Is Locavorism Really Elitist?

By Samuel Fromartz

It's fashionable, or maybe just attention-grabbing, to argue that local and organic foods are elitist, the preserve of wealthy shoppers who are willing to dole out wads of bills for a weekly fix of local, sustainable food at the farmers' market.

Perhaps if it's repeated enough, we'll actually believe it, and then begin to spin yarns about the vast implications of this highly disturbing trend.

James McWilliams takes this simplistic view over at the Times' Freakonomics blog. If good, clean, food is elitist, he argues, then it leaves out the vast majority of shoppers and thus creates a wedge in our communities. So you better watch out! Farmers markets are secretly destroying your neighborhood.

In countering this ludicrous assertion, I'd first ask, Where is the evidence that local foods are elitist? You won't find it in McWilliams diatribe. He just assumes it.

Sure, I see people who are well-off at the Dupont Circle FreshFarm market in Washington (which is located in a high-income neighborhood). But I also see well-off people buying baby clothes on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. I don't jump to the conclusion that farm-fresh food or baby clothes are only sought by the wealthy.

This issue actually came up when I was researching my book Organic Inc. I had the notion firmly imprinted in my head that the typical organic shopper was a 30-something, upper-middle class, Volvo-driving, latte-swilling, yoga babe.

But try as I did to find the market-research to support that image, I could not. In fact, the largest and most authoritative study on that issue found that the median income of an organic shopper was right around the national median. The Hartman Group, which studies such things and sells their data in pricey reports to the food industry, has said that income is the least important factor in determining whether someone is an organic shopper or not.

Which is why you find penniless college kids eating organic vegan dishes. Now, programs are sprouting that double the value of food stamps at farmers' markets. And guess what? They are quite successful.

As it is, ethnically diverse groups are disproportionately represented, Hartman found when studying the organic marketplace. Here's another factlet: one of the largest factors in determining organic food purchases was availability. What looks like a white, upper-middle class trend might simply be a function of availability. Or to flip the notion on its head, do low-income people prefer buying fast food and chips from corner stores, or are those purchases disproportionate because of the lack of alternatives? Access isn't the only issue here, but it is a big one.

Take the farmers' market I visited last weekend in Greenpoint Brooklyn. Sure there were a fair amount of white hipsters and young parents with strollers but there were Latino and Eastern European shoppers as well. "It's fresh?" asked one babushka eyeing a plump sourdough loaf. Surveying the crowd, you would be hard-pressed to describe it as upper-middle class.

In Washington, D.C., where I live, you see it too at farmers' markets that straddle neighborhoods with diverse income groups, like Eastern Market. This market is not some homogeneous beast as McWilliams assumes -- it's diverse because, it turns out, a lot of people like good, fresh food from farms. 

Here's the other thing about this community-wilting farmers' market fantasy McWilliams concocts. Local food represents perhaps 2-3% of all food sales (though farmers' markets are sprouting extremely fast and not just in upper-income zip codes). It's so minute it probably has less impact on a community than a public school gardening program.

But as farmers' markets continue to grow -- and there is no indication that they won't -- they will likely add to communities simply by being a gathering place, where people can interact, especially as access increases. In short, there is nothing inherently elitist about local food, which is why all effort should be made in increasing access across the income spectrum.

But following McWilliams' logic, a superstore would offer more cohesion. They have the lowest prices. Low-income people can afford it. Oh yeah, only one problem. You don't need a lot of other businesses or even a Main Street when a superstore comes to town. You don't even need a lot of farmers. Just a few big ones. So how would a superstore create community cohesion? By spinning it from a fantasy determined solely by price.

Comments

[Kirsten@Nexyoo]

I don't think local food is elitist. In many places, community gardens and backyard gardens serve low-income populations. Urban agriculture is growing all the time-- grocery stores and farmers markets aren't the only source of local food.

[molly]

Thanks for addressing this so sensibly, Sam. A food delivery service in Oakland that includes a small envelope for donations with the meals they deliver to the truly needy saw the bits of change people put in that envelope go up (over 20% if memory serves) when they switched to fresh, local, seasonal produce in the meals. To claim good food is elitist is, in the end, quite elitist.

[twitter.com/lavalake]

I work for Lava Lake Lamb an organic lamb producer in central Idaho. We sell lamb at two farmer's markets in our local Wood River Valley. We often share the market with lamb producers that who sell the same cuts for less, yet we do great business at these markets. To me the question is, what is elitism? Our customers are from all economic brackets, but there is a unifying factor, the desire for sustainably and humanely raised meat. Elitist seems to be a word that is thrown around mostly from ignorance. Maybe we shouldn't worry about being elitist. The folks that buy from Lava Lake are indeed choosing our lamb for a reason and it is not just because it is a higher price. Thank you for this post, it gets to the heart of what local food is about.

[joe]

McWilliams needs to actually get out of the office more often. Where I live, in the Shenandoah Valley, the local produce auction opened by the Mennonite community 2 years ago is going gang-busters. Along with the yuppie food buyers repping stores and restaurants in Charlottesville and DC are plenty of just plain folks buying in quantity to freeze and can and home process. Putting up food for the winter is still a habit around here. My little meat market debuted its "sourced locally" label 2 days ago. Every item identified that way is from animals I purchase locally and slaughter in the USDA-inspected plant I own. The response has been overwhelming, with meat just flying out the door. For the record, my customers are the opposite of elite. Older white working class people, hispanic farmworkers, people dependent on food stamps, college kids, and so forth make up the demographic. The local meats are 10 to 20 percent more expensive. That appears to be no obstacle. People of all walks of life want good healthy food, food they can trust, food they can feel good about eating.

