A call for polycultural arguments: critiquing the monoculture rhetoric of the local food movement.

• Author: Prody, Jessica M.

I purchase shares of community supported agriculture (CSA), shop at farmers' markets, and belong to a food cooperative. I am also white, middle-class, and partake in these behaviors for environmental and community-building reasons. I am, in many ways, the typical locavore. I fit neatly into the narrative offered by local food movement rhetoric about why we should alter our food system. I enjoy meeting the farmers that grow my food and knowing where my food is grown. I think it important that any meat I eat is raised humanely. And I believe my actions, when combined with the actions of others, have the potential to make a positive impact on the environment and economy. Alison Hope Alkon and Julian Agyeman (2011) remind us, however, "such a consistent narrative, along with the movement's predominantly white and middle-class character, suggests that [the movement] may itself be something of a monoculture." They explain, "It consists of a group of 'like-minded' people, with similar backgrounds, values, and proclivities, who have come to similar conclusions about how our food system should change" (p. 2).

This essay explores how this monoculture is constructed through the arguments of movement rhetoric. By identifying the practices and motivations these arguments advocate, I illustrate the common appeals of movement rhetoric and ask whom these arguments exclude. The analysis examines three different texts: Barbara Kingsolver's (2007) Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, Colin Beavan's (2009) No Impact Man: The Adventures of a Guilty Liberal Who Attempts to Save the Planet, and the Discoveries He Makes About Himself and Our Way of Life in the Process, and Bill McKibben's (2007) Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future. Currently, popular local food rhetoric excludes low-income individuals, leaving them absent, and/or lacking attention to systemic barriers that prevent movement participation. However, opportunity exists to begin incorporating more experiences and knowledge into movement rhetoric to construct a polycultural movement. I begin by briefly discussing existing critiques of the local food movement before engaging in my analysis. I conclude with a call for inclusion of more diverse voices into movement arguments.

CRITIQUES OF THE LOCAL FOOD MOVEMENT

The local food movement has become the target of considerable critique. This essay relies heavily on those critiques that have come from the food justice movement, which point to the lack of inclusion of peoples of color and low-income individuals in movement activities and concerns. Food justice advocates have taken the local food movement to task for its lack of attention to working conditions of farm workers (Brown & Getz, 2011; Gray 2014), systemic barriers to food access (such as legal, economic, and historical barriers) (Guthman, 2011; Gottlieb &Joshi, 2013; Minkoff-Zern, Peluso, Sowerwine, & Getz, 2011), and the maintenance of cultural traditions (LaDuke, 2011; Norgaard, Reed, & Van Horn, 2011).

These cultural critiques are made alongside those that have targeted the movement for its lack of global perspective. Charles Kenny (2011) calls for a more cosmopolitan approach to food consumption, a position that emphasizes the energy and land efficiency in food production, rather than specified rules about how far away one should get her food or how exactly that food should be produced. James McWilliams (2009) may be the most vocal critic of the movement's local focus. His major critique is that the movement lacks consideration of global populations, ignoring that local agricultural systems are not possible in every place on the globe, nor have locavores been able to explain how such a system might justly feed the global population. In consideration of this global context, he writes, "If we don't figure out how to produce that food in a sensible and sustainable manner, one that honors future generations, our localized boutique obsessions are going to appear comically misguided (if not downright tragic) to future historians" (p. 14). In order to achieve a sustainable global agricultural system, McWilliams pushes toward a golden mean that blends local food options with limited use of chemicals and biotechnology; smarter use of water and soil; and creative farming solutions, such as aquaculture, to help build a system that produces food in an environmentally sensible and sustainable way.

The way in which the local food movement shapes its arguments can either encourage critical deliberation or stifle such discussion. Arguments that open space for the emergence of a polyculture within the movement have more potential for encouraging deliberation and debate. In addition, they have greater potential to create the discursive space needed to include diverse perspectives, which are necessary to construct a food movement that allows people to connect to one another in their places, access healthy food, and consider issues of social justice.

Calling for more inclusive deliberation in the local food movement positions this project in concordance with other projects in the field of communication aimed at incorporating more cosmopolitan approaches. For example, Sobre-Denton and Bardham (2013), call for a cosmopolitan pedagogy in intercultural communication that "involves teaching the value of valuing, or encouraging an orientation to the world that values humanity and ethically obliges those who adopt this orientation to work for social justice in their communities first, and then at national and global levels" (p. 151). Milstein, Anguiano, Sandoval, Chen, and Dickinson (2011) do not use the language of cosmopolitanism in their work; however their call for incorporating non-Western understandings of place in order to create more inclusive ecocultural discourses has similar intentions. Milstein et al. contend the shift in environmental discourse toward a non-Western relations-in-place model, which connects cultural and environmental issues, might encourage participation in environmental causes from individuals who may not traditionally participate.

Similarly, making local food movement arguments more cosmopolitan--and thus polycultural--by incorporating cultural issues of class more readily into its rhetoric may open the possibility for more diverse participation in the movement. This shift would not necessitate giving up commitment to local food production, but it would necessitate asking ethical questions concerning the conditions of food production systems regarding who has access to the system, whose culture is privileged in the system, the global implications of the production system, and whether or not the system helps to sustain access to food for future generations. The analysis that follows explores how current arguments avoid this polycultural approach, particularly in terms of class differences, and what discursive space currently exists for including more polycultural arguments into local food rhetoric.

LOCAL FOOD RHETORIC

Each of the texts examined in this essay received widespread attention as the books made national bestseller lists, the authors took to television and radio for interviews, and one even produced a companion documentary (e.g., Beavan, 2009). Not all of these authors have been presented as voices of the local food movement, but each advocates for local food consumption. I have chosen to analyze these texts for two reasons. First, they are representative of popular local food rhetoric. They utilize a dominant trope in which the narrator details a year-in-a-life of producing and consuming local food (for examples see Kimball, 2011; Mather, 2011; Smith & MacKinnon, 2007; Wonginrich & Dibben, 2013). In addition, each author is white and middle to upper-middle class, making the experiences in these narratives representative of movement discourse in both form and perspective.

The second reason these texts were chosen involves the differences in their narratives that allow for critical insight into various discursive openings currently extant in popular locavore arguments for constructing a more polycultural movement. Kingsolver (2007), Beavan (2009), and McKibben (2007) focus on local food to different extents in their discourse. Kingsolver's text documents a year in her family's life in which they lived almost completely on local food in Southern Appalachia. In this sense, Kingsolver's model is a typical theme in popular local food rhetoric as the entirety of the text focuses on her yearlong experience in a rural setting. Beavan and McKibben differ from Kingsolver's in that their journeys related to local food serve as dimensions underlying broader projects. Beavan's No Impact Man follows the year-in-a-life model, but his year is not strictly focused on local food; rather, he documents a year in the life of his family in urban Manhattan in which he sought to create zero environmental impact. Eating locally was part of the project, in addition to cutting consumption, altering transportation, and severely limiting electricity usage. McKibben's arguments deviate the most from typical local food rhetoric in that his year-in-a-life narrative is positioned within a broader call for the reconstitution of local economies, which he contends will address environmental, health, and economic failures of our current economic system. His local food consumption in rural Vermont becomes the model for constructing economies of energy, communication, and transportation.

My analysis of these narratives follows scholars, such as Guthman (2011), who examine how movement rhetoric can contribute to insularity and exclusion by constructing a movement unfriendly to people of color. I use textual analysis to identify how movement rhetoric potentially functions to exclude people from lower socioeconomic conditions. To perform the analysis, I identify moments in the texts where (a) authors discuss their perceived inclusivity of...