In many parts of the world, food reformers have been working for the past two or more decades toward what one early and influential set of authors (Kloppenburg et al. 1996) termed ‘coming in to the foodshed’ – that is, trying to create viable local and regional alternatives to the geographically extensive, highly consolidated, industrialised, and commoditised food supply chains that became the norm in most industrialised places over the course of the twentieth century. In its most general sense, ‘foodshed’ refers to the geographic area from which a particular population receives its food; given the scale of industrial food production and marketing, the foodshed for almost any given place now encompasses much of the globe. But the phrase ‘coming in to the foodshed’ – or what Wes Jackson has called ‘becoming native to this place’ (1994) – implies something much more specific and value-laden. This approach to ‘rebuilding the foodshed’ (Ackerman-Leist 2013) is grounded in ideals of emplacedness, along with practices that foster socioecological regenerativity and mutuality among human and non-human species and between living beings and the landscapes they inhabit – literally, their habitats. This approach draws on ideas from agrarianism, agroecology, ecospirituality and ecofeminism, post-colonialism, and environmentalism, among other strands of thought and activism. It takes form in projects and networks of exchange and association under terms like ‘food justice’ (Alkon & Agyeman 201l; Alkon & Guthman 2017), ‘civic agriculture’ (DeLind 2002; Lyson 2004), ‘food sovereignty,’ and ‘solidary economics’ (Holt-Giménez 2011). It is an important element of what is often referred to as ‘the food movement,’ which food writer Michael Pollan has characterised as a ‘big lumpy tent’ crowded with sometimes contradictory projects (Pollan 2010). But the task of coming in to the foodshed also frequently stands as a critique of the more mainstream elements of the food movement (Guthman 2007; Saraiya 2016; Genzlinger 2017). It overlaps with efforts to modify existing structures and practices, but in general envisions a much more radical rebuilding and reconceptualisation of society, economy, and ecology, with food-related changes as an entry point rather than an end in themselves.1
Attempts to come in to the foodshed are inherently in dialogue, and sometimes in tension, with the memoryscapes of particular places, understood as the layers of meaning that have accrued within a physical environment over time. Memoryscapes are shaped by and in turn shape the meanings that inhabitants and outsiders attach to a given place, creating both opportunities and limitations for the kind of deep re-envisioning that many neo-agrarians are working toward. Although food reformers are inherently focused on the future, they are also increasingly aware of the need to address legacies of past practices and inequities, including various forms of soil degradation and deep-rooted, often gendered, classed, and racialised patterns of displacement and exploitation. Some of those reconsiderations of the past take place on larger-than-local scales; for example, class action lawsuits in the United States over discrimination by federal agricultural officials against farmers of colour have been national in scope (Cowan & Feder n.d.). But given the inescapable linkage of food production with actual places and resources, even the broadest reform efforts inevitably come down to earth somewhere, creating inherent linkages with specific, emplaced histories and locations. As they do so, they intersect with existing commemorative practices and inherited understandings of particular memoryscapes. These encounters are enabled by what Anna Tsing (2005) has termed ‘friction,’ or the means by which widely circulating ideas and projects gain purchase in particular locales and allow both the global and the local to come into being in ways that can be complementary, confrontational, or both.
