Where Are All The Locavores?

Echoing Joan Dye Gussow's call to relocalize our food systems

Do you ever wonder what life would be like today if Al Gore won the 2000 presidential election? I do, and here’s why: Because that man went on to dedicate his life to environmental activism while the rest of the country wasted the next two decades arguing about whether climate change was real, instead of working to impede¹ its progress.

When I read This Organic Life: Confessions of a Suburban Homesteader, a memoir by environmentalist Joan Dye Gussow, who was advocating as early as the 70s that we “eat locally, think globally”, I had similar thoughts. Published in 2001, the book details her pursuit of an all-local diet (grown herself in upstate New York), proving that one can eat well locally year-round, even in the Northeast. 

As the mother of the sustainable food movement and a leading thinker on the damages of consumerism to the environment, Gussow was calling for us to relocalize our food systems in order to safeguard the future of the planet. A locavore lifestyle bypasses an industry dependent on fossil fuels. It contributes money directly to local economies and small food producers instead of the fat pockets of corporations who are motivated by sustaining profit at the cost² of both depleting and polluting our most precious resource—the soil from which food grows.

We are eating more thoughtlessly than any people in history. By now our thoughtlessness about the soils that support us is complete. Unlike cars and clothes and computers, food must be produced year by year, by year, by year…forever, as part of a functioning ecosystem. - Joan Dye Gussow, This Organic Life

I’ll cut right to it and acknowledge the rapidly inflating elephant in the room—food access is a massive issue in our current society. Accessibility and the cost of entry are a genuine barrier for many to a proposed locavore lifestyle. But that doesn’t change the fact that we must seek climate-positive solutions and continuously make efforts to repair the damage that has been done. This includes the subsidies that support the industrial food economy, which have dangerously altered perceptions around the “value” and true cost of food. Gussow states it plainly, “We don’t see any need to be cautious spenders or cautious users, especially where food is concerned. It’s too cheap.”

So let’s not get hung up on accessibility as a roadblock for progress. There are plenty of people with means who have fallen prey to our modern food systems, contributing dollars (and by doing so, support) towards big industry instead of small growers. And as Gussow says, “It’s important here to deny the too-common assumption that this safe, fresh, local food movement is only for the well-off.” She started growing her own food with the goal of food security, needing to feed her young family on a limited income. Like gardening, cooking from raw ingredients (vs. buying pre-made and often ultra-processed foods, or eating out for convenience), can also be an act of thrift. 

Growing all of your own food and/or obtaining it from all-local sources is an extreme undertaking to commit to—although this kind of life is admittedly a dream to me. But a more modest, and collective, commitment to the pursuit of relocalization is what I have long envisioned as achievable activism. I believe that we as a society must redirect our efforts and resources towards supporting local food communities, and subsequently, our future towards economic and environmental sustainability.

If we take away the subsidies that support the present food system—cheap fuel and water, public funding of high-tech agricultural research, massive public investments in infrastructure, including overbuilt highways to handle giant truckloads of traveling food—we can invest them in a food system that conserves soil, water, air, and human resources, and produces reasonably priced food. - Joan Dye Gussow, This Organic Life

Gussow’s work has had an undeniable impact, influencing academics, policy makers, activists, and leaders in our modern food movement from Alice Waters to Michael Pollan. Barbara Kingsolver³ credits: “Her writings and creative thought have shaped the history and politics of food in this country.” But unlike much of her scholarly work, This Organic Life is a beautiful and personal story—a memoir intended for an audience of individuals written more than twenty-five years ago. If more readers had taken up Gussow’s brand of locavore activism then, where would we be today? 

Joan Dye Gussow (photo credit: Alice Proujansky)

Just a few years after This Organic Life was published, I would join my first CSA as a bright-eyed twenty-something and grow to be a locavore in Brooklyn. Once I became invested in local agriculture, my cooking and eating fell into rhythm with the seasons, and there was no looking back. It was vegetables that initially seduced me, but animal products like meat and dairy would soon be part of my constant consciousness about where my food came from. 

I wasn’t (and am still not) so hardcore in my locavorism that I forbade myself such essentials for an avid home cook as olive oil, lemons, or spices, but I was never not aware of what ingredients in my refrigerator and pantry were non-local indulgences. Anything I could source from my own community (primarily fed at the time by the farmers of upstate New York), I did. This was an intentional lifestyle that I proudly lived. 

