Locavores No Better Than Racists

Proud of yourself for going totally local for your Christmas dinner this year? Did you put on your white hood and go burn a cross afterward? Because the locavore movement is really just a thinly veiled cousin of tribalism and racism,” Ethan Epstein writes of the “profoundly misguided” eat-local cult. Ethics holds that the interest of all people be considered equally—and locavores, like racists, value one group’s interests over another’s.

“‘Locavorism’ encourages people to weigh the interests of their local farmers, cheesemakers, or ranchers over that of others,” Epstein writes for True/Slant after seemingly being harangued by his California neighbors to buy produce from a Monterey Bay farmer over some from an Iowan. “That is, solely because Farmer John happen to live near us, we should care more about him than Ma Kettle, who lives farther away. … This attitude hardly differs from tribalism and racism.”
(More locavore stories.)