NORTH BAY BOH E MI AN | JUNE 1 8-24, 20 14 | BO H E M I AN.COM
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Arts Ideas SUSTAINABILITY, DEFINED In Douglas Gayeton’s ‘Local,’ urban farmers like Novella Carpenter,
from Oakland, point to the pleasure in growing one’s own food.
Lexicographer Douglas Gayeton’s new book brings our food system to the grass-roots level BY SARA BIR
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he most insightful part of Douglas Gayeton’s new book, Local: The New Face of Food and Farming in America (Harper; $34.95), might be the afterword, where he discusses the unfortunate fate of the term “climate change”: “What we can’t comprehend, we avoid. We tune out. Call it climate fatigue.” That sort of fatigue encompasses many hot-button issues, including our food supply,
the production of which is inextricably linked with climate change. It takes time, energy and discipline to stay on top of this stuff, especially when the rhetoric is all about fear. And I’m tired of people telling me to be afraid of food. Even when fear is grounded, there’s only so much we can get out of it. It inflames our passions quickly, but exhausts them just as fast. Enter Local, part of a multi-platform project called the Lexicon of Sustainability. The project is about hope,
locality, and ordinary people taking action on large and small scales. The idea is that words come before actions. As Gayeton writes, “words illuminate.” Creating a shared language of terms—“a real food dictionary”—educates consumers so they know what they’re eating and who ultimately benefits from the money they spend. Gayeton, a Petaluma resident and multimedia artist, cofounded the Lexicon with his wife, Laura-Howard Gayeton (North Bay residents may have some familiarity with Laloo’s,
her goat’s milk ice cream company). He traveled across America, interviewing and photographing farmers, scientists and entrepreneurs in both urban and rural environments to learn more about how they generate abundance using sustainability. The result, documented in Local, is a growing bank of over 200 terms, each illustrated with a colorful photo collage overlaid with Gayeton’s folksy handwriting. These “information artworks” are dense with color and words, as saturated as a modern-day Book of Kells, but the general idea comes across pretty quickly. For instance, “cage-free” only means the poultry was not raised in a cage; it says nothing about how it was raised (most likely crowded and indoors, as it turns out). You can also see the information artwork on the Lexicon of Sustainability website, and watch the series of short “Know Your Food” videos. The book is advantageous because it’s a bit stickier; you can read it in bed, peruse over it at breakfast and leave it out for friends to flip through. It’s interesting to see how different bits and pieces shine in each medium, even though they essentially use the same content. The Lexicon collects the terminology of both boutique food producers (“heritage breed”) and social justice (“food security”), allowing them to coexist on the pages of Local without the antagonistic attitudes that flourish around the difference between the haves and have-nots. This is something I struggle with, especially with the foodrescue nonprofit I work with in my own community. Is it better to focus the organization’s resources on delivering our clients the