ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the ways in which "exceptional places" are performed through food-centered advocacy tourism. It discusses the Piedmont Farm Tour makes a significant and context-driven departure from the policy-centered advocacy strategies and rhetorics of technological expertise often employed by environmental advocates. Like toxic tours, tourists participating in the Piedmont Farm Tour are simultaneously positioned as witness to wounded places and as coperformers in narratives of healing and sustaining. Tourists are invited to protect both the environment and local culture, to represent the ethos of the small-scale, sustainable family farm by participating in the prevention its economic collapse. Since 1994, the Carolina Farm Stewardship Association has hosted and sponsored the Piedmont Farm Tour each spring in order to promote organic, and biodiverse agriculture in ways that specifically enable farmers and consumers to make lasting connections. The tour produces the possibility of a subjectivity founded on ethical responsibility and dialogic response-ability is the result of a continual process of witnessing.