The six-state region of New England in the northeastern United States presents present-day food reformers with a particularly rich, layered, and complex ground on which to attempt the task of rebuilding a regionally scaled foodshed. New England is by no means alone in presenting a fairly coherent image of regional identity in which food plays a role; the construction and marketing of such imagery is very widespread, especially in areas that have had to reinvent themselves in the wake of economic and other changes. In the extensive scholarly study of ‘invented traditions,’ social memory and cultural geography in recent decades, commemorative and representational practices in such places have been explored very thoroughly. There is now a substantial body of literature that traces the construction of what have been called ‘edible identities’ (Brulotte & Di Giovine 2014) in regions like Tuscany (Gaggio 2011) and other rural parts of France (Trubek 2008), the Swiss Alps (Grasseni 2011), Britain’s Lake District (Sims 2010), and the American South (Weiss 2016). Within these efforts, the crafting of New England’s unique imaginary and the commemorative infrastructures that render it ‘visitable’ (Dicks 2003) and consumable stand out as particularly intentional and inventive; they have had remarkable longevity and reach; and they have a particularly complex and ambiguous relationship with both the natural resource base of the region and the industrial capitalist economy that has developed there and elsewhere over the past two centuries. But despite the presence of food-related issues within many of these processes of regional image-making, critical studies of place and memory have not yet deeply intersected the growing literature on the cultural politics of food reform in the present, in New England or elsewhere. In what follows, I trace the construction of some of the spatial, imaginative, and functional components of New England’s pastoral memoryscape over the past two centuries and consider some of their implications for contemporary neo-agrarian projects of ‘coming in to the foodshed.’
This chapter focuses on the agricultural and does not attempt to touch directly on New England’s equally important and iconic maritime economy. Many of the issues of scale, nostalgia, and ideology faced by the region’s farmers have been manifested in similar or parallel ways in fishing, and with the expansion of both fish farms and agroecological approaches to farming that situate the production of human food within larger biotic systems, the two may be moving closer together in the present and future. But in terms of inherited images and associations as encoded in New England’s particular land and seascapes – the yeoman farmer and the hearty mariner, the ‘wild’ resource of fisheries and the cultivated landscapes of the farm – the histories, economies, and regulatory environments of farming and fishing remain quite distinct, making it difficult to cover both adequately in a survey of this length.
The two-century history of market-oriented agriculture in New England reflects the fundamental contradictions between farming at a small scale (whether through choice or necessity) and the logic of markets centrally organised around the search for profitability and the kinds of efficiencies and technologies that can produce it. Within that logic, the types of farming operations best suited to the region’s resources of land and fertility have long been considered untenable or backward-looking by a range of actors, sometimes including farmers themselves. That association with backwardness and pastness has sometimes been pejorative, often nostalgic, and occasionally proudly embraced. In the aggregate, it has produced a profoundly ambivalent memoryscape that contains submerged or muffled memories of the illusory goal of both directing and containing capitalism’s prodigious energies.
The earliest European settlers saw both an abundance of ‘virgin’ land and an antagonistic wilderness as they pushed beyond the fertile flatland farms of the coastal region into interior river valleys and then – as population pressures began to make themselves felt in the eighteenth century – farther into upland areas with thinner soils (Stilgoe 1982: 43–53; Judd 2014: 69–94). Throughout the colonial period and accelerating after the Revolution, and especially with the turn toward industrial production around the turn of the nineteenth century, well-capitalised and entrepreneurial elites seized on the new opportunities afforded by the expanding capitalist economy of the new nation (Clark 1992). More sedentary, ‘slower’ forms of wealth tied up in land quickly came into direct conflict with newer speculative ventures, a dynamic that has bedevilled farmers in New England and elsewhere ever since (Magdoff 2015; Holt-Giménez 2017: 23–56). A decade after the Revolution, in the agrarian uprising known as Shays’ Rebellion, western Massachusetts farmers took an armed stand against the effects of what we now call ‘financialisation’ – the making of money from money rather than more directly from a natural resource base (Gross 1993; Richards 2002). The farmers were soundly defeated, but scholars have shown that the outcomes of the uprising were somewhat ambiguous (Pressman 1986; Gross 1993; Peet 1996; Goldscheider 2015). Most of the insurgents were pardoned rather than punished; there was a decisive shift toward stronger centralised government on both the state and national levels, and the event has always had a strangely muted presence within the subsequent commemorative landscape, suggesting that New Englanders in this period were already beginning to develop a collective ability to hold radical popular dissent in a continually unresolved though sometimes surprisingly productive tension with elite economic and political power. In subsequent centuries, the region’s politics have often combined the famously liberal with a deep conservatism; one result has been a tendency to buffer rather than directly confront the problems caused by the power of capital.
