By Rebecca Hoffer, Opinions Contributor
Good to digest. Globally unimpressed. Economically oppressed. Politically obsessed. Abuses unaddressed. Land dispossessed. Social unrest. Radical protest. Deep-fried chicken breast. Cardiac arrest. But morally-expressed, green labels suggest. Have we digressed?
The food movement consists of overlapping and interconnecting issues surrounding the consumption and production of food. It is environmental, political, industrial and agricultural. It varies from human labour rights to animal welfare, from local farms to distant markets, and from world hunger to an epidemic of obesity. And more recently, from social activism to the consumer bandwagon.
However, the food movement, in its various forms, is subject to a fair deal of criticism. In response to the complexities of the problems it challenges, it has become an ideology – one that can attract and convert, but also repel and restrict. It has been packaged and simplified in dualistic terms in order to appeal to the broad audiences it depends upon for its success.
“They have to show that they really are different … for without such practices it’s very difficult to get any political project going,” says Kregg Hetherington, an environmental and political anthropology professor at Dalhousie. “On the other hand, you can’t be too different, or you won’t be able to grow and get a lot of people interested in your cause, or, in the case of organic farming, consuming your products.”
However, there are particular dangers associated with any claims of certainty – whenever a single voice purports to provide the answers. In this “packaged” food movement, this voice can easily take on a tone of self-righteousness: moralizing and judgmental.
Ideological assumptions and exclusions can be distracting from a movement’s practical material aims, leading to misdirected efforts and the potential loss of realistic and viable solution.
“Science, which holds life as mysterious and wondrous, unfairly bears the brunt of the blame apportioned out by the food movement,” explains Daniel Morrison, food activist and dedicated member of the Grainery Food Co-operative.
Though he is a proponent of organic food, Morrison explains how an “outright rejection or ban of synthetic compounds” may not be the answer.
“It seems a shame if a farmer is forced out of business due to a pest infestation, simply because a single, targeted application of pesticide that would save, for instance, an entire orchard of trees, is considered unacceptable,” he says.
The food movement is based on a foundation of legitimate and rational concerns, but these are obscured when the emphasis is placed on the exclusionary, puritanical and hypocritical. If the food movement can be relegated to the fringes or dismissed as unreasonable, or alternately, when it is green-washed into meaninglessness, the critical issues avoid being confronted.
Patricia Bishop of Taproot Farms is a local farmer in the Annapolis Valley, offering a weekly community supported agriculture (CSA) vegetable box with its Halifax drop-off point at the Grainery. She explains that the global issue of struggling farmers, and the food security that is threatened, is not hype.
“Farmers are going out of business,” she says. “When this happens we lose skills and knowledge, employment, communities, and in some cases, the agricultural resource: land.”
Direct exchanges between farmers and customers, found at farmers’ markets and CSAs, play a significant role in ensuring the continued existence of local farms.
“The food movement is people,” Bishop says.
Here in Nova Scotia, there is a strong movement of dedicated, knowledgeable, and critical thinkers. There are concerted efforts in the university scene under the minds of Campus Action on Food (CAF), Seemore Green, NSPIRG, SustainDAL, the King’s Alternative Food Co-operative Association (KAFCA) and the King’s Agricultural Committee among others. There are plans to enliven our campus space with an Edible Campus, and ideas for a student-run food co-operative. We are part of a growing network of universities, farms, individuals and organizations.
“These fads may come and go, but we should see them as a chance to keep a public conversation alive about how the long-term consequences of our consumption habits, and to diversify the systems of food production and distribution beyond the petroleum-intensive ones that still provides the bulk of our diet,” summarizes Herrington.
Although the food movement has grown from grassroots to large-scale corporate advertising campaigns, neither its new packaged image nor its overly-moralizing or exclusionary manifestations should be mistaken for the core of the food movement.
“I do realize that our culture moves in waves of trends,” says Bishop. “I am hopeful that this trend will translate into a way of being and that citizens will come to a local-first mindset.”
Rather than a subscription to a prepared set of beliefs, it is a movement towards awareness, informed decisions, critical thinking, and localized solutions. It is a movement toward what Morrison calls food literacy: “The knowledge of how to grow, prepare and consume food.”
Rebecca Hoff is a member of Campus Action on Food and a second-year student at Dalhousie.
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