McWilliams states "Localizing the food supply, in other words, automatically means that a small group of people will have exclusive influence over what the rest of the community has access to." Well guess what - 3 megacorporations slaughter about 80 percent of the beef processed in America. Hello! Right now, major agribusiness has huge exclusive influence over what our communities have access to, along with the big box retailers. I really don't understand what point he is trying to make here. He comes off like some insecure farmkid who hates the "latte liberals", when in fact he is secretly envious of their clothes or education or savoir faire or some other equally unknowable quality. I would really like to know what he eats. If I had to guess, I would bet he can hardly boil a hot dog. Anybody who is that far off the mark on what is really going on the local food movement probably doesn't know much about how food gets on a plate.

[Neysa]

I work on an organic farm in New York, and sell at the Union Square Market once a week. I have a food blog about working on an organic farm, and I definitely get pegged with the 'elitist liberal' label from some readers. It's a little unsettling when it happens because I make a point to keep my blog apolitical, but preconceptions about eating locally and organically are so deeply ingrained, that my work alone makes my actual political leanings moot. I think the best way to combat the stereotype is just to keep doing what we're doing--providing healthy, fresh food to our local communities. Farms really have the power to connect people.

[Walter Jeffries]

A reality is that I could not afford to buy what I produce, not in any quantity. That is part of why I grow so much of our own food. The fact that I'm good at farming has allowed me to produce extra that supports our farm and family. I get to eat my pig and share it too.

Is it elitist that I sell to people who are willing to pay a premium for the top quality food I grow? No, it is simply good old Capitalism. I can produce a limited quantity of my product. People who want that high quality product are willing to pay a higher price so they are the ones who buy it - I'm not willing to bother selling for a price that won't sustainably support my farm and family. Since I don't get government subsidies I must make the economics actually work, unlike Big Ag. There isn't anything elitist about that.

Everyone makes choices. Some people choose to buy lottery tickets, expensive cars, cigarettes or cigars, lavish vacations, fancy wines, champagne, beer, Picasso originals and velvet portraits of Elvis. It is a semi-free market - everyone can make their own choices. Are a large percentage of our customers of higher income? Yes. Are all of our customers rich? No, not by any stretch of the imagination. The determining factor is they are people who appreciate high quality, pasture raised, humanely handled, local food. It is all about personal priorities, not elitism.

You make your choices and take your chances. Do you want cheap high fat with bread crumbs $1/lb E. coli hamburger or top quality choice pastured meat? Do you want low cost tainted peanut butter or something better? In the long run the cheap food is more expensive. Nothing elitist about being smart.

Cheers

-Walter
Sugar Mountain Farm
in the mountains of Vermont
http://SugarMtnFarm.com/

[Michael Janiszewski]

If you think that a revitalization of small farms and the growth of Farmers’ Markets in this country was a positive thing, apparently you would be wrong. Associate Professor James McWilliams’ recent post, “Is Locavorism for Rich People Only?” on the New York Times blog, Freakonomics, suggests this surge in smallholder farming is actually a part of a conspiracy masterminded by and for the benefit of “rich people.” This “elite few” structured the Locavore movement so that “a small group of people will have exclusive influence” over what we buy. It seems Locavorism is destroying the economics of our carefully constructed industrial food system, and in the process, jobs stocking shelves and unloading trucks in big box supermarkets are being lost, jobs that are vital to the lower classes, all for the sake of enriching smallholding farmers.

I have responded to McWilliams flawed pieces in the NYT and The Atlantic in the past, and given his penchant for wrapping deficient strands of logic around his flimsily constructed straw men, I am astounded that these two publications continue to grant him space. With his latest NYT’s post, he plumbs new depths in writing with a sloppy use of words, a paucity of facts, and a logic that would impress Orwell’s Ministry of Truth. I suggest that given the good Associate Professor’s credentials had a student submitted this piece to him, he would have returned it covered in red ink!

www.jakobsbowl.com

[Sam Fromartz]

It's fine to be a contrarian, but I think people are making a career of it (in order to get attention). McWilliams seems to be adept at it. But I think his goal of contrarianism exceeds the value of his arguments.

I had a history professor once who argued it was impossible to see the real fabric of contemporary life -- it takes at least two decades remove to do so. As a historian, McWilliams ignores this at his own peril.

[Paula]

So if access is the sticking point, how do we improve access?

[Rebecca T. of HonestMeat]

Sam- thanks for using data to illustrate your argument, unlike McWilliams. I had to counter his arguments, paragraph by paragraph, because they are so absurd & hollow. Read it here-

http://www.honestmeat.com/honest_meat/2009/10/sometimes-a-great-notion-will-get-you-published-in-the-new-york-times.html

[twitter.com/HoneyBHolistic]

Access is being improved - faster in some areas, slower in others.

Private gardening, soup kitchens, food pantries, community gardens, urban farms, farmer's markets, and CSAs across the country are improving access to locally sourced, fresh, quality produce and foods prepared from them.

The kind of access we really need are access to funding and more people interested in working or volunteering in their communities. This will keep existing programs running, provide funding for new programs, and foster organic visibility that builds awareness and encourages participation at all levels.

[Tamar]

Hi Sam -- Could you cite the study that looks at median income of organic buyers? Is it the Hartman Group study? All the data I've seen suggests that organic buyers earn more than the general population, and I'd very much like to see data to the contrary.
Thanks!
Tamar