Can the revolution, as Alice Waters claimed, be delicious? Can purchasing local, seasonal food priced to accommodate the high costs of small-scale organic farming stave off, or even reverse, environmental damage and inequities in human well-being? Can plunking farmers markets in every neighborhood encourage the health and wealth of consumers and producers alike? Can consumption right disparities if done consciously, ethically? Sociologist Alison Hope Alkon and the cross-disciplinary team led by environmental scientist Sally Fairfax, historian Louise Dyble, and planner Greig Guthey probe these dilemmas in two recently released books on the uneasy bedfellows of taste and justice within locally oriented food communities in and around the East Bay. Through interviews, ethnography, and policy analysis (past and present), the authors conclude that while the local food movement has enabled diverse small businesses to thrive, innovative restaurants to emerge, high-quality farmers' markets to mature, and sustainable agricultural practices to spread, it has not created a just food system in which farm workers receive a living wage and have equal access to healthful foods. The question that lingers is whether this just food landscape ever can emerge from a movement founded to enable food created by and for small, local, craft-oriented sellers to reach its taste-driven patrons. Even as the movement diversifies and imagines patrons with limited incomes in urban areas, there remains resistance to dropping food prices if this requires compromising on cultivation practices. Even as the movement recognizes that "good" food must provide a living wage to those who produce it, resistance to scaling up (thereby producing higher profit and wages) continues. And therein lies the conundrum. Looking at Fairfax et al. and Alkon together, with a dash of Heather Paxson's The Life of Cheese, we can better understand this tension and imagine the pros and cons of various approaches to its resolution.
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