The Socio-Nature of Local Organic Food

Alison Hope Alkon

Department of Sociology, University of the Pacic, Stockton, CA, USA; aalkon@pacic.edu

Abstract: The concept of socio-nature asserts that social relations are inherently ecological and that ecological relations are inherently social. This paper examines how, and with what consequences, discourses and practices of support for local and organic food reect this idea. It argues that proponents of local organic agriculture view the food they promote as simultaneously social and the product of human labor. However, advocates understanding of the concept is partial and constrained by social privilege. It does not extend to industrial agriculture or paid farm labor. The literature on socio-nature coheres around the revelation that what is understood as natural is also social and vice versa. In contrast, this paper takes a new approach, examining socio-nature as a practice-shaping discourse already embedded in social life. Investigating the on-the-ground ideological work performed by the concept also allows for assessment of its political consequences. Keywords: socio-nature, food, farmers markets, inequality, organic, local

Among critical geographers and fellow travelers attempting to bridge the nature society dualism, the concept of socio-nature asserts that social relations are inherently ecological and that ecological relations are inherently social. Research demonstrates the inseparability of society and nature at sites ranging from genetically modied organisms (Harraway 1997, 2008) to urban gardens (Gandy 2006), amusement parks (Darling 2006; Davis 1997) and cities themselves (Heynen, Kaika and Swyngedouw 2006). The goal of these works is to examine nature and society as materially and discursively co-productive of one another, and to understand the historically situated processes through which this co-production occurs. Urban landscapes and human-created technologies are envisioned not as different from or outside of the natural world, but as formed (and reformed) by socio-environmental processes with material and ideological consequences. Other analyses offer deep readings of so-called natural places, analyzing them as socially produced. According to many of this perspectives adherents, what is at stake in thinking through socio-nature goes beyond the theoretical. Many deploying this concept view it as capable of animating a new kind of politics, arguing that the erroneously perceived separation between nature and society justies the exploitation of both people and planet. They argue not for the reunication of humans and nature pursued by many environmentalists, as present in that vision of reunication is an acceptance of present-day separation, but for a recognition that society and nature are always and already intractable as a starting point for political work (Castree and Braun 2001; Heynen, Kaika and Swyngedouw 2006). Understanding the natural and the social as co-produced, these theorists believe, can lead to a politics seeking
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to better human society and non-human nature (Castree and Braun 2001; Heynen, Kaika and Swyngedouw 2006). Food is in many ways the ultimate socio-nature. Eating is a primary human need, and while critical social scientists are often wary of claims that something is a part of a universal human nature, the need for food is certainly one of humanitys essential components. The species of plants and animals that humans eat are certainly living things, but most have been bred by humans to take their current form (see, for example, Whatmore and Thorne 1997). Corn, for example, did not exist prior to human cultivation, as it was domesticated from a wild grass called teosinte by indigenous peoples in the Americas (Braun 2009). With the exception of a few wild edibles, food species begin as what Neil Smith (1984) calls external nature, nonhuman species and landscapes before contact with humans. It is then shaped by human technologies, including agriculture and plant breeding in order to become unied with and sustain human bodies, which are, of course nature as well. In addition, the processes of food distribution, as well as food preferences and taboos, are deeply social phenomena (Douglas 2004; Forson and Counihan 2011). Because food is commonly regarded as socio-natural, and because its social and environmental dimensions are the subject of broad-ranging social movements, this paper explores how co-production is understood by actors working to create sustainable food systems. This question is theoretically important because it moves beyond a research agenda focused on the existence of socio-nature and calls for it to examine the political effects of culturally available narratives of co-production. More pragmatically, this approach allows for an empirical examination of the political consequences of socio-nature. Those seeking to reform and transform the food system are motivated by a variety of discourses, including animal rights, food safety, public health, food justice and food sovereignty. These divergent and overlapping discourses are often united in their opposition to industrial agriculture. This paper focuses on actors who focus on the need for local and organic food, both in the popular media and on the ground. The ideals associated with this goal include an eco-agrarian ethic in which support for small, organic farmers is essential to environmental sustainability, community coherence and resistance to corporate power. This local organic food discourse animates the writings (and the book sales) of authors such as Michael Pollan, Wendell Berry and Barbara Kingsolver, as well as the purchasing decisions of many customers of farmers markets and community-supported agriculture subscribers. My work unpacking the politics of socio-nature in efforts to promote local organic food was comprised of a deep reading of this popular literature, as well as participant observation and interviews with managers, vendors and customers at a farmers market dedicated to local organic food. It reveals that supporters of local organic food generally describe their preferred foods as both the product of nature and human labor. As such, they often attribute to it the potential to enact an array of ecological and social benets, including decreasing pollution, building healthy soil, creating vibrant rural and urban communities, and establishing local economic alternatives to corporate control. Politically, this brings environmental and social change together, and broadens the environmental movements perspective on what kind of landscapes are to be regarded as worthy of sustaining.
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However, the understanding of socio-nature evidenced by supporters of local organic food is both partial and privileged. Supporters construct local organic food as simultaneously natural and social but do not make the leap to seeing nature in processed foods or factory farms. This division allows supporters of local organic food to construct their own foodways as separate (and separable) from the corporate food regime, orienting them toward the creation of alternatives over a fuller and more critical engagement with industrial agriculture. In addition, supporters of local organic food evidence a limited recognition of the social, in that many of them fail to recognize the full scope of human labor associated with food production. While proponents of local organic food emphasize the labor of the farm owner, they recognize neither the contributions nor the struggles of the mostly migrant farmworkers whose labor is essential on the overwhelming majority of even small, family-owned farms. Eliding farmworker labor allows supporters to believe that worker rights and conditions are not relevant to their social and environmental goals. A fuller and deeper understanding of socio-nature might instead lead supporters of local organic food to pose broad questions about who is producing what kind of food (and through it, what kind of nature), for whose benet, and to whose disadvantage. Such a shift might help proponents to envision a transformation of the industrial food system into one that is both environmentally sustainable and socially just.

