Courtiers once collected special flavors for the famous banquets of the Roman emperors “in every corner of the Empire from the Parthian frontier to the Straits of Gibraltar” (Suetonius 274). The Chinese emperors, too, demanded a succession of unusual and exotic treats from distant lands opened up by the Silk Road. Today, this tradition still lives on, fitfully, in North Korean leader Kim Jong Il’s requests for Czech beer and Italian pizza.

If we are what we eat, then emperors have been defined not just by bloodline but by diet as well. What good was it to have an empire if you couldn’t “eat” it too?

The isolated Kim Jong Il aside, such distinctions between the imported exotica available only to royalty and the routine local fare of commoners have largely faded. What was once available only to kings and queens is now sitting on your local supermarket’s freezer shelves. Food courts in malls throughout the world routinely offer European, Asian, and Latin American fare alongside such hybrids as Chinese Cajun (bourbon chicken) and Mexican Italian (jalapeño pizza). Exotic flavors such as pepper, nutmeg, vanilla, and pineapple are now commonplace.
Nor is this phenomenon confined to the industrialized world. Fast-food hamburgers bring the taste of America even to the lands of the sacred cow (where lamb substitutes for beef). The world’s poorest subsistence farmers, losing their livelihoods to cheap agricultural imports, crowd into the cities where they eat foreign corn, wheat, and soy products that have often been chemically augmented. The global trade in foodstuffs has made cosmopolitan eaters of us all.

Exotic provenance alone no longer supplies sufficient added value to justify higher price tags. The declining terms of trade—by which raw materials such as agricultural produce have declined in value relative to manufactured goods—have affected producers and consumers alike. The declining value of pork bellies and corn syrup and potatoes can barely keep their producers afloat, and the same mar-ket logic applies to more upscale choices like specialty coffee, cilantro, and Asian pears. In short, only products that are in scarce supply, such as truffles or kangaroo meat, escape being subjected to industrial-style production, scientific manipulation (such as genetic engineering), or just plain cross-border competition that drives down prices.

Whereas distance once conferred value on food as traders brought items from a land of abundance to a land of scarcity, the global market and ferocious price competition have largely eliminated that value. To maintain profit, the food industry has sought other methods of adding value to both raw and finished products.

The alchemy of the marketplace transforms this vulgar pursuit of profit into something more high-minded: a quest for distinction. To acquire this distinction, in Pierre Bourdieu’s sense of the term, wealthier global consumers have drifted toward other designations to reinforce their sense of exclusivity. It is no longer enough to eat New Zealand lamb or Brazilian oranges in the wintertime. These products have become déclassé, much as sugar and tea lost their distinction as elite comestibles in the Middle Ages to become the mainstay of the British poor by the time of the Industrial Revolution (Mintz 148). Discriminating consumers, who want to show that they have taste—which is so much about asserting status and economic class—gravitate toward other marks of distinction. This campaign has also involved the transformation of “health foods” from flavor-challenged options—the lowly tofu burger—into flavor-enhanced superfoods full of vitamins, antioxidants, and omega-3 fatty acids. “Healthy” once battled “tasty” in the popular imagination. Today, as the advertisers for Healthy Choice frozen dinners remind us, the consumer doesn’t have to choose.

The “organic” designation has for some time been one such attempt to push a certain class of food up the value chain. In this way, the industry has succeeded in getting a growing number of consumers to pay more for fresh produce and packaged goods. But as organic food goes mass market, higher-end consumers are looking for other distinctions. The “local food” movement, by turning the age-old relationship of value and distance on its head, is poised to replace organic as the value-added distinction du jour.

The Taste of Organic

The firm NRE World Bento produces organic box lunches for the Japanese consumer. The boxes contain organic rice and vegetables produced in California, humanely raised pork from Mexico, wild salmon from Alaska, and other staples of the organic trade. Although 90 percent of the product is sold to Japanese railway customers, the factory is not located in Japan or even in nearby China. Rather, NRE World Bento is located just outside of San Francisco in the mid-sized California city of Fairfield, not far from the Jelly Belly and Thompson Candy factories.

