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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] READ: 'Locavore' as 2007's Word of the Year
  • Date: Sat, 26 Jan 2008 19:48:46 -0700


Food Words for Thought: 'Locavore' as 2007's Word of the Year
Posted by Brian Halweil, January 4, 2008 at 2:00 PM

Brian Halweil of Edible Communities and editor of Edible East End checks
with ... a word or two.
http://www.seriouseats.com/required_eating/2008/01/food-words-for-thought-lo
cavore-as-2007s-word.html

You may not have heard that "locavore"—a person who feeds mostly on food
grown or caught or gathered nearby—was named word of 2007 by the good
people at the New Oxford American Dictionary. But at a time when many
Americans have already capitulated on diet-related resolutions—both
Weight Watchers and Special K retained major billboards in Times Square as
the ball dropped—there is no doubt that our eating habits have turned a
corner.

It was just three years ago that Jessica Prentice, a San Francisco woman,
decided to eat only food originating within 100 miles and called herself a
locavore. Inspired by a crescendo of contaminated food imports, rising gas
prices, and a craving for food that hadn't been processed and packaged and
sapped of life by longhaul trucking, environmentalists, foodies, parents,
family farmers, and anyone who cares about what they put in their mouths
increasingly make local their chow of choice.

Today, the appearance of locavores from Maine to Alaska parallels the
meteoric rise of local food on restaurant menus, supermarket shelves, and
school cafeteria trays. Major health care providers like Kaiser Permanente
are hosting farmers' markets at their clinics and packing their salad bars
with local mesclun. The Portland, Oregon–based fast food chain
Burgerville, 50 locations and growing, serves a simulacrum of the
McDonald's menu, made entirely from wheat, beef, potatoes, and cheese
raised in the Pacific Northwest. Localharvest.org has seen traffic triple
in the last two years as 300,000 unique visitors each month search out
farmers' markets, pick-your-own farms, cheesemakers, and meat producers in
their ZIP codes.

Big players up and down the food chain, from Wal-Mart to Whole Foods, are
figuring out how to transport food a couple of hundred miles instead of
several thousand—a challenge, since the current spread of farms and
existing shipping infrastructure can make it easier and cheaper to purchase
long-distance food. Industry surveys peg "local" at just a few percent of
national food sales, although it's a sector soaring at 22 percent a year,
according to consumer research firm Packaged Facts.

So don't call us a Locavore Nation just yet. Now is more like the
amuse-bouche stage.

But one word really doesn't capture the tectonic shift that is happening in
America's alimentary affairs. We are becoming more gastroliterate, as a
blossoming culinary lexicon sets us a bright, new place at the dinner
table.

In a revolt against anonymous food, the new American eater wonders not just
about "food miles" (a term created simultaneously in the late 1990s by
British and Iowa State researchers to describe how far our food travels
from farm to plate) but also about "foodsheds" (coined in 1996 by
University of Wisconsin sociologist Jack Kloppenberg to denote that sphere
of people and land that feed us).

When shopping for dinner, our victual vocabulary includes terms to help us
choose meat, including "cage-free" (chickens raised without confining
battery cages), "grass-fed" (feeding livestock on pasture that has found a
resurgence in concerns about everything wrong with modern meat), and
"heritage breed" (turkeys, sheep, lamb, pigs, and other livestock that are
particularly beautiful and tasty because they haven't been manipulated by
modern breeding).

There are even designations such as "shade-grown" (raised in a way that
protects the rainforest) and "fair-trade" (products that offer a fair
compensation and working conditions to farmers) to help us select coffee or
chocolate or sugar grown by farmers in far-off lands. We may get a weekly
box of food from a "CSA" (community supported agriculture, a term from the
1980s used to denote a farm membership) or we may study the seafood counter
for "C.O.O.L." (mandatory country of origin labeling that has been approved
for seafood—but not meat and produce) or scorn "GMOs" (genetically
modified organisms).

Not everyone knows these words. But their very existence pushes
agribusiness, food policy, and consumers toward a new place. Armed with a
broader knowledge of how food can be categorized, American eaters seek out
food that is better for them, farmers and the planet. Instead of "eating
thoughtlessly," as farmer Wendell Berry once warned, the American eater is
beginning to probe, refuse, and demand better.

Consider that in the last four years, Edible Communities, the national
network of local food magazines that Edible East End is part of, has soared
to 51 magazines—from San Francisco to Brooklyn, from Iowa to the
Carolinas—all devoted to sustaining their local food community by telling
its story. Collectively, our readership stands at nearly 5 million people
clamoring to become more powerful eaters by learning what produce can be
raised in a greenhouse in January, why a pig raised outside tastes better,
and how the farm bill affects our daily lives.

As food gains prominence in our nation's cultural dialogue, understanding
how we eat can shine a light on all those dysfunctional aspects of our food
system, from abuse of farmworkers to stubborn subsidies to chemical
pollution. Which means that a series of buzzwords like locavore, seemingly
trivial on their own, add up to some very different choices at the checkout
counter.

It's worth noting that Oxford's choice for word of the year has often been
prophetic. Phone number was the choice 80 years ago, and fridge, pizza,
nonstick, and Big Mac are other food terms that made the cut. Last year's
choice of carbon neutral foreshadowed the Nobel Committee recognizing Al
Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the Senate
passing its first greenhouse gas reduction bill. So, tase, MRAP vehicle,
and other less appetizing words of 2007 notwithstanding, the choice of
locavore should mean a very toothsome future.






  • [Livingontheland] READ: 'Locavore' as 2007's Word of the Year, Tradingpost, 01/26/2008

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