Unpacking Socio-Nature
Scholars invoke the term socio-nature to examine nature as a social product. Castree (2001:3) explains that nature is dened, delimited and even physically reconstituted by different societies, often in order to serve specic, and usually dominant, social interests. In other words, the social and the natural are seen to intertwine in ways that make their separationin either thought or practice impossible. In this vision, nature is neither stagnant, nor in equilibrium, but is actively produced and contested through human activity (Botkin 1990; ONeill 2001, Zimmerer 1996, 2000). Important work on this subject deconstructs the idea of wilderness, arguing that it is not separate from human social activity. The classic example here is William Cronons The Trouble with Wilderness, which described nature not as a pristine sanctuary where [lives] the last remnant of an untouched, endangered, but still transcendent nature, but rather the creation of very particular human cultures at very particular moments in human history (1995:69). Cronon seeks to understand how and why wilderness is understood differently in dissimilar historical periods.1 Extending this tradition, scholars have investigated how dominant conceptions of what nature is and should be, serve to legitimize and even naturalize particular land use and management practices (Peet and Watts 1996). Whiston Spirn (1996), for example, describes how understandings of nature as wilderness inuenced the material practices of those designing urban parks, and Gandy (2006) offers a related analysis of how the garden city movement drew upon these tropes to seek a synthesis between nature and the urban form. Additionally, Robbins (2007) traces the ways that dominant understandings of trees as ecologically benecial led to the planting
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of fast-growing but invasive and ecologically damaging species. In contrast to a popular discourse that regards nature as static and separate from human society, this research agenda demonstrates how socially constructed notions of the natural have various material and environmental effects. Other scholars take a discursive approach, analyzing how constructions of nature embed ideas about race, class and gender. Merchant (2003) has written prolically on the ways the wilderness has been constructed to maintain myths of gender difference and hierarchies. In the US, white people have historically posited racial differences as natural (Anderson 2001), and justied the marginalization of communities of color through a belief that they are closer to nature (see Ellingson 2001 on Native Americans and Glave and Stall 2006 on African Americans). In addition, colonizers commonly attributed agency to nature in the countries they conquered, erasing the work of indigenous cultures (Gandy 2006; Mann 2005). Each of these works interrogates environments and social orders commonly constructed as natural to demonstrate how social processes inuence both the ways we think about them and the material practices through which they are developed. Together they powerfully assert that seemingly natural landscapes and social orders are socially produced. Additional research further chips away at the nature/society divide by analyzing the presence of nature in urban areas. Some are aligned with Harveys (1996) commonly quoted statement that there is nothing unnatural about New York City. Jane Jacobs, for example, wrote that urban environments are as natural as colonies of prairie dogs or the beds of oysters (1961). Matthew Gandy (2002) describes how cities are not only akin to non-human nature, but constituted from it by tracing how raw materials were reconstituted to create a metropolitan nature in New York City. Other scholars look for nature in even less likely landscapes. Darling (2006) examines New Yorks Coney Island, not only demonstrating how the seemingly organic seaside has continuously been shaped by, for example, truckloads of sand imported to widen the beach, but also exploring how the amusement park showmen used animals, natural disasters, freaks, and human sexuality to package nature for a public that was simultaneously frightened of and intrigued by it. Davis (1997) similarly looks to Sea World to examine how its owners, Anheuser-Busch, produce a vision of nature that drives public consumption of the theme park experience. Price (2000) examines everyday artifacts, including pink amingos and The Nature Company, to show how consumerism mediates humans relationships with nonhuman species and landscapes. Each of these contributions demonstrates that a socially produced nature pervades all aspects of social life, both discursively and materially. Within each of these approaches, some researchers write in the tradition of urban political ecology, which looks to labor as the essential bridge between nature and society. Here, nature is incomprehensible except as mediated by labor (Bakker 2003; Heynen, Kaika and Swyngedouw 2006; Smith 1984; Swyngedouw 2006). Humans use labor to meet basic needs for food, warmth, shelter, etc but this process simultaneously produces new human needs. This process is social in that it is subject to norms and processes, but it is simultaneously governed by biophysical processes such as hunger and gravity. Importantly, though,
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socio-natural landscapes are unevenly produced, following various social hierarchies and creating landscapes capable of integrating wealth and poverty. The political ecology approach is particularly germane to this study because it sheds light on the way that farm owners labor becomes constructed as socio-natural while migrant farmworkers remain invisible. Overall, the research program associated with socio-nature regards it as a thing to be revealed, explaining how what is self-evidently natural is also social and vice versa. Working from both sides of the nature/society divide, this research pushes them towards each other. However, it also redraws the very binary it seeks to upturn, naturalizing either the natural or social while treating the other as something to be demonstrated through research. This paper moves beyond demonstrating the existence of socio-nature (that what is assumed to be natural is social and vice versa) to examine its consequences. It builds upon work by Heynen (2006) and Gandy (2002, 2006), both of which deal with the praxis of socio-nature in social movements, to begin a new research program examining socio-nature as a practiceshaping discourse already embedded in social life. Politically, it guides us to question the actions and strategies that are animated by this discourse. Food is an important standpoint from which to begin this agenda because unlike the wilderness or New York City, it is self-evidently natural and the product of human labor, and is tied to the broader processes of urban metabolization (Heynen 2006). It is generally sold as a commodity, valued and distributed according to social standards and unequally available based on hierarchies of race, class, gender, national status etc. But as it is consumed, food once again becomes nature in the form of human bodies. In his urban political ecology of hunger, Heynen (2006:139) writes that the production and distribution of food, or the lack thereof, are processes that bridge physiology and markets, or necessity for food and desire for particular foods. The physiological necessity of food is a component of Smiths (1984) external nature, but our desires for particular foods, the social relations that govern the labor of food production, and the means through which food is commodied and distributed, are all deeply social. As will be argued below, supporters of local organic agriculture evidence an understanding of co-production that orients their visions and strategies toward both environmental and social sustainability. However, this understanding of coproduction is partial and coheres around middle class labor and consumer desires. It fails to incorporate the kinds of labor and everyday food practices that are generally performed by low-income people and people of color. Their erroneous vision in which the inequalities and abuses that pervade the food system are separate from the local, organic alternatives they create is one reason that supporters of local organic food have been unable to imagine a means of food system transformation that highlights issues of labor and social justice (Allen 2004).