Within both the memoryscape and the foodshed, this tension has historically manifested itself in a range of interconnected narratives, images, and experiences of New England’s landscapes – especially its pastoral landscapes – over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Conforti 2001). In the visual arts (Truettner & Stein 1999), literature (Delbanco 2001; McWilliams 2004), and mass publishing, canonic works and consumable items of popular culture constructed and cemented what Julia Rosenbaum has called ‘a distinct sense of home’ (2006: 78) in the imaginations of many Americans in ways that have ranged from the quaint and nostalgic (Currier and Ives prints, Little Women) to the gothic (Ethan Frome and H.P. Lovecraft). These images often included or are even centred around the table, particularly around holidays like the Fourth of July (Waldstreicher 1997), Thanksgiving (Seelye 1998; Baker 2009), and Christmas (Nissenbaum 1997), when nationally circulating imagery and foods reinforced the notion of New England as an origin place for the nation.
This notion was carefully crafted and often directly linked with the projection of political and economic power within and beyond the region itself. As early as the first decade of the nineteenth century, influential white New England businessmen in other cities along the east coast and later in the Midwest established ‘New England Societies’ (Vartanian 1972; Seelye 1998) to ‘cherish the memory and perpetuate the principles of the original settlers,’ in the words of a historian of Cincinnati’s chapter (Peet 1996: 23). Spatially, architecturally, and imaginatively, the iconic New England village formation – white-painted wooden houses, churches, and civic buildings surrounding a common or green – came to convey images of yesteryear to many in the region and far beyond (Wood 2001). These images were codified (or reinvented) in situ through the efforts of historic preservationists and exported widely throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Lindgren 1993; Holleran 1998). Nineteenth-century New England emigrés to upstate New York, Ohio, and points west reproduced this pattern of settlement along what some have termed the ‘Yankee runway’ (Conforti 2001: 150; Adams 2014) while colonial and craft revivalism movements of the twentieth century amplified the aura of ‘pastness’ associated with the region – especially its rural places – through the making and marketing of Shakers, gabled Cape-style suburban houses, popular domestic and holiday decorating traditions, the collecting of antiques (Greenfield 2009), and more. Assertions of the region as a a national and cultural origin place were also intended to bring people and wealth into the region through tourism, sentimental hometown reunions, and reinvestment in ‘left-behind’ upland and rural places (New England Magazine 1897; Sears 1989: 49–86; Brown 1995: 135–142; Albers 2000: 196–267).
Those places served as a kind of shadow of the westward-moving frontier and the scaling-up of agricultural production on ever-larger, more mechanised farms. Food production in the peri-urban belts around New England’s industrial-era cities remained viable well into the twentieth century, but the mystique and nostalgia surrounding New England farming became attached to rural places that had been less able to meet the demands of industrialising agriculture from the outset. Indeed, as Stephen Nissenbaum has shown, ‘the pastoral heart of New England’ has been moving steadily northward for two centuries (Nissenbaum 1995: 39), always simultaneously one step ahead of and behind the edge of ‘progress’ and modernisation, with tourists (Harrison 2006), back-to-the-landers (Brown 2011), second-home buyers, and outdoor enthusiasts moving along with it and developers and businesses sometimes following.
