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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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.

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?

Locavores and slow food proponents will really get a kick out of Watershed chef Scott Peacock’s write up about growing up with field peas in his native Alabama in this morning’s AJC.

Thanks to books like Pollen’s Omnivore’s Dilemma and Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, along with recent extensive coverage by the NY Times, the local/slow food movement has really taken off in the past year or so. It goes a step further than just simply eating “organic”, which some strict locavores will tell you has been co-oped by the “industrial food chain” (another basic principal of the movement), and encourages people to buy locally (to reduce the food’s carbon footprint and support the local economy) and eat “real food”…(as opposed to anything processed…80% of which is made mainly of corn and soybeans).

Pollen’s follow up to The Omnivore’s Dilemma, In Defense of Food, sums up the diet of a locavore this way “Eat Food. Not Too Much. Mostly Plants.”

If it sounds like I’ve signed on to this latest “fad”, I have. It ain’t an easy way to eat, especially for those of us stretched to find the time to dedicate to finding and cooking food, but its the first book I’ve read about “food” in a long time that made any sense and didn’t come off like it had an ulterior motive.

Essentially, it boils down to…eat real food, not processed. That means eating a little meat that eats grass preferably (not force-fed corn), and lots of plants (fruits/veggies), preferably organic and local. Not easy…but it tastes so much better…and is so much healthier.

Locally, the Decatur Organic Farmer’s Market is a great resource to grab these products. Also the DeKalb Farmer’s Market has grass-fed beef and sells a lot of organic produce (and is very good about telling you where it came from).

But still, I gotta tell you, even for a Decatur resident with two great resources, it ain’t all that easy. Any locavores out there with any additional tips?