Research Approach
Because narratives of co-production are widely available with regard to food, and because my interest lies in understanding the political consequences of such narratives, this paper examines advocacy for local and organic food. Local and
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organic food activism tends to nd its most dedicated adherents among educated middle-class and afuent white people, often in major metropolitan areas and college towns. Its strategies are largely economic. Movement adherents encourage the creation of local and organic farms and regional distribution models such as farmers markets. Many are farmers themselves, or at least avid gardeners. To examine the narratives of co-production held by supporters of local and organic food, I draw from a discursive analysis of the popular literature promoting this goal. As someone who has been participating in and studying food movements for well over a decade, I am intimately familiar with this literature, and draw on it here in order to argue that my ethnographic and interview ndings are relevant not only to the case itself but broadly characterize efforts to promote local organic food. I spent 18 months as a participant-observer at the North Berkeley farmers market, a market that strongly reects the goals and discourses promoted in the popular literature. Managed by The Ecology Center, one of the citys veteran environmental organizations, its bylaws allow only organic produce grown within 150 miles of Berkeley.2 The North Berkeley farmers market is a lively place. Friends and neighbors stroll from booth to booth, greeting one another and inquiring about families and common friends. Many patrons, especially women and young children, sit on the grass and savor their purchases while listening to a rotating cadre of live musicians. The North Berkeley farmers market is also extremely protable for vendors. On the rare occasion that a space becomes available, applicants are evaluated on environmental considerations, including organic techniques and the miles the food will travel. I attended this market weekly between 2005 and 2007, and have continued to patronize it in the years since. I took on the roles of customer, volunteer and occasional vendor. During this research, I was able to get a feel for the everyday discourses through which buyers and sellers linked the practice of growing, selling, buying and eating food to broader social and environmental themes. I took copious notes, which I later expanded. I also conducted 18 in-depth interviews with customers, vendors and market managers. These interviews allowed me to more deeply understand the worldviews and desires that led individuals to farm, work at, or shop at this particular farmers market. All interviews were digitally audio recorded and transcribed. I also conducted a survey of 100 market customers, using a sample of convenience.3 This survey provided not only demographic information but also data on the values and priorities of a larger swath of market patrons. I then scrutinized these notes and interview transcripts. This search for patterns from within a wealth of available data allows the observations and interviews to give rise to the analysis, and minimizes the risk of researchers merely replicating their own perspectives (Glaser and Strauss 1967). The themes of environment/ecology, human community, and social reform were immediately evident in my data, and I used focused coding to search for patterns concerning how those I studied regarded these ideas (Emerson, Fretz and Shaw 1995). A wealthy city with an important countercultural history, Berkeley, California has helped to dene the landscape of US food movements (Belasco 1989). However, this does not make this farmers market unique, as similar markets can be found
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in other predominantly white, liberal, afuent and highly educated areas such as Ann Arbor Michigan, Madison, Wisconsin, or Union Square, Manhattan. Like many of these locales, Berkeley is also generally politically progressive and tends to favor environmental and social goods. Therefore, it seems likely that if a recognition of co-production were ever to give rise to political possibilities, we would see evidence of it in Berkeley.

