Local Foods Research Project

Geographers are supposed to be good with maps. Mapping is what (people think) we should be doing. What follows is not a map in the traditional sense, nonetheless it does serve as a guide through the research project. The subjects of these maps, rather than landscapes as in traditional cartography, are what people think, say, write and do about local food networks (known as local foods discourse). As with any subject of thought or conversation, there isn’t just one set of thoughts or positions taken (any one discourse) regarding local foods - there are many. One way of categorising these sets of thoughts, or discourses, is by the arena in which they take place and by their audience.

For example, there is a distinct set of writings about local foods which is published as popular non-fiction, written in an accessible style, and reaching a diverse audience. Another set of writings about local foods is produced in academic texts which are written in more specialized language and aimed at a specific academic audience. Underlying this research project is an attempt to draw links between these two contrasting discourses of local foods.

This first map illustrates some key texts from the popular non-fiction local foods discourse:

• Plenty, by Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon describes the authors’ experience of eating food according to a 100 Mile Diet - food in which all ingredients were produced within 100 miles of their Vancouver home. This book has sparked 100 mile diet experiments throughout North America, and more recently in the UK. As such, I see this text and the ideas within it as central to the contemporary popular local foods discourse.

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Surrounding this text are six other books which represent some of the other key themes present in the popular local foods discourse today:

• Michael Pollan gets two entries, An Omnivore’s Dilemma, which follows four of the food chains which provide the food we eat, defined as “industrial food, organic or alternative food, and food we forage ourselves”. More recently, Pollan has added In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, in which he confronts the industrial food system with a simple manifesto for eating which would keep us and our environment in good health: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.“
• Eating: What we eat and why it matters by Peter Singer takes an approachable look at the ethical decisions taken by consumers when buying food,looking at the choices made by 3 families. Singer rehearses the common arguments behind vegetarianism and veganism, examines local, organic and fairtrade foods, and links makes clear the ethical foundations on which these positions stands.
• Coming Home to Eat: the Pleasures and Politics of Local Foods by Gary Paul Nabhan focuses on local foods, and recounts the author’s experience of spending a year “rediscovering what it might mean to know your foodshed”. In focusing on local foods and exploring some of the politics behind local food purchasing, Nabhan’s book has drawn some attention from academics (see below) who are exploring alternative food networks.
• Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation is a bestselling exploration of America’s fast food industry, and is included in this list because it epitomises the conventional food system which the other texts are setting out to oppose, or create an alternative to.
• Finally, Bill McKibben’s Deep Economy is included for a more personal reason. This book helped me to make the shift from thinking about sustainability in purely environmental terms (where I felt relatively powerless to affect change) to considering the environmental and social as entangled. The text weaves creatively the local scale of daily lives with the global picture, and considers several aspects beyond food. However, the discussion of local food networks set me thinking, and perhaps led (in the first instance) to this research project.

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This second map, on the other hand, illustrates some of the many academic texts written about local foods and alternative food networks.

How local food networks operate on the ground is affected by the discourses that surround their operation, both popular and academic - and what these two discourses have to say about local food networks differs considerably (as might be expected).

In this research, I hope to use these two maps to explore a local foods network in Scotland, and in doing so question both how that local foods network has come into being, and how accurately these maps ‘describe’ the network. In this sense, the project should represent a process of exchange and interplay between a case study, and these two very different local foods discourses, both of which claim to have something useful to say about local foods.