Digression from Tomatoes
Thursday, August 30, 2007
Tuesday morning, parking and setup for the Rittenhouse Square farmers’ market went unusually smoothly, so I wandered into the Barnes & Noble across the street, contemplating the purchase of a news magazine to read over coffee. My choice became easy once I noticed that the current issue of The New Yorker is the food issue!
(That morning, the first food-related article I came to was an amusing and tantalizing exploration of Singaporean street food, by Calvin Trillin. If it’s feasible, I’d recommend buying the issue to read that article; sadly, only the abstract is available online.)
The full text of the article I read yesterday afternoon, however, is available online. It’s entitled ‘New York Local’, by Adam Gopnik. Needless to say, I was excited to read this article—localism, the word Gopnik seems to use frequently, is entering the zeitgeist as interpreted by such a venerable magazine as The New Yorker! In the middle of the article, I texted a friend who is a geography professor, ‘I’m not sure what to think of [the article]’, and after I had a couple hours to ponder it, I think I’m annoyed. Gopnik writes about his meetings with community chicken carers, rooftop beekeepers, a Central Park forager, and a Brooklyn College fish farmer—all people he encounters in his week-long experiment to eat only food ‘grown or raised within the five boroughs of New York City.’
OK, intriguing experiment. But...I started to become dubious when Gopnik lists the following reasons he attempted this experiment: 1. to find out if it was possible, 2. to explore localism, and 3. ‘to see if perhaps the implicit anti-urban prejudices lurking in the localist movement could be leached away by some city-bred purposefulness’. ...Huh?! Is it just because I’ve become a locavore while living IN the city, taking advantage of co-ops and farmers’ markets and farm shares with other urban residents, that I am oblivious to this anti-urbanism he claims to sense in the movement? It’s true that he mentions in the paragraph previous that the usual rules of localism allow for a 100-300 mile foodshed, but if the whole article is focused on a five-borough foodshed, will his readers remember that passing mention? Am I just over-reacting?
He talked about interesting people and exciting projects, but I was a little sad that this article was the only perspective on localism in this issue of The New Yorker, a perspective so different from my own experience as a locavore. Please do let me know your thoughts! I know most of the blog entries so far have contained beautiful produce collections or tasty recipes [edited to add: and I love all of them!], but I am also interested in your help to become more conversant in the theory and advantages/objections to eating local.
OK, intriguing experiment. But...I started to become dubious when Gopnik lists the following reasons he attempted this experiment: 1. to find out if it was possible, 2. to explore localism, and 3. ‘to see if perhaps the implicit anti-urban prejudices lurking in the localist movement could be leached away by some city-bred purposefulness’. ...Huh?! Is it just because I’ve become a locavore while living IN the city, taking advantage of co-ops and farmers’ markets and farm shares with other urban residents, that I am oblivious to this anti-urbanism he claims to sense in the movement? It’s true that he mentions in the paragraph previous that the usual rules of localism allow for a 100-300 mile foodshed, but if the whole article is focused on a five-borough foodshed, will his readers remember that passing mention? Am I just over-reacting?
He talked about interesting people and exciting projects, but I was a little sad that this article was the only perspective on localism in this issue of The New Yorker, a perspective so different from my own experience as a locavore. Please do let me know your thoughts! I know most of the blog entries so far have contained beautiful produce collections or tasty recipes, but I am also interested in your help to become more conversant in the theory and advantages/objections to eating local.
Posted by Joanna on 08/30 at 10:57 PM
An aside-- the contents of your post are different when viewed from the index page vs. viewed from the comments link. Was this on purpose, or is this an interesting glitch?
I’ll have to read Gopnik’s article when I have more time. My views on advantages/disadvantages probably merit its own post.
First, I want to say this.. I know someone who knows him in real life and I have heard that he has quite a few “quirks” which can make him hard to digest.
Next.. I agree. It sounds like he is trying to make this a less “those hippie liberals” and more into “the conservative right” And it smaks of separatism more than it says “hey I wanted to try this project and found out it can really work”
I also want to talk more about why I do what I do.. But the moment hasn’t been right. Maybe next week. (altho I do like posting my recipes.. I know it can be mundane)
I was SO glad to find your post about this article, as I’ve been fuming about it for two days. I think you’re absolutely right in pointing out the problems with his “anti-urban bias” argument--it seems that this perspecitve has led him to write with a serious chip on his shoulder. It’s also lazy writing that mentions book titles without describing their content or importance (Kingsolver, etc.), relies on stereotypes of local eaters to make his points, and misses all the beauty that he must have encountered in the community gardens, farms, and neighborhoods he visited. But the thing that irritated me the most was his summary statement--that local food is a way for the upper middle class to reclaim their peasant heritage. I ran one of the oldest and largest community gardening programs in the country and watched hundreds of poor people who could NEVER afford to purhcase organic food grow it themselves, with free seeds that we provided, on land they leased for $10 a year. All this in neighborhoods that have no grocery stores, because they’ve all moved out to the suburbs to serve--you guessed it--the upper middle class.
Argh. Well, perhaps some letters to the editor are in order!
Thanks for your post.
Nicole—thanks for the vigorous reassurance that being a locavore doesn’t mean being anti-urban. I’m not sure why Gopnik thinks there IS an inherent anti-urbanism, just because locavores like to eat food grown on a farm (i.e., often outside city limits) or because he’s gotten that sense from conversations with certain locavores?
Yoko—Oops, sorry. I was experimenting with the ‘extended text’ option in posting entries, but apparently I misunderstood that.
Anj—Oh, thanks for your impression of Gopnik. I don’t remember reading any other article by him, but another acquaintance also mentioned something about his pro-NYC tendencies on my personal blog. And please don’t think I meant to infer that recipes are mundane at all! I’m happy to read about yummy recipes, and I edited the entry to make that clear.
Marci—I’m relieved to hear I wasn’t the only one who started fuming about the article! That whole ‘we’re now different because we eat peasant food’ was certainly a new perspective to me, but because I’m not a sociologist or anything, I wasn’t sure how to respond. Especially now that I work for farmers’ markets, I AM interested in making local food accessible for all urban residents of every income level, so I’m happy to hear about this community gardening program. Where is it?
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Gopnik is a fool to assume there’s an inherent anti-urban prejudice in those of us who champion the eat local movement. If we choose to eat locally grown food and happen to live in a major city, it’s more likely that we’re simply concerned about what we put into our bodies.
Many of us might be able to go buy a rural property somewhere in the middle of no where and maybe live off the grid, grow all of our own food, etc. I happen to like the benefits of urban living.
Rejecting our corporate overlords and the animal abuse that comes along with corporate farming isn’t a rejection of urban living. At all.