Nature and Society at the Farmers Market

Local organic agriculture is an important standpoint from which to explore the political potential of socio-nature because farmers market vendors, managers and customers regularly regard their food as the inextricable product of nature and human labor. With regard to nature, the language through which farmers market participants describe local organic food, and the places where it is grown, very much resembles the way that advocates for wilderness preservation describe the places they seek to preserve.

Organic Food and Farms as Natural Environments

In the popular literature, the idea of organic farms as holding some of the goods we tend to associate with the wilderness is perhaps best captured in Wendell Berrys (1993) essay Conservation is good work. Conservation is generally something one does in the wilderness, and it has been the goal of many wilderness-oriented environmental organizations. But Berry does not seek to conserve the kind of wilderness landscapes in which humans do not live. Instead, he argues that through organic farming, he can conserve the wildness of his soil and the nature that surrounds him on his seventh-generation Kentucky farm. Nature, in local and organic farming, is not some external entity to be visited on vacations, but the stuff of everyday productive life. Proponents of organic farms also link them to the wilderness by describing them as spiritual places. John Muir wrote of the Hetch Hetchy Valley that no holier temple has ever been consecrated by the heart of man (1912:249). Vendors and customers at the North Berkeley farmers market offer similar invocations when describing their attraction to local organic food. For example, Judy LaRocca, a biodynamic grape farmer and winemaker, expressed that for her, farming is like a religion, something similar to Wicca. My husband is born Roman Catholic, and he might identify as a Christian, but hes really a farmer. Judy expressed great admiration for the work of Rudolf Steiner, who is often credited with founding biodynamic agriculture (though many of its techniques have long been used by people native to North America). These techniques include not only organic cultivation but also the use of fermented herbs and composts and a planting schedule guided by an astronomical calendar. Indeed, Steiner describes the practice of growing biodynamic food as reading the book of nature, coming to understand and provide for the plants various needs and desires through creativity and experiments. In this way of thinking, food not only embodies a vision of nature similar to preservationists description of the wilderness, but is the vehicle through which
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wildness becomes a part of the urban landscape. One North Berkeley farmers market customer, for example, describes a recent visit to a market farm. Its amazing to have a sense of where the food comes from because I can feel the energy of that space in the food she said. Through her consumption of the food, the nature energy of the farm she visited becomes a part of not only this customers worldview but her physical being. Alice Waters, a celebrity chef who was one of the early proponents of local organic ingredients in gourmet food echoes this sentiment when she writes that if we dont care about food, then the environment will always be something outside of ourselves. And yet the environment can be something that actually affects you in the most intimateand literally visceralway. It can be something that actually gets inside you and gets digested (2005). Food becomes the vehicle through which the sense of spiritual connection to the environment described by Judy in the preceding paragraph becomes the stuff of everyday life for urban people. Wilderness preservationists argue for environmental protection on the basis of spiritual connection. Beginning in the 1960s, ecologists began to argue in favor of biodiversity. North Berkeley market farmers emphasize agricultural biodiversity, further connecting their productive landscapes to the wilderness ideal that has inspired many environmentalists. Most market farmers produce an array of crops aiming to mimic the vast genetic diversity found in nature. For example, the website of Riverdog Farm, which grows a wide variety of produce, emphasizes biodiversity as a strategy to avoid reliance on pesticides, which negatively affect the soil, water and workers who produce the food. By advocating for the planting of a wide array of crops, and several varieties of the same crop, organic farmers emphasize that their food is subject to the same bio-physical processes as all other lifeforms, and work to give it the best chance of survival. Vandana Shiva, a farmer, activist and writer commonly read by supporters of local organic food, argues that agricultural biodiversity is an important opposition to the privatization of genetic material under industrial agriculture.

The Hard Work of Farmers

Each of the above examples describes how market farmers and customers construct the naturalness of the food that they promote. But for their discourse to be one of socio-nature, they must also emphasize at least some of the human labor that makes this food possible.4 The most common trope through which the human labor component is emphasized are expressions of regard for the hard work that farmers must undertake in order to produce food. For example, one afternoon, I overheard the following exchange between a farmer and customer. The customer had picked out three heads of baby gem lettuce from among the farmers brightly colored choices.
Thats two, said the farmer, about to give him a price. No, three, replied the customer. Best policy, the farmer said with a smile. No sense gypping you, exclaimed the customer.5 You guys are like the hardest workers. No one works harder than farmers.

