Ah, there’s nothing quite as invigorating as a real-world story that results in an ultimate clash of ideals.

If you’ve yet to hear, the world’s largest food retailer is now openly promising to put a good deal more “local food” on its store shelves in the coming years, reopening the debate about the role or place of large corporations in the “local food” movement.

If you’ve seen Food, Inc. or found yourself on the receiving end of a “what’s evil about Whole Foods” rant , you are probably already pretty well-versed in this dilemma, which pits the money that large businesses can inject into local and/or organic farms against the often foggy larger purpose of the local food movement.

In the New York Times article, Linda Berlin at UVT sums up the major issue thusly…

“The local-food movement has been, certainly, about taste and quality of food, about providing good incomes for farmers, and also about other things that have to do with building smaller economies so we as a society aren’t dominated by the more industrial complexes,” she said. “This initiative doesn’t necessarily address that.”

If you listen to environmentalist Bill McKibben in his “Deep Economy“, the local food movement originally grew out of a deflated organic movement that felt a loss of purpose when larger corporations jumped onto and exploited that successful bandwagon.  Upon reflection by its 1970s founders, “organic” was too narrow – and reactionary honestly – a vision for what they were hoping to achieve.

“Local food” was seen as a way to tighten the qualities and mission of the movement, which, inadvertently or not, would make it less easily adaptable by larger corporations, who’s primary interest wasn’t in the local communities and relationships that were built around this most basic of human necessities, but the bottom-line.

However, like organic before it, local food’s current image in America has become vulnerable to being co-opted by major corporations, thanks to the natural fragmentation of the movement as it has gained in popularity across the continent.

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Michael Pollan, author and professor of journalism at UC Berkley, is often credited with igniting the local food movement with his 2004 book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Building off the work of early big agribusiness critics like Eric Schlosser, who penned Fast Food Nation three years earlier, Pollan used a tale of four different meals to expose the often-ignored realities of the post-1970s corporate food chain and offered his readership an alternative: local, organic food.

For many of you, this isn’t anything you haven’t heard before.  Heck, many of you are already arm-deep in compost, installing urban gardens in the forgotten corners of town, raising chickens, and luring farmer’s onto store shelves and weekly tables at markets, thanks to that little black book.

But Omnivore was published six years ago, and the food movement today struggles more with fusing the many thought-segments of the movement, than convincing enough average citizen that she should care more about the true “cost” of a corn dog.

Pollan’s follow-up books have dealt largely with transposing his Omnivore arguments into action items for the everyday eater.  ( “Eat Food. Not Too Much.  Mostly Plants.”)   In Defense of Food and Food Rules are smart publishing moves, giving the populace the diet books they crave (pun intended), but what of the movement itself?

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In case you couldn’t attend the Georgia Organics Conference keynote at Agnes Scott last month, here’s local food popularizer Michael Pollan’s speech in full.

h/t: Fresh Loaf

Dave over at InDecatur notes this quote from Agnes Scott’s Sustainability Director in an interview with the AJC…

But [this week] we’re going to announce a partnership for gardening and food with the city of Decatur, Decatur city schools, Georgia Organics and Oakhurst. What we’re going to do is find multiple locations to [develop] gardens and figure out who does the labor, how it’s funded and how the [produce] is distributed to the community.

The last time I asked the city about the “urban farms” initiative, they said it was still in the planning stages.  But this weekend is the Georgia Organics Conference at Agnes Scott, so this would be a good time to get it all out there.  Hopefully we’ll hear the full details soon!

Also, it looks like there’s still a chance to meet Michael Pollan even if you can’t attend the conference or the farm to table dinner.  Carl sent me a link a few days back from Slow Food Atlanta, which advertised “Cocktails in the Garden” with Pollan at the Oakhurst Community Garden on Friday, March 20th from 6:30-7p.  Tickets are $35 and can be purchased here.

With the publishing of Michael Pollan’s unintentional mission statement “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” in 2006, interest in the local food movement has exploded over the last 3 years.  Across the country, many different factions of farmers and eaters began to take a critical look at what they ate and where it came from.

But still in its infancy, the movement is endangered of being defined by its own extremes.  Stories about local food that float into popular culture often focus on the efforts of the wealthy, featuring recently retired corporate executives buying up old farm houses and producing goat’s milk cheese or local high-profile chefs taking up the food-to-table cause.   Outside of our own Atlanta, Serenbe sits as an upper-class community/utopia focused as much on food sustainability as on the principles of New Urbanism.

And while these high-profile efforts remain vital components of a larger picture, four-star restaurants and $4 heirlooms are often mistaken as the end goal of foodies everywhere.

Luckily, that’s not true.

The end goal is actually a lot more complicated and a lot less Utopian.  This month Mother Jones magazine details the struggle of locovores nationwide as they turn their attention away from their own habits and toward the habits of our agriculture policy.  While the first step was personally enlightening, the second is bound to be a seemingly endless slog through the mud of agribusiness subsidies.

And while this effort won’t provide as many great garden photo-ops or opportunities to sample great cuisine, it should never be forgotten that this is ultimately the more important and impactful goal of local food advocates everywhere.

Luckily, Pollan keeps reminding us of this.

Sometimes I feel kinda psychic.

These days whenever I come across an article by a food writer that invokes the word “rant” in the title OR apologizes for ranting in the first two sentences, I can  accurately predict that 9 times out of 10 the name “Michael Pollan” will show up within three paragraphs.

Thus was the case this morning, when my eyes fell upon food critic Cliff Bostock’s Year-End Rant in the pages of Creative Loafing’s Year in Review.

Since its publication in 2004, Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma and follow up, In Defense of Food, have really hit a nerve among those in the U.S. that have a passion for food.  Omnivore helped propel the slow/local food initiative, which today is exemplified by CSAs and in restaurants like Decatur’s Cakes and Ale, highlighting local, in season foods.

Why bring all this up (again)?

Well, a few weeks back, DMoholic Scott pointed out to me that Pollan is coming to Decatur on March 21st to speak at Agnes Scott as part of Georgia Organics 12th Annual Conference and Tradeshow.   The conference runs the 20th and the 21st and registration will begin in January, with preference given to GA Organics members.  So if you want to see Pollan, you might want to become a member if not already one.  Registration will open to the public in late-January if any openings remain.

Oh how I love this photo.  Take THAT corn subsidies!

In this week’s New York Times Magazine “Food Issue”, Michael Pollan writes an open letter to the next President of the United States restating his case for total reformation of the food industrial complex.

Anyone who has read his “Omnivore’s Dilemma” will notice that much of the article is little more than a summation of the book’s argument, slightly updated for 2008.  But for those that hear words like “slow food” and “organic” and think its an exclusively liberal, yuppie enterprise, I would challenge you to take a few minutes to read the 9-page article (yes, 9 pages) and then tell me that there’s not also quite a bit of conservative and libertarian thought embedded in the idea too.

At the local level, we already have a wide selection of CSAs (Community Supported Agriculture) delivering around town, an organic farmer’s market, the Oakhurst Community Garden, farm-to-table restaurants that promote local eating, and a city commission that is currently pursuing the idea of allowing residents to farm small parcels of city-owned land that aren’t really usable for anything else.

What else can we be doing to lessen our dependence on the oil-based food industry?

Here’s a question that popped into my mind…what’s CSD’s lunch menu look like these days?  Well, here’s the October menu for the elementary schools…corn dogs?