New $upport for Local Food

Did you catch Corby Kummer's recent Atlantic article (accompanying video above) on Walmart's move toward locally sourced products? It begins to break down Walmart-as-easy-enemy and raises questions about what top-down, profit-driven good could be done for the ground-up local food movement.

Just after reading the Atlantic article, I came across this article my friend Jeff wrote for True/Slant on venture captitalists who will meet with local and organic farmers in Chicago Thursday.

These articles complicate the positions of both local food and big agro.

The anti-big agro argument has addressed the mismatch between the forms of industrial production and the ways nature grows food. Fordist standardization is just not the way food grows best. So, I'm glad to see that some big capital is being pushed into in local food, which prizes diverse, sustainable agriculture. And I hope this means, in turn, that some capital will be pushed away from the giant, troubling, industrial monocultures of the last century.

But I can't help but wonder how local food will bend to meet the will of this new money stream. In the Atlantic article, heirloom varieties weren't to be found among Walmart's local produce selections. And in the True/Slant piece, the venture capitalists tout "value added business" as one way to increase local profitability. Canning preserves sounds innocent enough, but you have to remember that value added business is what put corn components into practically everything we, as a country, eat.

So, I'm open to these new opportunities for local food, but wary too. I believe our best food should be available to everyone, not just the moneyed yuppie set. And perhaps these new, giant, players will help democratize and spread the movement. But we should be mindful of what that democratizing spread looks like, how it is formed, what kind of labor produces it, and what it does to the food we eat.