Food Reform Movements: “Fresh, Local, and Organic”: Sustainability and Healthy Living in Today’s Holistic Food Reform Movement

If progressive refomers relied on the then new science of nutrition to rationalize the organization of labor, the contemporary food reform movement relies on sustainable agriculture methods that gained acceptance in the wake of the 1973 energy crisis to rationalize the management of ecological systems in an attempt to heal both the body and the environment, reducing one’s waistline and his carbon footprint at once. The most distinctive feature of the contemporary food reform movement is thus its holistic approach: nowadays reformers attempt not merely to change the American diet but rather to transform its globalized, industrial food system, intervening at every stage in the process of production, transportation, distribution, and consumption of foods. Three public figures are most commonly associated with this social movement: celebrity chef Alice Waters and journalists Eric Schlosser and Michael Pollan. All three are members of Slow Food, an international organization founded in Italy in 1989 to counter the fast food lifestyle.