Local Food Movements

Books and articles supporting a local food movement have become commonplace, with popular authors such as Wendell Berry, Barbara Kingsolver, and Michael Pollan espousing the virtues of eating locally. At the same time, others have critiqued the local food movement as failing to achieve its stated ends or as having negative unintended consequences. This chapter provides a general analysis of local food movements, specifically separating this complex phenomenon into three distinct sub-movements. During this analysis, the chapter pays particular attention to how sub-movements conceptualize people, food, and the roles that individuals, communities, and political institutions play when trying to bring about change. It argues that understanding these sub-movements is necessary for understanding and interacting with both local food’s supporters and its detractors.

Local food, farmland, and urban development: A case of land grabbing North American style

This article examines emerging forms of investment and land speculation and their implications for local food movements in urban areas. These investment involve purchases of large tracts of land in growing urban areas with a view to profiting from re-zoning and exiting the market well before development occurs. It uses a case study of the struggle in Edmonton, Alberta over a city food and agriculture strategy and the protection of prime food producing land in the northeast from urban development. The article shows how local food activists were able to mobilize citizens in support of local food and preservation of the land and were able to initiate a process of linking land use decisions to a food and agriculture strategy. However, the power of development interests and the planning process resulted in a strategy which was weak on preserving land for food and the adoption of a land development plan which preserves little land and threatens the future of existing food producers in the area. The article argues that new forms of land grabbing in North America pose challenges to movements seeking to preserve local food production.