Through the Eyes on the Ground: Re-positioning Rural Agrarian Actors as Leaders in the Local Food Movement during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Despite Costa Rica’s efforts to promote international tourism, the economy continues to struggle with unprecedented unemployment rates due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This is especially concerning for tourism-dependent regions, such as the Monteverde Zone, where most residents have abandoned land-based livelihoods in favor of tourism. This study uses photovoice to illustrate the ways that small-scale food producers have adapted to the unique challenges of the COVID-19 global pandemic in a region that was already experiencing a loss of agrarian identity. Overall, local food producers have been affected by the diminished tourism economy through the closing of restaurants and the decrease in tourists, causing them to experience crop loss. Food producers have adapted to the economic impacts of the pandemic by re-investing their efforts into a local economy. As part of this shifting strategy, some food producers have begun to expand, diversify, and embrace an approach to growing food that is in line with building more resilient models of food production and engaging with their clients in different ways. Using community-based participatory methods, this study illustrates how food producers have adapted to changes brought on by the pandemic, re-positioning some of these rural agrarian actors as prominent figures in the local food movement.

Grassroots Sustainability in a Concrete Landscape

The second chapter explores the urban ecovillage in the United States, the first example of radical sustainability and autonomous development. Through insights gleaned from field research, the chapter presents the challenges ecovillagers face attempting sustainable living in a neoliberal context. It examines the cultural conflicts between sustainability culture and consumer culture as well as the exclusive, upper-class, white nature of the local food movement in the United States. Monetary and time constraints associated with growing local organic food has largely turned it into an elite phenomenon, such that it is relegated to those with disposable income, luxury of time, and education. In fact, urban gardening is often cited as a first step to gentrification in urban communities. However, ecovillagers engage in communitarian sustainability innovations that are egalitarian, elegant, and low cost. Thus, they maintain a small ecological footprint while attending to the mental, physical, and spiritual needs of their human and nonhuman community members.

THE ECONOMIC PAMPHLETEER: Local foods: Seeds for social change

The local food movement has grown in direct response to the industrialization of the agri-food system—and more recently in response to the industrialization of organic foods. Locavores seem to have an intuitive understanding that the enviro­nmental and public health problems associated with industrial food production must be solved within the socioeconomic context of local commu­nities. Similarly, the problems of social justice can­not be solved without addressing the larger envi­ronmental and public health problems of society. Systemic problems require systemic change, which is rarely quick and never easy. However, local community-based food systems can provide fertile seedbeds of systemic social change.

From globalism to localism: How structural economic shifts can support the local food movement

Local is Our Future was published shortly before the rise of the COVID-19 pandemic, yet it makes a timely contribution critiquing economic globalization given the experiences of 2020. It emphasizes the need for shorter supply chains and champions local food systems by focusing on the structural forces that currently control the food system.

“Ditch red meat and dairy, and don’t bother with local food”: The problem with universal dietary advice aiming to save the planet (and your health)

In recent years there have been increasing calls for “global dietary transition” in order to save the planet and improve human health. One troubling development associated with this is the attempt to delineate in universal terms what constitutes a sustainable and healthy diet. This perspective takes issue with this development, and specifically refutes one increasingly popular dietary narrative which calls for people to avoid red meat and dairy, and which portrays the local food movement as a romantic distraction. In contrast, the paper provides evidence of a range of sustainability and health benefits associated with both local food systems and the agri-food system’s inclusion of ruminants (the suborder of mammals from which humans mostly derive red meat and dairy). Finally, the perspective calls for a pluralist and multi-scalar approach to the multifaceted challenges associated with food production.

Making Sense of “Local Food,” Urban Revitalization, and Gentrification in Oklahoma City

This chapter examines the linkages between urban revitalization in Oklahoma City and Oklahoma’s statewide local food movement, focusing on three phases: a period of emergence, led by the Oklahoma Food Cooperative; an innovative “hybrid cooperative”; a period of expansion, in which a number of local food-related firms and organizations proliferated, particularly in and around Oklahoma City, which was undergoing a period of intensive downtown redevelopment and gentrification; and a more static, defensive period characterized by business closures and the saturation of a niche market. This account demonstrates how the meanings associated with “local food” shifted as the movement aligned itself with actors associated with Oklahoma City’s revitalization efforts, drawing “local food” away from an early emphasis on balancing economic, ecological, and justice concerns in favor of capturing premium prices for more fetishized foods.

Local versus global food consumption: the role of brand authenticity

Purpose This paper aims at investigating the contemporary trend toward regional consumption from the perspective of consumers’ search for brand authenticity. In particular, the paper joins literature on brand authenticity from the marketing literature and literature on the local food movement to investigate consumers’ response to authenticity claims in the competition of local and global food brands. Design/methodology/approach The paper engages in a series of three experimental studies; one of which uses a Becker–DeGroot–Marschak lottery to assess individuals’ willingness to pay for authenticity claims of (non)global brands. Findings Findings show that authenticity perceptions lead to higher brand value independent of brand globalness; while global brands can mitigate competitive disadvantages in localized consumer markets by actively authenticating their brand image. Originality/value This paper reveals the usefulness of authentic brand positioning for global beverage brands when competing with local beverage brands to overcome the liability of globalness. To sustainably benefit from the local food movement, local brands thus will require to build up brand images beyond associations of mere authenticity.

Confronting Whiteness in Kansas City's Local Food Movement: Diversity Work and Discourse on Privilege and Power

In recent years, the whiteness of the local food movement has been an increasingly popular topic in both academic and popular discourse. In what ways have those within this movement responded to critiques of exclusionary whiteness and privilege? Drawing on interviews with local food advocates in Kansas City (KC), this article explores the discourses and practices used within the movement in response to questions of equity and racial justice. It argues that in KC, one way that local food movement advocates react to these critiques is by discursively celebrating “diversity”—a response that actually works to further conceal racialized inequality and to maintain systemic white privilege. Within this case study, this “diversity work” took the form of counting and celebrating phenotypic diversity in local food spaces. In KC, this manifests as a celebration of new U.S. immigrants—a form of diversity work that is easier to engage in than calls for deeper, structural changes in the food system. This diversity work, whether intentionally or not, depoliticizes discussions of food systems reform and distances local food advocates from the responsibility to address deeper inequities. Such findings illustrate some of the narratives and practices that help sustain structural racial inequality in local food systems amidst a shifting broader discourse that calls for the dismantling of white privilege within many social movements.

Building London’s Food Democracy: Assessing the Contributions of Urban Agriculture to Local Food Decision-Making

This article presents the contributions of Urban Agriculture practitioners in establishing the local food movement and the foundations of an active food democracy in London. It argues that food democracy is emerging from a set of contestations within institutional channels, but also through the historical struggle of formulating the dominating political discourses, both of which are co-constituted through specific social and political practices. Webster and Engberg-Pedersen’s political space framework (2002) breaks up this article in order to describe: 1) How specific institutional channels form different strategies of collaboration and contestation; 2) how these are reflected in political discourses evolution; and 3) what dilemmas and opportunities this evolution in practice entails in relation to responsibilisation and its influence on the possibility of establishing true active food democracy in London.