>
> I think the idea that our class location (place in the production and
> distribution process if you like) is tending to less and less place bounds
> on our consumption choices, real or otherwise. And in the US these types
> of
> distinction were always less important (having to do with our lack or
> diminished aristocratic heritage among other reasons).
>
> I don't know where you live, Toronto?, but in Michigan, California, North
Carolina, Massachusetts, and metro-NY where I've spent the last thirty five
years of my life class places staggering bounds on peoples' consumption
choices - even as the "choices" proliferate insanely. Take Michigan, the
people of the Upper Peninsula and Upper Lower Michigan may have way more
choice now that they shop at mega-WalMarts instead of - or, more likely, in
addition to their shopping at - tiny local markets, but they (my students)
still have no idea about their own food traditions much less the kinds of
options available in Ann Arbor or the unimaginable world of Chicago,
Toronto, New York, Boston, San Francisco, etc. Sure, there are more
Starbucks' and Biggbys' (the local omnipresent coffee chain) but they hardly
sell any "coffee" - just about everything that goes out the door is a
Pumpkin-spiced, caramel-swirled, whipped-cream-smothered nightmare, to go
with that icing-dripping, muffin top of hellish proportions.
Sure they can get "organic" food at the supermarket and there are more likely to be new-style farmer's markets around - fostered by the MSU Ag Experiment Station and Cooperative Extension at the behest of the Farm Bureau in the name of agritourism and rural development, but they way they eat is deeply constrained to the familiar, the fast and the prepared.
Now the people of Lansing and East Lansing, the capital and the "city" w/ the No.2 university - the Land-Grant/Ag School have a whopping two, non-chain, "high" end restaurants... 44,000 undergrads, an associated number of faculty and staff, all those lawyers, lobbyist and legislative professionals and two damned restaurants (neither of which compares to the top fifteen in Ann Arbor, where ~38000 students attend the No.1 university, where houses are twice as expensive, etc. Professional folks here in East/Lansing eat across a wider pallet than the generally much lower income, and lower SES, populations to the north but it is still primarily wider relative to "ethnic" fast foods - from burritos to sushi to ethiopian and cheeses. Outside of a very few non-locals the idea of preparing "exotic" or legacy vegetables remains too weird for words. In the main, my students - at MSU and CMU - dislike Ann Arbor not only because of its snobbishness but also because consumption there isn't "normal" - jeez, who'd ever want to go see and art of foreign film? - and they feel that the two are correlated.
Hell, after working in NYC, I went to grad school in Santa Cruz and spent a great bit of time in San Francisco, Palo Alto and Berkeley... compare shopping and eateries in those places to the ones in San Jose, Sacramento, Modesto, Redding, and then Watsonville.
> PS Wouldn't the fact that some here probably know alot about food
> consumption but were under the false assumption that most US farms were
> capitalist (wage labour dependent) actually make my point of the dubious
> nature of the shifting focus from production to consumption of food? Isn't
> the whole 'food movement', for all of its shortcomings and problems, about
> attempting to reconnect people with the source, that is the production and
> distribution, of their food? Why are people hostile to this?
>
Who the heck are you pointing at here?
Me, I'm basing my comments - and I know a significant number of folks here who were involved in - the fifteen years of exchanges (circa 1970-1985) on these issues associate with what was called the modes of production debate, then the political economy of agriculture and the rise of agrifood studies. You seem to be holding on to a kind of romantic neo-Weberian farmers-as-precapitalist, or at least Smithian, remnants of independent family-labor-based "farming", that engages in ethnic- and sex/gender-intensive forms of super self-exploitation in the face of falling prices due to overproduction based on the contradiction between individual farm strategies of increasing gross production to deal with net declines in income and the exacerbation of overproduction, all in order to maintain cultural commitments to "the land" and "community"...
Most US "farms" - and here I gotta figure you're willing to accept that the vast majority of the units fed by irrgation across the southwest and up and down the Pacific coast states ARE capitalist, as are many of the thousands-of-acres-large grain- and fiber-producing units across the great plains and cotton-producing south, as are the massive vegetable, fruit and cotton producing units of the southeast - are dependent on pluriactive incomes off farm... they are not dependent on hiring wage laborers, they are dependent on hiring segments of themselves and their workdays out as wage labor... particularly those not hiring farm managers to manage production on their land.
But even if you reject the overweaning market power of the larger producers, of capital goods producers, of fertilizer/pesticide/seed companies, of processors and retailers particularly in a world where global markets tend to set prices - all of whom set prices for inputs, establish production regimes for their seeds, and enforce very specific grades, standards and certification practices for the commodities produced, is your sense really that the majority of the people - in North America - involved in consuming the products of "the food movement" are really interested in reconnecting with the production and sources of their food? Do you really think the majority people who eat at Chez Panisse really care about Alice Waters' goals? Are the politics and dreams of Wendell Berry and Michael Polan actually representative of the intentions of the vast majority of organic consumers, of slow food, of suburban and rich urban farmers markets.
I don't know how things are where you are but all the scholarship I know on organics, agroecoloty and community supported agriculture indicates that the movement began with the kind of synthetic dreams you write of but that organics got taken over by rent-seeking conventional producers (think California Certified Organic Farmers) and/or monopoly-seeking organics (think Horizon), etc. and, since the vast majority of the originators had no political economic critique - beyond back-to-the-land Berry- and Rodale-ian populism (my parents' friends) or maybe cooperative-ism - they were largely/completely unprepared for this (just like the 1970s Gore-ian environmental movement was completely shocked and unprepared for the neoliberal reaction) .
In terms of CSA's the dream was, usually, not to market monetary shares but to have subscribers work the land for the share of the food... the problem was that most people interested in subscribing to a farm (like my parents did to Walnut Acres in the 1970s) are too busy to and not interested in working someone's land - which is difficult, back-breaking and dirty work (and way less fun than smashing bottles, crushing cans and flinging newspapers like we did as kid "volunteers" at my mom and dad's recycling center in the mid-70s before the town took it over)... in Michigan, California and upstate NY the few CSAs that began with work-based shares have all-but universally failed or gone over to monetary subscriptions and nothing but. There has been an explosion of farmer's markets but the most successful are in places like Okemos, MI, where the clientele shops of status, health and taste reasons - the reason most folks eat and high-end "slow food" restaurants - so they can "connect" to the hippie, earthy, Mennonite and/or conventional farmers (but not all that very much). The one that's struggling is the older one, in Lansing, where traditional, conventional and seriously-aging farmers sell their goods... 'cuz Lansing doesn't have the population of class-measured-by-income or class-measured-by-status/SES folks who give a hoot about "authentic" farm produce and connecting to it.
Ours is no longer Jeffersonian populist nation - "we" don't care about rural America much at all, and we have never had either the aristocratic food culture of Europe OR the agroecological terroir-ist national identity. Sure slow-, alt-, and organic-food folks say this is what they are about establishing but slow-, alt- and organic-food consumers consume slow-, alt- and organic-food primarily for reasons of personal health and social status and only secondariy or tertiarily for agropopulist connections... it is way more of Andy Szasz's politics of personal "inverted quarantine" than the social agroecological politics of collective socionatural connection.