ABSTRACT

Staying in, living within your means, and getting back to basics…. In the spirit of newspaper style sections that make weekly lists of trends that are “hot” or “not,” these are three things that have enjoyed a prolonged warm spell, fueled by awareness of global recession and the environmental crisis, not necessarily in that order (von Hahn 2008; Combes 2010). These three prescriptions find perfect confluence in the local-food movement, one of the most visible and growing forms of ecological life politics, manifest in such diverse but related practices as farmers’ markets, CSA (Community Supported Agriculture), and variations on the 100-Mile diet. 1 “Life politics” is Anthony Giddens’s term for the range of new social movements that differ from earlier forms of collective, emancipatory activism in their focus on aspects of individual practices in everyday life. My use of the term follows Wendy Parkins and Geoffrey Craig’s use of it in their book Slow Living, to describe the Slow Food movement. Parkins and Craig embrace the term cautiously, tempering its emphasis on “the reflexive project of the self” in the context of global risk culture (Giddens 1991, qtd. in Parkins and Craig 2007, 12) with the ethical imperatives such a culture makes on us, creating “a greater understanding of contingency, chaos and suffering as well as the limits of nature, time and human life, potentially giving rise to values of community, peace and slowness” (Parkins and Craig 2007, 14). Like Parkins and Craig, I approach my subject with a mix of critique and hopeful appreciation for the possibilities it represents. I read the local-food movement, at least in its North American incarnation, as an expression of postcolonial politics. While my argument focuses on the ideological dimension of such politics in a settler-invader society, I also want to recognize the potential a project like local food has to produce positive social change.