news-record.com

Those of you interested in the push for local food systems (as expressed in urban farms, community gardens, CSAs, etc.) should read this analysis by a British nonprofit that has been promoting sustainable agriculture for years. You can find the East Anglia Food Link report, "Limitations of a Provenance Approach to Local Foods," here.  

I have been reporting on the growing interest in local food systems over the past few months and was glad to read about the hard lessons and experiences of this group; I believe this Western (albeit non-American) perspective could be useful to those pushing for such a system here. 

From the report: 

"In short, there is a danger that, by focusing the concept of local food on the very particular issue of “local provenance”, we commodify local food. This makes it easy for the supermarkets, agribusiness and the big food manufacturers to appropriate and MacDonaldise local food and to convince consumers that they can deliver it.  In doing so we betray other, equally important agendas including the craft/relationship agenda and the diversity agenda discussed above.

"This betrayal will be all the more pointless if the other points made in this paper turn out to the true: that local provenance turns out to be at best relatively unimportant, and at worst potentially negative, in terms of environmental sustainability. If there are times when an emphasis on local provenance is actually normal">in opposition to other agendas like diversity or craft/relationship (i.e. when local provenance is being appropriated by “big food”), then environmental sustainability is just about the only argument left for it. If that argument too is open to challenge, we have a problem."