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Discussions of farmers hard work are common among supporters of local organic food, and are sometimes even evoked as a defense against criticism (as in, you shouldnt be so critical of farmers; they work so hard). This emphasis on farmers hard work is represented in the popular literature by David Masumoto, a third-generation peach farmer and author of several books. Masumoto subtitled a recent talk at Oregon State Universitys small farm conference Why We Farmers Work So Hard. His refrain, there are no sidewalks on a farm, indicated not only that farming was difcult, but that non-farmers should have a special respect for those who do this work. Supporters of local organic food construct it as socio-natural by emphasizing its connection to the non-human environment while simultaneously underscoring the human labor necessary to food production. Of course, it is the labor of the farmer or farm family that is so highly regarded and that counts in the construction of socio-nature evidenced by supporters of local organic food. The invisibility of other kinds of labor, particularly that of the migrant workers who do the bulk of the cultivation even on small family farms, will be taken up in the next section on the limits of socio-nature.

Political Consequences of Socio-Nature

In sum, supporters of local organic food evidence a broad understanding of socionature that animates politics wedding the improved ecological health (constructed through ecological science and the wilderness aesthetic) to the betterment of human society. The place to be preserved is not a place devoid of human life, but a farm in which humans and non-human species are engaged in a complex socio-natural process that results in the production of human sustenance. And this process, according to advocates of local organic food such as those who populate the North Berkeley farmers market, also helps to create landscapes that better support nonhuman life, from the micro-organisms more common to soil untreated with chemical pesticides to the greater number of sh found in rivers that do not collect runoff from pesticide-ridden elds. Further, according to this logic, preserving the farm also helps to preserve the city. Farmers markets provide access to food that supporters believe is better for human health, tying their own wellbeing to that of non-human landscapes and organisms. Farmers markets are also commonly viewed as a social good, a vibrant public place where social connections can be forged and a way to maintain the economic life of the local community. This is an important departure from an environmental movement focused largely on places in which humans do not live (or, as in the case of Native people who once inhabited protected lands, were removed from). Indeed, the ecological aspects of the local organic food activism are aimed at places where people live, work and play, which is precisely the denitional shift called for by the environmental justice movement.

The Limits of Socio-Nature Among Supporters of Local Organic Food

Recognition of society and nature as co-productive of local and organic food both pervades and shapes much food activism. This recognition, however, is partial and limited by the movements general privilege.
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Industrial Agriculture Just Isnt Natural

First, advocates such as those populating the North Berkeley farmers market recognize the food they desire and promote as simultaneously social and natural. But the fruits of industrial agriculture are described not only as immoral or exploitative, but as somehow unnatural. For example, one evening at the farmers market, I overheard the following conversation between two customers in front of the homemade pasta stand:
Ooh, smoked salmon ravioli, said a man to the woman beside him, gazing longingly at the pasta displayed in front of him. Its Atlantic smoked salmon, she responded warily. His mood immediately changed from desire to anger. Atlantic Salmon is all farmed and really bad for the environment, he said to the woman working. The only salmon thats any good from an environmental standpoint is Alaskan. Its all wild. Its like real sh! And they have good governmental protection in Alaska so its good to support that. In the Atlantic, though, its all farmed. They keep the salmon in cages in one place, which has a disastrous effect on that bit of ocean, and then move the cage to another. Its like slash and burn!

It is certainly consistent with a socio-nature approach to evaluate the ecological effects of various practices. But in referring to wild-caught sh as real sh, this customer implies that farmed sh are something other than natural. Again, the nature/society binary is redrawn with wild sh being a part of nature, and not at all social, and farmed sh cast as socially produced and not at all natural. This comment also resembles the way that farmers market participants and other supporters of local organic agriculture construct genetically modied foods as nonnatural. For example, the opening sentence in The GMO experiment, a short video created by Greenpeace, describes genetically engineered crops as a worldwide experiment on people, animals and nature. Casting the creation of these crops as an experiment on nature certainly precludes the possibility that such crops include nature, even as a hybrid creation of nature and technology. In addition, one of the most compelling framings of GMOs uses the term frankenfoods. This is, of course, a reference to Mary Shellys novel in which the fusion of human remains and techno-science create a monster. This storys warning against human intervention into natural processes of life and death is in many ways precisely the opposite of the concept of socio-nature, in that not only does it view society and nature as separate, but regards this separation as both moral and necessary. Indeed, for many supporters of local organic food, it is not only farmed sh and GMOs that are constructed as entirely socially produced, but industrial agriculture more generally. The blogger at Aisle of Confusion, who names Eric Schlosser and Michael Pollan as her greatest inuences, writes that, There is nothing natural, acceptable, or necessary about modern industrial agriculture. Similarly, Francis Thickes book, A New Vision for Iowa Food and Agriculture, contains a chapter called How industrial agriculture differs from a natural ecology. This chapter sets out the two paradigms, describing the former as a monoculture, dependent on herbicides, pesticides, fertilizers and fossil fuel that leads to the depletion of ecological capital and the leakage of pollutants. Natural ecology, however, is characterized by biodiversity, energy efciency, self-renewal, resilience and the
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recycling of nutrients. In this binary, food is either natural or industrial, but never coproduced. While these are not the best known authors writing about local organic food, the natural/industrial binary they construct is common to advocates of local organic food. Indeed, it resonates with Michael Pollans directive to eat food rather than the edible food-like substances produced by industrial agriculture (2008). Advocates of local organic food certainly describe it in terms that reect an understanding of society and nature as co-produced. The food and the farms in which it is grown are depicted both as natural and as the product of human labor. Industrial agriculture, however, is depicted as somehow contrary to nature, despite the fact that it is composed of plants, soils, water, etc and produces the goods that become the stuff of human bodies. This partial understanding of co-production limits the political possibilities and strategies chosen by supporters of local organic food. By contrasting their preferred foods with an unnatural industrial agricultural system, advocates create a romantic vision that infuses much of their literature and everyday discourses. While this romanticism does not negate their recognition that a landscape (in this case, local organic farms) can be both natural and socially produced, it simultaneously leads to a more utopian politics in which particular discourses and actions are presupposed by a small subset of relatively privileged people and legitimized through their claim to natural-ness. This occurs because the idealized practices are envisioned not as opposed to, but as removed (and removable) from, the broader agricultural system. Such an approach necessarily yields a politics of conversion through which these discourses and practices are brought to others, who are then judged based on their desire to enroll (Childs 2003; DuPuis and Goodman 2005; Guthman 2008).

