| Chapter 1: | ADM, A Tomato Named Local Lucy, and Small Farms: The Ecology and Reemergence of Farmers’ Markets |
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The tabloid uses cartoon-character tomatoes named “Traveling Tom” and “Local Lucy” to represent the differences in food quality and impacts on the environment and local economies between tomatoes produced in the global agro-food system and tomatoes grown in a local agro-food system. Traveling Tom is a tomato bred to be picked green, transported an average of 1,500 miles, and gassed to give it a red color. Local Lucy is a locally grown tomato that tastes great and benefits a local farmer and, therefore, a local economy.
The tension between these examples highlights issues of power: how the environment will be exploited and who will control and benefit from its Resources and proceeds—or, more specifically, where farms will be, who will be the farmers, where people will buy food, and what sort of food people will eat. This situation lends itself to analysis using an ecological perspective used by anthropologists and other social scientists. Before moving more deeply into the issue of global and local food and agriculture systems, an overview of the research and theoretical framework for this book will be informative.
An Applied and Ecological Approach to Enhancing Farmers’ Markets
In his Malinowski Award Lecture to the Society for Applied Anthropology, Walter Goldschmidt (2001) reflected on Edward Tylor’s book, Primitive Culture (published in 1889), noting, “the sentence that closes the first textbook in anthropology reads as follows: ‘Anthropology is essentially a reformer’s science’ ” (p. 423).