The Fabulous Forager

As you may have heard, the Oxford Dictionary’s official word of 2007 is locavore. In their words,

The past year saw the popularization of a trend in using locally grown ingredients, taking advantage of seasonally available foodstuffs that can be bought and prepared without the need for extra preservatives.

The “locavore” movement encourages consumers to buy from farmers’ markets or even to grow or pick their own food, arguing that fresh, local products are more nutritious and taste better. Locavores also shun supermarket offerings as an environmentally friendly measure, since shipping food over long distances often requires more fuel for transportation.

While many have argued (and I kind of agree) that “locavore” is too awkward and unfamiliar a word to count as a “word of the year,” it does reflect two trends: America’s growing concern for the environment–however shallow, half-assed, and pretentious it might be–and the “foodie” craze. Locavorism, or whatever you call it, is largely a positive trend: more focus on where our foods come from, on what goes into them, on what the growing methods put back into the earth. Most importantly, it encourages more focus on your particular ecosystem. If you take locavorism seriously, it’s an excellent way to start rewilding.

But its growing popularity in mainstream America makes me suspicious that it’ll turn into a short-lived dietary fad like any other. We can all look at, say, Horizon Dairy to see what’s happened to organic foods. And we know that Americans have a messed-up relationship with our foods; we tend to latch onto some new diet or vitamin or ingredient or way of preparing meals and take it way too far, and then abandon it completely when we sniff a new fad floating our way. This most frequently happens when large swaths of the population adopt the diet not for health or environmental reasons, but to show off how fashionably eco-conscious they are. I worry that the same will happen to this locavorism.

Granted, this is not exactly anything new. The hyper-industrialized “3,000-mile Caesar salad” method of food production is less than a century old. For the vast, vast majority of human history, we were all such locavores that no word was needed to describe it. Locavorism by any name is vastly older even than organic agriculture. We’ve been using organic farming methods for 10,000 years. Whereas been locavores, by sheer necessity, since before we were humans. (That is to say, since the beginning of life on Earth.) Peak Oil will soon make it impossible to practically live any other way, so it’s not like once locavorism goes out of style we’ll all go back to industrial agriculture. Industrial agriculture, like industrial everything else, requires something to fuel it. What concerns me is the possibility that locavorism will be chic, then passé, then all of a sudden it will become vitally necessary to be a locavore and everyone will disregard it as “so last season.” (There’s no fashion so hateful as the most recent fashion, and that goes for philosophy and politics as well as it goes for clothing. Consider the vitriolic response you’ll get from mentioning Communism or fascism, as opposed to the response you’ll get from mentioning monarchism or feudalism.) Sure, it sounds ridiculous, but consider the Greenland Vikings and their stubborn refusal to eat fish. There will certainly be a few people willing to change their diets and lifestyles to adapt to a new world. The only question is, how few? And will the current trend of locavorism effect the number for better or for worse?