"When the farmer can sell directly to the consumer, it is a more active process. There's more contact. The consumer can know, who am I buying this from? What's their name? Do they have a face? Is the food they are selling coming out of Mexico with pesticides?"
About this Quote
Brown is selling intimacy as policy: the idea that a tomato tastes better when it comes with a handshake and a backstory. The surface pitch is economic (cut out middlemen, help farmers), but the engine is moral. "More contact" and "Do they have a face?" are cues that the real commodity here is trust, not produce. He turns supply chains into a character test: if you can picture the person who grew your food, you can feel virtuous about buying it.
The quote’s sly move is how it frames globalization as an epistemological problem. Imported food isn’t condemned primarily because it’s foreign, but because it’s unknowable. Mexico enters as a loaded symbol of distance and deregulation, and "pesticides" arrives as the punchline that converts anxiety into a consumer choice. It’s not a careful claim about comparative safety; it’s an invitation to suspicion that flatters the buyer’s desire for control.
Context matters: Brown, the California pragmatist with countercultural instincts, is channeling the farm-to-fork ethos that surged alongside farmers markets, foodie politics, and post-NAFTA unease about what modern abundance hides. The rhetoric is populist without sounding like it: he doesn’t rail at corporations, he asks questions. Those questions are the argument. They imply that if you can’t name the farmer, you’re gambling with your health, your community, and your conscience. Direct sales become a civic act, a way to shrink an impersonal economy down to something you can look in the eye.
The quote’s sly move is how it frames globalization as an epistemological problem. Imported food isn’t condemned primarily because it’s foreign, but because it’s unknowable. Mexico enters as a loaded symbol of distance and deregulation, and "pesticides" arrives as the punchline that converts anxiety into a consumer choice. It’s not a careful claim about comparative safety; it’s an invitation to suspicion that flatters the buyer’s desire for control.
Context matters: Brown, the California pragmatist with countercultural instincts, is channeling the farm-to-fork ethos that surged alongside farmers markets, foodie politics, and post-NAFTA unease about what modern abundance hides. The rhetoric is populist without sounding like it: he doesn’t rail at corporations, he asks questions. Those questions are the argument. They imply that if you can’t name the farmer, you’re gambling with your health, your community, and your conscience. Direct sales become a civic act, a way to shrink an impersonal economy down to something you can look in the eye.
Quote Details
| Topic | Food |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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