Environmental Morality and Artisanal Pork: Local Food to Save the Planet

With the local food movement the adaptation of the secular religion of environmentalism to American culture took new directions. While it appealed to many environmental tropes and commitments—sustainability, community, local action for global ends—local food placed them in new contexts. Rather than direct sensory experience of wild nature, it spoke of the satisfactions of good food at home and in high-end restaurants. Instead of the morality of self-denial it stressed a refined sensual experience, meals at home or high-end restaurants, for ecosystems as a measure of morality substituted distance (usually defining “local” as within 100 miles), and replace environmentalism's network of biological relationships with ties formed within a (purified) market system. Its mixture of consumer experience and fashion with environmental morality showed one important way in which environmentalism, once the cause of dedicated nature lovers, adapted or was adapted by the wilder culture and how that affected its moral and ethical vision.