The authors outline a fair, moral food system meant to counter the ills of and repair the damage wreaked by industrial food production. “The kind of local knowledge and live, craft intelligence which is sensitive to the ‘expectations of the land,” they write, “has all too often been replaced by the universalizing perspectives of agricultural science that are generated in the nowhere/everywhere of the laboratory and the experimental plot.” In opposition to this, the moral economy of their utopian foodshed will “envelop and condition market forces,” and in this imagined community of eaters, “production, processing, distribution, consumption, and waste disposal will be organized so as to protect and, where necessary, to regenerate the natural resource base.”

Proximity rather than strict locality or regionality is identified as the guiding principle of the foodshed, although the authors nevertheless insist that “foodsheds are socially, economically, ethically, and physically embedded in particular places…a socio-geographic space [where] human activity [is] embedded in the natural integument of a particular place.” They’re firm, but leave some wiggle room, and in general the principles they champion ring true even twelve years after they were written. In fact, the parameters with which they define and frame the movement are still totally relevant. It’s taken a while to get the momentum going, but people are increasingly aware of the issues invoked in the authors’ clarion call, and the movement they helped stir up grows stronger ever day. There are forces at work that weaken it, but after all, greenwashing and pressure from industry to water down organic standards so that they can compete are just an indication of the concept and movement’s popularity and potential.

In other news, I’m off for Central Asia for two months where, if wild apples are plentiful, internet connections are most emphatically not. Regular contributions will be return in August—see you then!