Farmers Arent the Only Ones Working

The supporters of local organic agriculture demonstrate an incomplete understanding and valuation of a second element of socio-nature, namely labor. For political ecologists, labor is the primary way to understand the co-production of nature and society. While supporters of local organic food understand that both nature and the labor of the farmer are necessary for the food they prefer, they simultaneously ignore other necessary labor. Farmworkers are largely physically and discursively absent from advocacy for local organic food. Thus their labor, and its contribution transforming external nature into edible socio-nature, plays no role in supporters understanding of co-production. The predominantly immigrant, Latino/a workforce who cultivate the bulk of US crops are rarely present in farmers markets like North Berkeley, though many farms do hire individuals, predominantly white and in or recently out of college, to staff their farmers market stands. The most progressive participants in the North Berkeley farmers market attempt to mark this absence. For example, when asked to describe why the market is important, one manager acknowledged labor as well as environmental issues:
The Ecology Center tends to put environmental goals together with social goals. At the same time as saying sustainable agriculture is a really important part of preserving our planet, [we also emphasize] sustainable employment practices. A lot of farms use really cheap labor and the people who are working on the farms live in horrible circumstances.

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She went on to describe several farms featured in the Berkeley farmers markets that use unionized labor, rely solely on the labor of farm owners, or who have nanced the purchase of land by their former farmworkers.6 The latter farm had also participated in the 2007 May Day immigrant rights protests, supporting their workers decision to strike. Rather than canceling that days market, white farm owners and interns arrived with one small table full of produce and a statement claiming that this meager amount was what they were able to accomplish without the help of their Latino/a workers. They also wrote an article in their community-sponsored agriculture newsletter describing the situation. Each of these were attempts to represent the labor of farmworkers within the food system and therefore point towards the potential for a broader understanding of co-production than generally characterizes adherents discourses and practices. However, while individual farm owners and market managers see labor as essential to the markets socio-environmental goals, this is not an integral part of the farmers market mission or of the wider local organic food discourse. At the farmers market, participating farms are screened for their environmental credentials (organic certication, local, etc) and ownership structures (family or cooperatively owned). While the Berkeley farmers market guidelines also mention farm labor practices, that criterion is much less often applied. In addition, the previously described exemplary farms are not given preference within the farmers market. Indeed one evening, a woman approached the managers table to ask why Swanton Berry Farm, a vendor at the Saturday farmers market and the rst organic farm in the US to sign a contract with the United Farm Workers (UFW), was not present on Thursdays. Limited spots at the small Thursday market were offered on a rst-come, rst-serve basis, explained another market manager. We totally support the UFW. Its just that they didnt apply.7 Despite managers individual support for this farms exceptional labor practices, no institutional effort was made to extend them this opportunity. Additionally, The Ecology Center does nothing to encourage other market farms to follow this example. The Ecology Center and other organizations sponsoring farmers markets have the ability to advocate for the recognition of farm labor in their policies and advertising discourses, but they do so in only the most limited ways. Farmworker labor, therefore, remains outside the notion of co-production envisioned by supporters of local organic food in sites such as the North Berkeley farmers market. Moreover, there are several ways in which the literature describing local and organic food serves to discursively erase the presence of this group from even the image of co-production that farmers markets construct. Supporters commonly stated directive to build community with the people who grow your food emphasizes connections between farmers and consumers, but ignores the laborers performing much of the actual cultivation. Indeed, the reverence for small, family farms often displayed by supporters of local organic food mistakenly convinces many farmers market customers that market farmers do not employ non-family labor when nearly all of them do. In addition, while all of the food at the North Berkeley farmers market is local, those who cultivate it are not. When supporters of local organic food emphasize geographic proximity, it obscures the difcult, costly and sometimes even deadly journeys of those who travel thousands of miles in order
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to produce the food found there (Alkon and McCullen 2011). The farmers market clearly embraces an understanding of co-production because it views local, organic food as the product of both nature and human labor. But the labor it regards is limited to that of the farm owner. Despite the necessity of their labor, farmworkers are not treated as an essential component of the socio-natural system as understood by supporters of local organic food.