By my late thirties, I was the founder and owner of Primal Supply Meats, a whole-animal butchery that supported farmers and small food producers in my community (directly purchasing more than $7 million in goods and services over seven years, I’m proud of that too). In many ways I had found my life’s work and achieved a dream. But working to keep the business going, especially in the years following the COVID-19 pandemic, started to take a massive toll on my health, and my diet.

I was overwhelmingly busy, and devolved to eating what was available. Often caught starving after forgetting to eat for hours, carb-heavy staff meals or butter-laden restaurant food would be in front of me. Recognizing this, I would make a conscious effort to keep up my regular home cooking practice, but my kitchen was always stocked with Primal Supply seconds. Nearly every meal I made contained meat (or at least animal fats—in an embarrassment of riches, I was consuming more pasture-raised meat than any one person should eat).

There came a point where I needed to come to terms with my ailing physical and mental health, and could no longer ignore that my body was struggling to process a lot of what I was eating⁴. I had grown used to feeling terrible because it had become normal to me, and that needed to change.

In a fit of desperation I plotted a cleanse diet, focusing on easily digestible foods. I eliminated gluten, dairy, gratuitous consumption of rich proteins and fats (hello lard in everything), and daily indulgences of alcohol and sweets. After an initial period of intense tracking and limitations, my diet gently evolved to plant-heavy with plenty of whole grains and fiber-rich foods, and much more moderate consumption of all those other hard-to-process and less-than-nourishing ingredients. It worked. My weight, my energy, my appetite, and my mood, at least as much as these were influenced by food, all improved.

The main habit I stuck to moving forward was making a point of going to the grocery store on a weekly-ish basis to stock up on fruit and vegetables (a welcome throwback to the days of being a CSA member who couldn’t help but also buy whatever looked good at the farmers' market). When my refrigerator is bursting with bunches of perishable produce, I will prioritize these ingredients in my cooking every day.

I became dedicated to this routine as one of my forms of self-care, but in order to maintain this practice while I also kept up with the intense demands of my entrepreneurial life, the shopping had to fit into my insane schedule, and visiting my local farmers' market on Thursday afternoon just wasn’t going to happen. Instead, I became a regular at the grocery store. I felt better, but I was achieving this through great personal compromise. I was choosing to shop with convenience, not ethics.

While I was publicly serving as a champion of my local food economy, I was grinding it out, just getting through each day to get up again and run my business, and trying to save myself with food I was buying from industrial supply chains and the big corporations. There was a deep hypocrisy to my my new rituals. All the fruit on my counter had stickers on it, and I consumed more avocados from Mexico than I did apples from Pennsylvania, because I didn’t have the time and capacity to practice what I preached.

At the risk of soliciting eye rolling as the entitled white lady (I am very well aware that having the choice to purchase organic foods at the grocery store is a privilege), I wanted to write this story to share the lesson I had to re-learn: Cooking at home and clean eating are important for my well being. But in order to sustain my personal values, my local economy, and the soil on this earth so it will continue to feed us all, eating local matters more. 

My cleanse diet was one of those cases of treating the symptom, not the cause. Eventually I would make the incredibly difficult decision to close my business, and in doing so, remove myself as a resource to the farmers I partnered with and the local food community I served. As the leader of a company with an impactful mission, I had rationalized giving myself a pass for my individual affect. Once I was in the afterlife of ownership, I had time, more than anything, to again consider and make intentional personal choices about where my food comes from. 

The first Thursday in June after I officially closed up shop, finding myself newly at home without work obligations, Brad and I walked and shopped at the farmers’ market in our own neighborhood in Fairmount. I was overjoyed to discover it had doubled in size while we were gone, including some makers and growers my business once supported. I have since become a regular, choosing to show up each week for the vendors who show up for my community.

Having just read This Organic Life, Gussow’s words were fresh in my mind and feeling relevant as ever while I walked to the market on a record hot week this past October, when instead of sporting a sweater, I was wearing a summer dress and sandals. I wondered how, or why really, has the locavore movement not caught fire and become a way of life for more people by now?

Climate change isn’t something we debate the validity of anymore. And we have seen first hand, when the pandemic broke our massive, corporate-run food supply chains and the grocery store shelves were empty, the fragility of the industrial food system that our society has encouraged to endlessly scale. During that time it was local farmers and small businesses like mine, not corporations, that had your back.

Being a locavore is a part of my identity and belief system. I have built some of my most important relationships through this lifestyle. And throughout the two decades of commitment to support my local food community, wherever I am at, demand has never outpaced supply.

