Locality, markets, and small farmers in the Midwestern United States

With increasing public concern about the overall safety of the industrial food system in the United States, the concept of "local" foods has emerged to play a significant role in public discourse about our food. This thesis examines how 20 diverse small farmers in northern Illinois and southern Wisconsin construct and use the concept of local as it relates to their farm activities and market participation. This thesis employs two forms of data collection: ethnographic interviews and mental mapping, to understand how farmers construct and use "local." The interview data represents an ideological understanding of "local" which, when interpreted through the rubric of cultural models, reveals two distinct ways of speaking about farm activities and "local". The mental map data sets represents a personal understanding of geographic space and reveals that Midwestern farmers use local in a manner similar to that observed by Selfa and Qazi, where local becomes the shortest distance to the markets the farmers already use. The two data sets taken in relation to one another show that "local" is an ambiguous term whose meaning can change depending on the context.