Word of the Year: Locavore

Happy New Year to all. As usual, the media is engaged in its rhetoric of retrospection. Last night while taking care of the cat of a friend who is out of town, I turned on the TV and found out about the "hottest" fashion trends for 2007 and 2008: animal prints are really going to be the thing. Zebra, in particular, is the hottest new trend. In the midst of the vacuous infotainment reporting, I thought if you can't "beat 'em, join 'em." Hence, this posting on the "word of the year." Mark Meisner from SUNY-ESF told me a few weeks ago that the word of the year is "locavore." Of course, I had to rush out and do a little research since this trend is one that I find more interesting than the latest "animal print" statement. So here is the scoop.

The New Oxford American Dictionary announced that its word of the year for 2007 is “locavore.” Locavore, according to the Oxford University Press blog, is a term used to describe the popular practice of “using locally grown ingredients, taking advantage of seasonally available foodstuffs that can be bought and prepared without the need for extra preservatives.”

A locavore is a person, but a locavore is also part of a movement, which “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.”

Locavore came about in that laboratory of human innovation known as San Francisco. Four women coined the term in an effort to get local residents to eat a 100 mile diet comprised of local foods. Jessica Prentice, one of the four women, is actually credited with coming up with the word. You can read her story here.

http://blog.oup.com/2007/11/prentice/

I've been interested to hear people use the word locavore. I've heard some folks refer to themselves as such recently, so it does seem to be circulating. A few years ago, people referred to themselves as "foodies." Will they know switch to locavores?


Accompanying the discussion of Locavore is an accompanying literature of the locavore, punningly represented in the Columbia Journalism Review as “New Grub Street.” Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser are key representatives of this trend, although there are dozens of titles that play out the key inquiry question: "If we are what we eat, what does that mean? Where does our food come from?" Pollan puts it well when he notes in the _Omnivore's Dilemma_ that we have reached an interesting point in our history where we need an investigative journalist to unravel the mystery of our food supply.

I'm particularly interested in a comment he made in a recent interview where he noted that:

"I know as a writer I've learned that you can't pitch a story on agriculture to an editor in New York, but if you call it a story about food, suddenly people are interested."

I think he's right about that.

There's a BURNING interest right now in Food writing and local food. The recent flurry of responses on the WPA listserv about food writing was pretty striking.
--the rhapsodic food memoir (e.g., Ruth Reichl) or a variation of it such as the "Coming Home to Eat" kind of memoir (Nabhan, Kingsolver)
--the discursive cookbook that is half recipes, half proclamation about local food (Alice Waters, Lappe and others)
--the investigative journalist take on food (Pollan, McKibben, Schlosser, and others)
--academic books on the culture, politics, and ethics of food (Nestle and others)
--let's not forget the agrarian essayists and memoirists, nonfiction writers who get short-shrifted sometimes because they mention the FARM, the actual origin of all food. Books like the recent one by Scott Chaskey about his organic farm, though, have a market and the Canadian TV show "Manic Organic" suggest there is a whole market there for the "farmer guide" to show the public from whence their food comes....
I won't get into all the documentaries about the food supply and farming, but they are worth exploring in another posting.

I'm fascinated by the idea that "food" sells and it is the lens through which to sell writing about agriculture and farming. Pollan even goes so far as to suggest we retitle the "Farm Bill" the "Food Bill" so people will actually pay attention to this archance bit of legislation and figure out how many billions of dollars we are paying out for corn subsidies to keep the high fructose corn syrup industry running--the same industry that is an engine for our obesity epidemic.

The Oxford blog says locavore a word to "watch," and I agree. I think it's worth watching the nonfiction "literature of the locavore," which I'm doing in an article I'm writing right now.