It’s easy to get excited about the farmers' market during tomato season. But if you are lucky to have a farmers’ market in your community that operates year round, you should be shopping there in the winter too. Let the farmers that are standing in the cold with their dwindling offerings know that you look forward to their Spring harvest. Ask if you can join their CSA. We need to put dollars in farmers’ pockets today to keep them growing and coming back. Because if you promise you’ll get to it tomorrow, it might be too late. I share this fear with Gussow:

What if farmers get discouraged…and stop farming because they can’t make a living—as too many can’t? Who will feed us then? - Joan Dye Gussow, This Organic Life

Consider this essay my echo of her call for the relocalization of our food systems. Where are my fellow locavores at? It’s far past time to accept the limitations of seasonality and to get to know your local farmers, producers, and purveyors. And while I’m at it, this butcher thinks it’s also time to stop encouraging excessive meat-eating and start making conscious animal consumption the norm. Gussow shared this sentiment when she wrote, “Some of us would argue that if we ate flesh more moderately, much of that could be raised locally.”

You could also start your own garden like Joan, but there are plenty of good people out there doing this hard work for you. And you’re looking for convenient solutions, right?

The devil is in the details, and knowing your farmer is important whether what she grows for you is beef or beans. Thoughtfulness about your diet has to include asking yourself what happens to all the lives that produce your food, whoever or wherever they are. - Joan Dye Gussow, This Organic Life

Remember friends, without farmers, there is no food.

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Might I Suggest You…

READ

“I Ask Seven Heretical Questions About Progress”, an essay by Ted Gioia (who writes

The Honest Broker

on Substack, gave me a lot of food for thought. On theme for this newsletter, this view really struck a chord with me:

There was a time when lowering costs improved quality of life—raising millions of people out of poverty all over the world. But in the last decade, cost-squeezing has led to very different results, and is increasingly linked to a collapse in the quality of products and services.

But I will note that I found hope in his final, radical hypotheses.

WATCH

The Wonderful Story Of Henry Sugar, a short story by Roald Dahl, was adapted into a short film by Wes Anderson—the first of four shorts which you can stream on Netflix (the others being The Swan, The Rat Catcher, and Poison). I have loved Dahl’s stories since reading them as a child (Matilda forever), and Anderson’s signature style brings his work to life in a way that felt like a gift. As I sat on my couch in awe while the credits rolled, Brad simply and correctly stated, “What a neat little thing.” 

COOK FROM

Tenderheart: A Cookbook about Vegetables and Unbreakable Family Bonds by Hetty Lui McKinnon, who also writes

To Vegetables, With Love

on Substack, has been my favorite new cookbook since I unwrapped it on Christmas morning. I’ve dog-eared many recipes and loved what I’ve cooked so far. I’m hooked. One of the best things about this book, besides the inspired individuality of the recipes themselves, is the way it’s organized by ingredient. If I’m looking for inspiration on how to use my Mycopolitan CSA, I turn to the mushrooms chapter. When I tire of my usual go-tos for the heads of napa cabbage I pick up at the farmers’ market each week in the winter, there are plenty of new ideas in the cabbage chapter. 

For the same reason, I also adore I Am from Here: Stories and Recipes from a Southern Chef by Vishwesh Bhatt. But with that note, I should probably stop carrying on about my cookbooks, or this newsletter will get a whole lot longer.

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I’ll leave you with one final and often quoted message from Joan Dye Gussow:

What is your money doing out in the world? If we need to keep spending to keep the economy going, we just have to start deciding which economy, which parts of the economy do we want to grow? And if what we want to grow is a sustainable local food system, then we need to put our money where our hearts are.

Until next time, thanks for being here.

XX,
Heather

1. A not-so-fun fact I came across in my research: The first solar panels installed on the White House in 1979 (following the back to the land movement) were removed in 1986 by the Reagan administration, which also eliminated tax breaks for solar panels. Add that to the “what if things had gone differently” list.

2. I could also expand on the indirect cost of the atrocious practices the industrial food system has on the people and animals that exist within it, but I already wrote about that here and here. I recommend a read in the interest of conscious meat consumption.

3. Kingsolver is currently trending and being lauded for her book Demon Copperhead (which you should absolutely read). I have been a devotee of hers since a librarian who worked at my (principal) dad’s middle school, and knew me as a reader, handed me a copy of The Bean Trees. But of all of her works, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle had a notable impact on my life and locavore philosophy.

4. This had actually been going on for a long time—I had my gallbladder removed due to massive calcium stones when I was ten years old.