Two factors have determined the factory’s location. One is the source of the raw materials. Japan simply doesn’t produce the volume of organic rice, vegetables, and meat that World Bento needs. The company had to look elsewhere. Although the eel for the unagi bento makes a long round trip from China to the United States and back to Japan, most of the remaining ingredients are grown and raised in California. The free trade agreement between the United States and Mexico brings the cheaper Mexican livestock into World Bento’s supply chain.

Ordinarily, given Japan’s import regulations governing rice, the United States would be the last place that the company could outsource. US growers have been trying to break into the Japanese market for years with little success. Herein lies the second factor: NRE Bento discovered a loophole in Japanese import regulations that permits a low tariff for imported rice if it is part of a product containing at least 20 percent non-rice ingredients.

The NRE World Bento story illustrates several interesting developments in the organic market. What was once largely a countercultural phenomenon geared to local consumption has gone mainstream. The market for organic food reached $23 billion in 2002. In many countries it is the largest growth sector in agriculture. In the United States, for instance, the organic market has grown by roughly 20 percent a year since 1997. This market has become attractive enough to lure Wal-Mart, which is poised to become the largest purveyor of organic produce in the country.

The international trade in organic products has also inexorably expanded over the years. Australia, Brazil, China, and several other key agricultural producers are aggressively marketing their organic produce. But demand continues to outstrip supply. One of the top three organic producers in the world, the United States imports eight times more organic food than it exports (Tringe, 2005). “Product shortages in North America and Europe are resulting in organic food imports from across the globe,” according to Organic Monitor, which identifies China, Turkey, and Brazil as sources for beans and nuts; India, Paraguay, and Ethiopia for herbs and spices; African and Asian countries for fresh fruit and vegetables; and Latin America and Australasia for organic meat products.

In the food world, a packaged item like a bento box has a much higher profit margin than the raw materials alone. And so an inter-national organic assembly line has emerged to produce and transform the inputs into finished products that can then retail at a much higher price. To facilitate the creation of this assembly line, countries have begun to harmonize their regulatory and labeling mechanisms. Rather than being at cross-purposes, free trade and regulation go hand in hand. The contemporary food trade is only possible with certain quantifiable standards (health and safety requirements, quality assurances, and so on). Disputes continue, for instance between the United States and Europe over genetically modified organisms, but the general principle of harmonizing food trade standards endures.

This harmonizing process bears out one of the conclusions of Julia Guthman’s penetrating study of the California organic sector, Agrarian Dreams: the organic movement has devolved largely into a practice of labeling. At the outset, the organic movement was not about adding value to products for upscale consumers. In the 1950s, J. I. Rodale was concerned about the sustainability of the soil. Only gradually, with the development of third-party certification, did organic become a marketable category. The more radical approaches to crop production, the reconfigured relationship with the consumer, and the more ecological understanding of overall sustainability have subsequently been overshadowed by the more easily quantifiable questions of regulation and marketability. This is how states and international regulatory agencies “see”—and thus organize, in James Scott’s formulation—organic agriculture.

The love affair between high-end customers and the organic sector may well be brief. With the institutionalization of the production and distribution of organics—which enabled NRE World Bento to set up shop outside San Francisco, countries like Brazil and China to boost their exports of organic produce, and Wal-Mart to shoulder its way into the market—discriminating consumers are beginning to look for a different measure of authenticity.

Going Local

Locavores—the latest trend in dietary activists—speak of reducing “food miles,” of sustaining small farms, of the better taste of produce grown or raised locally (Feffer, 2007). It’s not just Europeans. North Americans are beginning to follow the European lead in prizing local products. Local sourcing—with its application of the term terroir to products other than wine and the rapid growth of direct farmer-to-consumer marketing through consumer-supported agriculture (CSAs)—has taken up the same radical challenge to factory farming that the organics movement raised a generation ago, but with an additional critique of the global agro-assembly line. In a reversal of the old relationship between emperors and their dominions, people are nowadays assigning greater value to items produced locally.

