I just ran across this post from Julie at Feministe (I know, I know — do some real work, Catherine!) in which she reviews the new book, Just Food: Where Locavores Get It Wrong and How We Can Truly Eat Responsibly. I’m now very interested in reading the book, which according to Julie includes some good factoids, though the author made some “pretty stunning assumptions” about locavores and “hasn’t actually researched any food justice movements.”
My favorite part of the review is Julie’s statement, “You know, this book would have been terrific had it been a completely different book.” I’m taking it out of context, but this sentence sounds exactly like what my mom was supposed to tell her high-school students when they gave her an incorrect answer (i.e., “Your answer would be correct if the question was ….”). Only problem was, my mom was a math teacher. She used to joke that sometimes the only thing she could say to keep with this teaching method was, “Your answer would be correct if every other number in the universe had been obliterated.”
In case you’re wondering what completely different book Julie was hoping for: she wrote that author James E. McWilliams would have done better “to work with locavores rather than picking a fight with them.” Here’s her review.
Has anyone read Just Food yet?
Stone's Throw Farm 
Just read the review of “Just Food…”. It reminds me of all the people who want to throw science in the trash can because it upsets their pat little theories on life. I find it interesting that someone would attack locally grown/owned food producers. Is there a conspiracy hiding in here???? Oh wait! That’s another pet peeve of mine. Thanks for alerting me to this book.
No, I haven’t read the book, so perhaps I should keep my opinions to myself, but honestly, why all this fuss over locavore anything.
There are plenty of words used by city folk to denigrate country folk, or more to the point, citified slurs at those of us who prefer to live in the country rather than metropolitan asphalt jungles.
I’m not sure McWilliams and his locavore cronies are complaining so much about local food as they are describing their own prejudices against those of us who trully relish living more than half a block from Starbucks.
I actually want both worlds — I’ve often longed for an espresso cart/kiosk located next to the field … but I want to be about the only customer, so that wouldn’t work. One day last fall when we were harvesting carrots, Dave brought coffee and homemade muffins out to the field. It was pretty awesome, except Dobby (the dog) ate some of the muffins when we weren’t looking. He was so happy carrying his muffin around that I think we all forgave him.
But I’m just being silly. I get your point, Diane. I’m just trying to get people riled up on this blog, much like Julie accused publishers of doing to sell books.
I do think that we tend as a society to want an easy fix to any problem, and that for some people, buying anything and everything labeled “local” or “organic” is their solution. It’s not that simple for me. I try to buy organic as a general rule, but it’s probably more important to me to buy chicken feed that was grown and mixed by a local farmer than to buy organic feed that has to be shipped to me. But for someone else, it might be more important that the feed be organic. It comes down to your personal values, priorities, and options.
You’re correct, of course, there are all kinds of varieties of buying locally, and we can get wrapped up in being purists about organic or locally grown.
It’s not so much the shopping in urban areas that I miss, but rather the varied architectures of Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia that I find myself longing to see again. There aren’t many cities in Minnesota which have this kind of building stock, but Duluth is one of them.
These kind of subtleties don’t seem to appear much in the discussions about city vs country folk. But I suspect these kinds of threads would tend to soften the either or divisions considerably.
[…] you’re interested in another take on criticism of the local food movement that I mentioned earlier this week, check out a terrific post by Kurt Michael Friese of Slow Food USA, “Gather Round the Table: […]