Rethinking Discourse

My reflection this week is largely shaped by the first reading I finished, "Avoiding the Local Trap," by Born & Purcell. While the other readings this week were an interesting and very thorough overview of the current thinking in food systems planning and a helpful list of toolkit for planners, I unfortunately found them more of the same. That's why I found the Born & Purcell article to be so amazing -- it was different, it was critical, it called into question our assumptions about progressive food planning. As planners, I think we get stuck on what's "en vogue." As a transportation planning student, my education has focused on complete streets, bike/ped, walkable and bikeable neighborhoods, and other similar "progressive" transportation planning issues, because that's where the current focus is. While I love these topics and ideas, and while these progressive planning strategies are why I wanted to study transportation planning in the first place, I worry about current transportation planning's hyper-focus on bikeable, walkable, TODs, and transit, all with the assumption that this, finally, is the solution. If planners blindly accept these strategies as an end-all panacea (walkable neighborhoods are going to solve our health problems, as well as our emissions problems, as well as our equity problems...well, you get the picture), we will end up without a critical lens to our strategies that is really the hallmark of our profession. As Born & Purcell point out, an overly pointed and tunnel visioned focus on local food may have unintended consequences, and is not in of itself a solution to the problems we are targeting.

With this in mind, there were a few takeaways from this article that really struck me. First, the authors point out that the local trap conflates the scale of a food system with a desired outcome. Specifically, they state "...descriptive research on scale should interrogate how the inter-relationships among scales are fixed, unfixed, and refixed by particular social actors pursuing specific political, social, economic, and ecological goals." In other words, "local" is a social construct that is inherently embedded in how we see regional and global scales. Since we have lately come to understand "global" as an inherently "evil" scale (as DeLind points out in the "Pollanization" of our understanding of the food system), then "local" must be the benevolent scale. But this is equating scale with ever-changing values that, really, have nothing to do with the food system at all. This relates to my second takeaway from the article, which is that local ("good") food may not be able to offer us everything that we have grown accustomed to, and actually like, about the global ("evil") food system. In order to rid ourselves of the global scale food system, which we have unjustly married to the wrong end of our value system, we may be giving up tangible parts of our, and our community's, culture. For better or worse, our community's culture, our community's food, is not wholly tied food grown at the local scale. Does this mean we should abandon it?

The authors mentioned something along the lines of not being able to imagine a Midwestern meal without a Jell-O mold. Jell-O, of course, is not grown locally in the Midwest -- it is an industrial food. Does that mean the Midwest should rid themselves of Jell-O, a staple at their gatherings for decades? I remember in undergrad, I was preparing Christmas cookies for a group of friends. The cookie recipes were all passed down through my family and in turn influenced by my German and Polish ancestry. One of my "food woke" friends was horrified that a Polish jelly cookie recipe called for Crisco and refused to eat it. I was so upset that I cried -- my mom had made these for me when I was growing up and they were one of the first things I ever helped her cook, and her mom for her, and so on. These cookies were important to how I understood my identity and my heritage, and with how I connected to family and friends. I don't want to give up the Crisco cookies, and I don't consider them "evil" for being partially made from industrial food. So yes, I do try to eat local, and I have a garden, and I love TODs. However, I think we as planners, as argued for in the Born & Purcell article, need to take a critical lens to assumptions we hold about planning strategies. We need to separate the outcomes we desire -- whether ecological sustainability, social and economic justice, or food quality and human health -- from the strategies we are employing and make sure that "local food and the local food movement are taking us where we want to go."