As these images of regional identity were being crafted, promoted, and occasionally contested, a narrative about New England’s inherent unsuitability for farming began to take shape, becoming more entrenched and taken for granted as time went on. According this narrative, competitive pressures beginning with the opening of the Erie Canal in the 1820s made it virtually impossible for most New England farms, with their limited soils and fertility, to remain economically viable, leading to widespread farm abandonment and a precipitous decline in agriculture as an economic driver in the region. Some observers blamed farmers themselves, pointing to poor practices of husbandry and soil management. Other versions of the tale, more aligned with the valorisation of the sturdy Anglo-Saxon yeoman farmer, celebrated settlers’ initiative and resilience in carving homesteads out of the rocky hillsides in the first place, accepting the putative end of agriculture in New England as part of a more or less natural progression toward a more efficient and modern mode of living. Scholars have shown that, over time, variations on this decline-and-abandonment narrative have been enlisted in support of a wide range of projects including economic redevelopment, rural beautification, tourism promotion, and land and forest conservation (Barron 1984; Bell 1989; Donahue 2007). The narrative is reinforced by many features of the landscape itself, perhaps most famously the old stone walls running through tracts of reforested former farms, a kind of picturesque ruin that many observers have readily accepted as a sign of a lost, bygone era and way of life (Bell 1996; Lapping 2001; Ryden 2001; Wessels 2005).
This story of poor rocky farms and regional agricultural decline is both true and untrue, and farmers have had to maneuver carefully within and around it over time. As Dona Brown has noted, the whole notion of decline has been not so much mistaken as misunderstood (1995: 137–138). It has been very largely driven by regional chauvinisms and anxieties inflected in complex ways by a broad range of historical changes. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, New England’s ‘free soil’ was enlisted within antebellum sectional debates; many Northerners felt that a demonstrable agricultural strength in the older American states was an essential part of the argument for northern ideological superiority, and feared that an actual or perceived decline weakened that argument. As the century went on, population pressures and demographic shifts linked with immigration patterns and the growth of cities continued to create new opportunities but also new stresses for New England’s farmers. Growing cities expanded markets for food, but the excitement of innovation and the potential for high returns in the manufacturing economy set an unrealistic standard of growth for the more mature agricultural sector. At the same time, the industrialisation of farming itself meant that smaller, older farms trying to compete in expanding foodsheds had to invest more capital in order to keep up, to find new (often niche) markets, or both. The widely disseminated New England imaginary continued to work against farmers in a region that was both shaping and resisting change. If the agricultural landscape was central to the notion of New England as an origin place for the nation, signs of struggle or losses within that landscape threatened to undermine iconic images supporting high-profile narratives of national purpose and growth. By the early decades of the twentieth century, anxieties about agricultural decline had become full-blown pronouncements of crisis and moral decay in rural New England, intersecting in complex and often troubling ways with urban-led reform and even eugenicist projects (Brown 1995: 138, Gallagher 1999).
In reality, the purported abandonment of agriculture and rural life was never as complete or straightforward as these jeremiads and elegies would suggest. Rather, variegated shifts in land use across the region reflected complex adjustments to changing markets, technologies, labour patterns, and transportation networks. New England’s overall agricultural production actually continued to rise throughout the nineteenth century, the supposed century of decline, not peaking until 1910. The number of farms and farmers did decrease overall, but the steepest drop was not until after the Second World War when a more national-scaled, fossil-fuel-driven food system became dominant. Even today, acre for acre, New England farmland is as productive as almost any in the United States – just on a much smaller scale (Bell 1989: 49). The narrative of decline dramatically flattens the reality of continual readjustment and reassessment by those involved in food production in the region, as well as the persistence and inventiveness of New England’s food sector over the more than two centuries since the logic of markets began to favor those with sufficient capital to pursue economies of scale and mechanised efficiencies of production.
The issue of scale, in terms of both the size of the regional land base and its potential fertility, has been central to the ways that farmers and many others in New England have negotiated the tension between their awareness – often a kind of moral consciousness – of ecological limitations and their accommodation or pursuit of the expansive promise at the heart of capitalism. Farmers have learned hard lessons about exceeding the often-limited carrying capacity of their land, and many of their most visible adaptations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries – letting over-used upland pastures revert to woodlot, shifting fields into grass production to meet urban demand for hay in the age of horse-drawn transport, adding lumber to the mix of products on diversified small farms, specialising in protein and dairy rather than attempting to maintain more diversified crop production – were carefully considered course-adjustments rather than the wholesale retreat proclaimed by many politicians, economists, planners, and reformers (Barron 1984; Judd 2000; Donahue 2007).
