Oregon Humanities

Is Local Always Good?

There’s an old joke: Did you know that in China they call Chinese food “food?” We could revise this joke to consider our current love affair with “local food.” It would go like this: Did you know that they used to call local food, “food?” Our contemporary vocabulary reveals a revolution in our relationship to what we eat. We have developed a new lexicon to combat the rise of industrial food production—“community-supported agriculture,” “locavore,” “carbon footprint”—a lexicon that would not have been recognizable to those who lived in an era when local food was simply “food,” before industrial agriculture turned small farming into an act of political resistance, when there could be no “slow food” because there was no fast food. And now, we take these neologisms to be as natural and as desirable as the food they intend to describe. We try to find alternatives to factory farms and monoculture, to make the food chain more legible, to eat seasonally, to resurrect regional foodways, and thus provide a centripetal force in a centrifugal world. All of this, we hope, will connect us better to our land, connect producers and consumers, and connect us all better with each other. “Local” now stands in for all things virtuous.

But should it? Is local always good? Does going local promote an ethic of connection—or can it be a tool of exclusion and inwardness? And what community should I be trying to connect with anyway?

Our craving for the local gives off the scent of nostalgia, for “simpler times,” for a romantic notion of community that may not ever have existed. The fragrance of my childhood, however, was not freshly churned butter, but the salty oceanic smells of food that had come from halfway around the world. Growing up in a Japanese household in New York City, we always had jars of niboshi around the house—the small dried sardines that we sprinkled on rice or munched the way Americans munch potato chips. I also remember the floral but tart taste of umeboshi, the pickled plum so salty that it would make your face pucker. And all of our meals were based on rice. The rice might have come from as near as California and not the paddies of Japan, but one could be sure it did not come from the Hudson Valley. These exotic foods, which had traveled thousands of “food miles,” were the bread and butter of my kitchen. They were what connected us to our Japanese heritage, nourishing not just our bodies but our spirits in the way that only smells and tastes can do. What would my immigrant mother have done if she could not have tasted the flavors of home? What would adjustment to the United States be like for our newcomers if they could not taste coconut or curry? And what would our lives be like?

What if “local” is just “provincial?” Local is an instrument of community, sustainability, maybe even democracy itself. But “local” has also been used as the rallying cry of segregationists and xenophobes, people who don’t want outside agitators disrupting their “local” customs. The local helps anchor us in place in an increasingly placeless world, but will the infatuation with “our” communities, the nearby, the small, cause us to retreat from our obligation to and curiosity about places far away? Can one be “local” and also be cosmopolitan? What if the strange is as important as the local?

About Reiko Hillyer

Reiko Hillyer is a visiting professor at Lewis & Clark College and an Oregon Humanities Conversation Project Scholar-Facilitator. She will be leading the architectural tour Pedal Through Time as part of Portland’s Pedalpalooza on Wednesday, June 16, 2010.

09 June 2010 | Posted by Reiko Hillyer in Inside O. Hm.
Permalink | Comments? (3 so far)