentalize the two. This becomes particularly evident when examining conceptualization of the term “local”. I argue that the spatial content of “local” in particular contexts

Acknowledgments

David Goodman and the other participants at the Workshop on International Perspectives on Alternative Agro-Food Networks: Quality, Embeddedness and Bio-Politics (University of California, Santa Cruz, October, 2001) made thoughtful and challenging comments about the ideas developed in this paper. The anonymous reviewers contributed further useful observations, while Matt Russell and Tom Richard offered helpful readings of a later version of this paper. Mistakes and omissions that may remain are

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