Co-Production and its Consequences

The goal of this article has been to examine to what extent, and with what effect, those working to promote local and organic food conceptualize society and nature as co-produced. To date, the literature on socio-nature largely coheres around the revelation of co-production, in which what is commonly assumed to be natural is demonstrated to also be social and vice versa. This paper adds an additional layer to this important foundation by exploring how co-production is understood by actors in everyday life. In other words, it moves theorists beyond demonstrating the existence of socio-nature and towards investigating what is at stake in its recognition. This brings us to the question of assessing the consequences of socio-nature in shaping the worldview that guides political action. Scholars advocating for a socionature approach have often argued that it might serve to foster a new kind of environmental politics that is less romanticized and more attuned to dialectics and the dynamics of human labor. Because food is one of the more obvious examples in which nature and human labor are inextricable, and because food is currently the subject of vital social movements, it comprises an important standpoint from which to examine the politics of socio-nature on the ground. Based on my ethnographic and interview data from the North Berkeley farmers market, as well as the wider sustainable agriculture literature, I argue that the movement has an important, yet limited, understanding of co-production. Supporters tend to portray local organic food as co-produced by society and nature. Because they see local organic food as nature, supporters advocate for it through a discourse that borrows heavily from the language through which environmentalists advocate for the preservation of wilderness, particularly themes of beauty and biodiversity. And yet, by simultaneously emphasizing the hard work required by farmers to produce food, movement supporters recognize local organic food as a product not only of nature but of human labor. This understanding of co-production fosters the creation of a politics that weds improved ecological health to the betterment of human society. It brings the place to be preserved out of the wilderness and into the farms, homes and bodies where human life takes place. This spatial shift facilitates a stronger connection between the environmental politics of various food movements and advocacy for environmental justice that prioritizes the places where ecological processes are more immediately intertwined with human health disparities. However, the politics of socio-nature embraced by supporters of local organic food is both partial and privileged. First, awareness of co-production is limited to local and organic food and farming. Supporters continue to regard industrial agriculture not only as ecologically and socially damaging, but as unnatural. This
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discursive move fosters a romantic vision of local organic food and a utopian politics that naturalizes one set of socio-natural relations as right and legitimate rather than a more open discussion of what kinds of agro-ecological landscapes should be preserved and why. This partiality is deeply entangled with the movements general social privilege, which allows activists to (attempt to) remove themselves from an unnatural food system and shop their way in to an alternative (Szasz 2007). The sustainable agriculture movements understanding of their preferred foods as socio-natural while other food is merely industrial parallels its strategy of creating alternatives rather than transforming the food system entirely. Both are about constructing and creating something pure and removed from a larger system that is unnatural and destructive. This carving out of utopian niches stands in contrast to a potential alternative strategy that might emphasize continuities between industrial and alternative food systems in order to think about large-scale transformation. By emphasizing continuities between industrial and local organic food systems, activists might become convinced that the only way to truly have local and organic food is to transform the food system writ large. The notion that local organic food is natural, and that industrially produced food is not, certainly has widespread appeal, particularly among the predominantly afuent, white subjects who are generally hailed by the romantic discourses surrounding local and organic food (Alkon and McCullen 2010; Guthman 2008; Robbins 2007). But it seems possible that, rather than turning away from local organic food, a discourse that relied less on questions of what is or is not natural might instead turn more explicitly to issues of ecological consequences and of power. It may be no more natural to pollute a river than to protect it, but protection remains benecial to sh, soils and humans. Instead of discussing what is or is not natural, supporters of local organic food might turn directly to questions of who is harmed by, and who benets from, what kinds of agriculture. This is precisely the shift called for by many scholars of socio-nature, who argue that the point is not to merely understand coproduction but to highlight the need to make political and moral judgments about which landscapes we seek to understand and protect and how we will go about doing so (Castree and Braun 1998; Cronon 1995, Haraway 1997). The other arena in which the partiality and privilege that characterizes local organic foods relationship to socio-nature is most evident is that of farm labor. Supporters of local organic food incorporate the labor of farmers into their understanding of co-production, which orients their environmental sensibilities toward populated landscapes and human communities. However, many of the discourses and practices held by supporters of local organic food make the contributions of farmworkers, and the tremendous struggles they face, even more invisible than they are in industrial agriculture. Again because of the privileged position generally held by supporters of local organic food, they emphasize those aspects of socio-nature that best reect their middle-class sensibilities and desires. Recognizing that food is co-produced does not automatically orient them towards a deeper investigation of the labor involved, which would reveal a far less utopian vision of local organic agriculture. However, a food movement that advocated for more equitable labor relations might replace the utopian quest for alternatives with a more direct analysis of power. Such a move would require a reexive discussion of
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what kind of agricultural landscapes should be produced, by whom, and for whose benet. One could imagine answers to these questions that diverge widely from the above-described responses, particularly on issues of pesticide drift and its health consequences (Harrison 2011). Scholars of socio-nature have critiqued romanticized visions of the wilderness as serving to justify the brutality of industrialization (Gregory 2001). Supporters of local organic food participate in a parallel romanticism of local organic farms and farmers, but to a very different political end, namely to promote farming practices believed to be less harmful to plants, animals, soils and humans. Despite these more progressive political ends, this romanticism remains problematic in that it presents a particular idealized conception of socio-nature. It legitimizes the labor of the farmer, literally naturalizing it by casting it as inseparable from the natural processes that yield food production, while erasing that of the farm laborer. Better attention to the role of labor might also help to remove some of the romanticism from the rhetoric that tends to characterize support for local organic food. The harsh conditions faced by farmworkers, even on organic farms selling locally, are certainly at odds with this romantic view. But highlighting these experiences might help supporters of local and organic agriculture to create the kind of discursive reexivity in which multiple constituencies can discuss the kind of nature and society we wish to promote and protect, rather than attempting to enroll others in a pre-formed vision. With regard to intellectual conceptualizations of socio-nature, the discourses held by supporters of local organic food illuminate the ambiguous nature of the social. In some cases, such as Cronons writing, social refers to the mere presence of humans and to a need to understand human practices. But for many political ecologists, social refers more specically to the processes of human labor and to the ways that uneven power relationships are institutionalized under capitalism, producing unequal access to both material and discursive dimensions of nature. In other words, social can either mean human, or can be more specic to issues of power, exploitation and inequality. This distinction is reminiscent of debates around the social dimension of sustainability, which is sometimes dened as thinking broadly about human society, but other times dened more specically as accounting for inequalities. It also brings to mind Jill Harrisons (2011) insights concerning the ideal of justice. Harrison argues that constituencies involved in the management of pesticides dene justice in utilitarian terms (doing the most good for the most people), libertarian terms (best pursued through the market) and communitarian terms (located in local communities). None of these denitions prepare their constituencies to account for the disproportionate effects of pesticide drift and its tremendous health consequences on low-income Latino/a immigrant workers and their families and communities. Harrisons argument that only a notion of justice that explicitly addresses structural inequalities seems to provide some direction for scholars concerned with the politics of socio-nature. Like justice, social may be too ambivalent a lens to shape a politics of socio-nature. A stronger and more potentially transformative politics needs to be unequivocal in its assertion that nature is inseparable from inequalities of race, class, gender, national status, etc and from the capitalist processes that are so foundational to their (re)production. By this standard, support for local organic food does not t the bill.
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But there are strands of food activism that approach this goal, and that are beginning to gain greater inuence. Those organizing under the banner of food justice often focus on the ways that inequalities both emerge from and shape industrial and alternative food systems. However, while they tend to be more compassionate toward those who rely on industrial foods, food justice activists tend to follow the local organic food movements lead in their emphasis on alternative forms of production and consumption. Their goal is to create racially specic narratives and alternative food systems that might inspire communities of color to embrace more natural foods. The distinction between good food and industrial food remains just as strong. More broad in its stated goals is the food sovereignty movement, which participates in direct action protests against neoliberal institutions such as the World Bank and IMF. Efforts to translate this agenda from its roots in the international peasant movement to urban and US contexts, however, have seen a weakening of its most radical goals (though the newly formed US Food Sovereignty Alliance offers new promise). And yet the emergence of these threads of food activism, and their growing inuence on food movements, offers a hopeful direction for a food politics whose embrace of socio-nature is neither privileged nor partial. This movement might offer a vision in which all nature and all human labor is inextricable, and in which the conditions under which both exist can be improved through broad social transformation.

