Intro

The back of the van is opened, revealing hundreds of melons.  I wait anxiously as Farmer Dave describes the different varietals available.  “I have Crenshaw melons, Snow Leopard honeydew, and smell this French Chanterais melon.  It smells French doesn’t it, with its light, sweet perfume? Pick out what you would like” Farmer Dave says with a smile.  I try to contain my excitement while picking out which melons to get, rationalizing that I need at least five melons, maybe I possibly need the whole van full?!  This is a memory that fills my mind with the sweet taste and smell of summer.  It is an entirely different experience than strolling through the fluorescent filled produce aisle of the grocery store hoping that maybe this generic cantaloupe will taste less like cardboard than the last.  It does no evoke memories of summer; rather it reminds me of every bland fruit salad I have ever been served, even in the dead of winter.  There is no comparing tasteless grocery store melons to local grown melons fueled by the hot summer sun and picked at the peak of their ripeness.

My aim is to explore Local Food culture and find out why people are choosing to source their food locally and what it entails.  In the past couple of years what started as a grassroots movement has gained an ample following.  Growing concerns with where our food is coming from, our health as a nation, and the treatment of the animals we eat have been some of the issues that have garnered attention.  As a result people have been going “back to the land”.  Those interested in local food are supporting local farmer’s markets, subscribing to CSA’s and in some cases are growing their own food.  I want to get a better understanding of why people are making this move and shunning cheap, readily available food in favor of local products, which are generally more expensive and only available during their specific growing season.

            I would consider myself somewhat of an insider of local food culture.  For many years now I have held a fascination with European culture and their tendency to eat food sourced from their regions.  The combination of this fascination, a joy of cooking and a medical condition made me take a hard look at the food I was eating.  This was about six years ago, a time when local food had not made it to the forefront via avenues such as Omnivore’s Dilemma or Food Inc.  Local food was not something that was readily available, especially in Nashville.  It is something that has gradually bloomed and now has a rather large following.  I try to shop at stores that provide local and regional produce when I cannot make it to the farmer’s market and try to buy products from local vendors.  Last summer I participated in a program called a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) with Real Food Farm.  Each week throughout the summer I received a new box of freshly picked produce.  This semester I have become part of a group called Slow Food on Belmont’s campus.  I highly advocate Local Food and want to get as many people as possible involved in the culture.

            So what is my point of choosing this topic for my project?  I want to examine the many motives that have caused people to eat locally.  I want to explore why something so natural as eating food from local farms has become the “in vogue” thing to do and why the elite are readily jumping on this food movement while the lower classes are stuck eating cheap, highly-processed foods.  Eating food from a local or regional source is a practice that goes back through human existence and would be the logical and natural way for us to eat.  All of this changed through industrialization and the globalization of food commerce.  Food was no longer being purchased in the region, because we had access to food all over the world.  Then the real downfall of local food happened when major corporations started taking over the food industry.  It became about what is the cheapest to produce and for the consumer to buy, regardless of the consequences.  So why are people now taking a stand against these major corporations and standing up for the local farmers, that just a few years ago, were being run out of business?  What has shifted in our world and specifically in our country that has caused people to take a hard look at what they are eating and making them forgo the cheapest product in favor of the local product?   That is what I will examine.