Best Food Writing 2010 Read Online Free PDF Page A

100-mile-diet exercise, and quite a band of activists, writers, cooks, and consumers has united behind the belief that the industrialization of American agriculture has gone far too far. We’re putting a lot of pressure on the family farms we’re now desperate to save, believing that by rebuilding the local food system we’ll do everything from rescuing the ecosystem to lowering our cholesterol counts. But the advocates are butting up against an emphatic objection: that organic and local foods are exclusionary and elitist.
    Cost is always at the heart of the skeptics’ charge. What’s so great about Willie Green’s broccoli that I’m supposed to pay $4 for a head of it? Who gives a whit about pasture-raised pork when it’s on sale for $4 a pound at Safeway and I have to feed a family of four on $200 a month? The cost argument is the one that local-foods activists are scurrying to refute (at least the ones who aren’t floating on the same cloud as Alice Waters). They argue, for example, that CAFO (confined animal feedlot operation) meats are so cheap because of government subsidies. They show evidence that farmers-market apples cost about the same as QFC apples, and that they’re less expensive than the mushy, spotted apples at your local convenience stores. Nevertheless, the elitism charge seems impossible to shake off.
    Price matters. Of course it does. So does time: Once you get around to subscribing to an affordable CSA box that fills your fridge with antioxidants and idealism every week, how are you supposed to finish up all the calls you need to make that day at work, pick up the kids from their aunt’s house, get the dog walked, check your home e-mail, and then figure out what to do with five rutabagas and your fifth bunch of rainbow chard in three weeks before the kids crankily raid the freezer for Dinosaur Nuggets?
    It’s a legitimate concern for the partisans of locavorism. But food activists have been so focused on refuting it that they’re not addressing the subtler ways the locavore movement shapes, markets, and promotes itself. Specificity has become the cornerstone of the appeal of local foods—driving out to Oxbow Farm in Carnation with the kids so you know exactly where your weekly produce box comes from, getting to ask Brent Olsen himself about his Maris Pipers at the market. But the specificity that carries so much cachet for the people who buy into locavorism is exactly the thing that makes it so suspicious to the people who don’t. There are thousands of Seattleites who will drop $35 a person on dinner at Outback Steakhouse because they mistakenly think 35th St. Bistro is way too pricey. Even more will pass over the Charentais melons at one farmers-market stand in favor of plain old cantaloupes at another—if they’re not already put off, of course, by the gelato carts and freshly made pasta vendors flanking the fruit. If you really want the movement to go mainstream, O locavore, you’re going to have to give up the cachet.
    The worry is that local foods will follow the same path as organics. Just as Nirvana’s hipster cred plummeted the moment Sam Goody started papering its windows with Nevermind posters, the mass production of organic food has sullied the pur ity—and cachet—that we longtime believers relied on the label for. Fewer and fewer people would call certified organic food “elitist,” but in exchange for this new populism we’ve been given corporate lobbying to relax certification standards, organic spinach E. coli scares, small-scale farmers dropping their organic certification once the bureaucracy becomes too knotty, organic corn dogs. To many of the people now backing local foods, the word organic has all but lost its connotation for being, as Jaworski might say, “honest and genuine.”
    Not surprisingly, corporate America has its eye on the locavore movement. Two weeks ago, the University Village Safeway mounted a poster in the produce section, part of an