Endnotes
1 2

Light (1995) offers a similar analysis of romantic and classical views of nature. The exception is a southern California date farmer, who delivers his dried products in bulk to a San Francisco-based employee. It is this employee who brings the fruit to the farmers market each week. 3 A sample of convenience simply indicates that the researcher attempted to stop shoppers as they passed by her at the market, and surveyed those who agreed to participate. While these ndings are not generalizable in the way a random sample would be, her demographic data were overwhelming, and t with her ethnographic impressions concerning the afuent, white character of the North Berkeley farmers market. 4 They are, of course, ignoring immigrant laborers who fuel California Agriculture. This point will be taken up later in the article. 5 Cultural prohibitions against ethnic slurs are so strong in Berkeley that we suspect the customer is unaware that gyp is a derogatory insinuation associating Roma peoples, demeaningly called gypsies, with theft. Ignorance of this term reects white privilege and the invisibility of people of color, but not the individual-level racism generally associated with more common ethnic slurs. 6 Market managers tended to answer my questions in terms of all three of the Berkeley farmers markets rather than just North Berkeley. The farm that is unionized and the farm that nanced land for their former employees do not sell on Thursdays, but at the larger Tuesday and Saturday markets that are held at the other locations. 7 This has been contested by a Swanton Berry employee.

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