New England’s farmers have nimbly pursued niche opportunities and products, finding and creating markets for what we now call regional heritage foods (apples, cranberries, maple syrup) through a wide range of strategies including rural and farm tourism, various forms of value-added products and direct marketing, festivals, and cooperatives (Brown 1995: 135–168; Harrison 2006; Paxson 2012: 63–94; Lange 2017: 143–168). Renewed waves of farmers – southern and eastern European immigrants in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, new homesteaders during the Depression and the 1960s and 1970s, college-educated neo-agrarians today – have brought skills and energy to older ‘Yankee’ farms, continually forging and re-forging relationships with still-expanding urban markets (Belasco 1989; Brown 1995; Kolinski 1995; Paxson 2010). Dairying has remained an essential component of New England’s commercial farm economy and pastoral landscape for more than a century and a half, with ‘cheese factories,’ then liquid milk, then a turn toward specialty foods like ice cream and small-scale artisanal cheese production as strategies for countering the continuing trend toward consolidation and competition from ever-larger producers outside the region (Paxson 2012: 99–103; DuPuis 2002; Valenze 2011).
Over time, farmers have also entered into partnerships with a wide range of allies whose interests overlap with their own in many ways but just as often create new challenges. Tourists and tourism promoters have tended to value pastoral landscapes more in terms of their potential for recreation than for food production per se (Brown 1995; Albers 2000; Harrison 2006). Newer, more gastronomic enthusiasms like the farm-to-table movement may risk commoditising and fetishising the very types of small-scale production that have historically suffered most from commercial pressures in larger markets (Trubek 2008; Paxson 2010). The conservation movement that arose in New England in the late nineteenth century initially approached farms and other human elements as intrusions within natural landscapes (Judd 2000; Donahue 2007). That legacy continues to shape land conservation work in the present, although some conservationists are also beginning to recognise environmental values in small-scale working agricultural landscapes. A parallel shift is underway in the realm of historic preservation, although a similar legacy of earlier thinking – in this case, an often hagiographic focus on an idealised past – continues to reinforce rather than challenge the deep-seated declension narrative (Lindgren 2001; Stanton 2017). Meanwhile, state policies and projects have very often privileged conventional and expansive ventures at the expense of smaller, less ‘legible’ types of farming, while the newest wave of technological utopianism in the agricultural sector has been very largely focused on methods that eschew the challenges of soil and land altogether and look to the laboratory and the digital realm for solutions to the problems of viability that have long plagued farmers in New England and well beyond (DuPuis 1996; Gregg 2001; Strom 2016). Each of these alliances brings its own complex mix of accommodation and resistance to the logic of markets, further complicating the discursive and physical landscapes within which present-day food reformers are maneuvering.
New England currently boasts a very active contemporary network of food activism and food systems planning which has helped to aggregate and coordinate smaller-scale efforts into larger holistic initiatives, including at the state and regional scales (Carroll 2011; American Farmland Trust 2014; Donahue et al. 2014; Ruhf 2015).2 Despite the vaunted parochialism of much of New England’s civic life, such projects clearly reflect a widely shared conception of the region-as-foodshed (or at least potential foodshed). This conception rests in part on a sense that food reform involves rebuilding the kinds of local and regional systems that existed in the not-so-distant past and that have left many traces in New England’s memoryscape – traces that reflect the essential ambivalence that people within this region have long felt about the productive capacity of their natural resource base as well as the capitalist expansion they themselves have done a good deal to advance. Contemporary food reform efforts must operate within this contradictory memoryscape, creating continued challenges for the project of uncoupling smaller-scale food production from the effects of larger economies that have emerged, in part, from the very kinds of innovation and adaptation at which New Englanders have long excelled.
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