Constructing the local

In another installation of my review of articles related to local foods, I am providing an annotation of an article that focuses on one state's efforts to institutionalize local food in the effort to support the local economy. At the heart of this process are questions that I am fundamentally interested in, specifically: what is local food; how do people define local food; and what is the scale of local food. This is an interesting article that raises many of these questions, and though they are mainly unanswered, the author also points to both problems and pathways to lead those of us concerned with local foods through this process.

Hinrichs, CC (2003), The practice and politics of food system localization, Journal of Rural Studies 19, 33-45.

This paper discusses the observations of food system re-localization (defined as a return to the greater regional food self-reliance of the past) in the context of Iowa’s efforts to promote locally produced food through a program called the “Iowa grown banquet meal”, which promotes the consumption of Iowa grown food both direct to consumers (through farmer’s markets and CSA’s) and through institutional use (schools, hospitals, etc.). The author prefaces this exploration into the social construction of local foods by noting that food system localization is a desirable and socially justifiable effort, but cautions against potential problems and pitfalls in both the constructing of “local” food and the possibility of exclusionary practices, among others. Hinrichs notes the reification of local food, and seeks to look closely at the practice, in the case of Iowa, of re-localizing the food system and the processes implications.

Hinrichs notes that multiple and “sometimes contradictory” conceptualizations of local foods, and explores the discourse of local foods in the context of the “global-local” binary. She is concerned that concepts of local food do not necessarily reflect the social and environmental implications with which it implies. Among the academic discourse, Hinrichs observes the use of the local as the answer to concerns coming out of globalization in general and particularly related to the food commodity chain, noting the problematic nature of this binary thinking. Contrasting the binary perspective, she invokes a systems-oriented approach that draws from ecology to add to the understanding of the local.

Hinrichs provides a list of themes that have come to exemplify local foods that encompass issues of community, local economics, scale, bio-diversity, health and democracy, among others. In addition, in examining the commodity chain of local foods issues of local versus regional also arise, as well as the complexities of local politics in producing meaning around local food. Particularly, there is a concern that local foods have the potential of becoming an elitist commodity and excludes the majority of consumers. She also points out the potential issues around labor, exploring concerns over who will grow food as Iowa farmers age out of farming and the state as a whole loses population. She notes the deep ambivalence Iowa residents have over immigrant labor which they acknowledge as necessary to many facets of food production in the state, but are still conceived as the other and are generally unwelcome in communities.

For this program, the scale of local was the entire state of Iowa (56,000 square miles). Scale derives from the state’s efforts to promote a specific type of consumption, and to account for the variation, and particularly the sparsely populated rural areas as compared to urban centers, that encompass the local food system that is conceived. Scale of production in the state of Iowa is also of interest as Iowa has traditionally been a commodity producing agrarian industrial state. Hinrichs notes that there is a notion of small scale production intertwined with in the concept of local food, which is problematic in this context. Ultimately, a central question that remains to be answered is who grows local food?