Consider the various “eat local” challenges that have sprouted up throughout North America. In Gourmet magazine, environmentalist Bill McKibben chronicled his effort to survive a Vermont winter on root vegetables, canned tomatoes, and locally brewed beer. Ethnobotanist Gary Nabhan confined his year of eating locally to within 200 miles of his northern Arizona home where a rather narrow range of food can be coaxed from the landscape. The food service Bon Appetit conducts an annual 150-mile “eat local challenge” at its cafés in universities and corporate campuses across the United States. Further north, a Canadian couple spent a year eating a whole lot of potatoes in the 100-mile circle they drew around their Vancouver home (www.100milediet.org). And, in his latest book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, food writer Michael Pollan set the bar even higher by defining local as no further than hand’s reach, as his progressively more demanding effort to eat off the land culminated with a meal of wild pig that he shot, wild mushrooms that he gathered, lettuce that he grew, and fruit that he gleaned.

At the moment, the locavore movement seems impervious to the institutionalization that has afflicted organics. Production for local consumption is by definition small-scale. A certain amount of added value can rise up through the food chain: the local farmer charging more for the local tomato, the restaurateur charging a little more for the local tomato salad, the consumer willing to pay extra for something that has a local “distinction” attached. But such a value-adding exercise by definition stops at the boundary of the defined “local space,” whether it is 200, 150, 100, or 50 miles. True, “local” Vermont maple syrup or Pittsburgh microbrew or Memphis barbecue sauce can be produced and marketed on a large scale, and these products derive much of their value from their specific locale. But the “eat local” purist is not interested in someone else’s local food. The local designation is not comparable to a Codex Alimentarius geographic designation—basmati, champagne, kimchi—that facilitates trade. The movement is designed to discourage trade because trade pushes producers to greater economies of scale.

Does the consumer, by buying local, acquire distinction in the same way that the Chinese emperor did by consuming Samarkand peaches or the upscale shopper does by buying organic plums at Whole Foods? The “eat local” movement has reversed the value-distance equation. It becomes the poor who are condemned to eat the cheap food in the supermarket—white bread produced several states away, frozen orange juice from Brazil, sandwich meat from hogs butchered in Mexico. The wealthier consumers demonstrate their extradietary concerns—whether expressed in the desire to reduce overall consumption, help small farmers, or improve their own health with less-processed food—by paying a little more for locally produced products, whether vegetables or microbrewed beer or bread from a local bakery. This process of creating value, often arbitrary, is inescapable in our economic system. When locavores praise the flavor of a locally grown tomato, they are asserting that taste—as opposed to merely the calories needed to sustain life—is important. They are privileging their own tastes, their own health, and the socioeconomic assumptions embedded in these choices.

Although the eat-local movement will, by its very think-small nature, resist the institutionalization that the organic sector has experienced, it may nevertheless fall into the same value-laden trap. Like the organic politics of Whole Foods, the eat-local phenomenon may devolve into a simple pocketbook issue—which vegetable, the locally grown or the imported, costs less?—and its fundamental critique of food production will remain largely rhetorical. If it stops evolving into a political movement and instead devolves into a mere consumer movement, eating local will become little more than a set of distinctions to distinguish one type of product and one type of consumer from another, and another opportunity to change the world will be eaten away by the exigencies of the market.

Sources Cited:


Pierre Bourdieu (2002) Distinction

Cambridge: Harvard University Press


John Feffer (2007) The challenge facing local food

Salon, January 18 www.salon.com/mwt/food/eat_drink/2007/01/18/eat_local/


Global Organic Food Industry Facing Supply Challenges (2006)

Organic Monitor www.organicmonitor.com/r1511.htm


Julie Guthman (2004) Agrarian Dreams

Berkeley: University of California Press


Bill McKibben (2005) A Grand Experiment

Gourmet, July


Sidney Mintz (1986) Sweetness and Power

New York: Penguin


Gary Nabhan (2001) Coming Home to Eat

New York: Norton


Michael Pollan (2006) The Omnivore’s Dilemma

New York: Penguin


James Scott (1988) Seeing Like a State

New Haven: Yale University Press


Suetonius (1981) Life of Vitellius, The Twelve Caesars

New York: Penguin


James M. Tringe (2005) U. S. Market Profile for Organic Food Products

USDA, Foreign Agricultural Service (FAS), February

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