The Japanese Journal of American Studies, No. 18 (2007)

Made in Kentucky:
The Meaning of “Local” Food Products in
Kentucky’s Farmers’ Markets

Taro FUTAMURA*I INTRODUCTION
Through the application of technological innovations and the enlargement of arable land, the United States increased its agricultural production and became the world’s largest food supplier in the twentiethcentury.1 This capital-intensive production, however, forced thousandsof small family farms out of business, and signiﬁcantly increased the disjuncture of size and scale of production between producers after WorldWar II.2 Furthermore, in spite of overproduction concerns, continuous
support by federal subsidy programs led producers to expand their operations, thereby relying even more on governmental assistance.
In recent decades, American agriculture has experienced rapid restructuring. This is not only limited to the abandonment of small family farms
and the concentration of production to a limited number of large farms,
but also includes ﬂexible reactions to international competition, changing market prices, and shifts in the amount of production and consumption targeting both domestic and international consumer markets. On theother hand, for those farmers struggling to continue producing traditional
Copyright © 2007 Taro Futamura. All rights reserved. This work may be used,with this notice included, for noncommercial purposes. No copies of this work
may be distributed, electronically or otherwise, in whole or in part, without
permission from the author.
*Ph.D. Candidate, University of Kentucky

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crops on available land, alternative strategies such as growing new products or ﬁnding niche markets are being sought to maintain their livelihood.
Recent studies on agriculture and food by social scientists have focused on macro-scale dichotomies of production and consumption as
well as binaries of local versus global food.3 Many have examined theglobalization of food from a critical perspective, including use of the“food mileage” concept to describe how far food products and commodities have traveled between the origin of production and the site of
consumption. With the rapid growth of global production and its network of retail chains, many of today’s American consumers do notrealize from how far and from how many places their food products
come. Food mileage has expanded radically over the past few decades,
and while this has brought obvious beneﬁts it has also produced many
drawbacks, such as the loss of nutritional content through distribution
processes, high transportation costs, and ﬁerce international competition.4 In other words, the availability of food products from outside
national boundaries is not necessarily beneﬁcial to the domestic foodsupply. This globalizing trend has spurred the growth of a localized food
network, which advocates closer connections between producers andconsumers both in terms of spatial distance and personal networks.
Current burley tobacco production in Kentucky is one example of how
small-scale farms in the United States are being transformed to utilize alocalized food network. Tobacco has long been a signature commodity
in Kentucky, and it was the largest burley tobacco producing state in the
United States for decades.5 With the decline of cigarette consumption
and the increase in international competition, however, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) reduced its tobacco quota allotments to burley tobacco growers in the late 1990s. This action forced a signiﬁcantdecline in the amount of tobacco production. Hundreds of tobacco farmers lost a reliable source of income through this process, a situation which
led many of them to shift their traditional burley tobacco production toalternative crops. In 2000, the Kentucky state legislature decided toutilize the Master Settlement Agreement (MSA), millions of dollars
obtained from tobacco companies after a lawsuit in 1998, by distributing
funds to counties to foster alternative agricultural production and related
practices.6 Kentucky farmers now produce a variety of commodities asalternatives to tobacco.

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Because farm size and the labor pool in Kentucky are signiﬁcantly
smaller than the national average,7 it is very difﬁcult for the state’s farmers to expand production and compete with larger commercial corporate
farms. One emerging solution for Kentucky farmers is to sell their alternative agricultural products directly to consumers instead of selling theirproducts to wholesalers that ship products to retail distributors. Examples of this direct sale practice include farmers’ markets, Community
Supported Agriculture (CSA), roadside farm stands, and mail-ordersales.8 These opportunities not only enable producers to set their own
product prices, but also provide consumers with direct access to freshand high-quality products. Direct sales, furthermore, usually provide
more proﬁt than selling to retailers because they cut the costs associatedwith intermediaries. Direct interaction between producers and consumers, therefore, emphasizes connections on a small geographic scale,the “local,” rather than the “national” or “global.” Thus, burley tobacco
growers who shifted production to alternative crops are contributing to
the establishment of a new locally-based food system.9
The scale of “local,” however, has not been considered carefully inprevious studies. What constitutes “local” food in Kentucky? Is it deﬁned
spatially, materially, or discursively? One may think of bourbon whiskey
or fried chicken as Kentucky’s “local” food, but in general we tend toneglect the connections between what is grown and where it is grown
and how a product is branded as “local.” It is important, therefore, tocritically examine the discursive and geographical meanings of places
that are embedded in food in the context of production, marketing, consumption, and culture. Here, place should be understood not just as an
absolute space ﬁxed in a certain geographic location (i.e., Haymarket
Square, National Mall, etc.), but instead as a site where social relations
are practiced through normative and collective processes.10
In this paper, I examine critically the concept of “local” food sold in
Kentucky as it emerges under post-tobacco restructuring. Speciﬁcally,
through case studies of Farmers’ Markets in Kentucky’s second and thirdlargest cities, Lexington and Owensboro, I analyze how agricultural
products are represented and sold in settings where their sites of production or spatial scale are speciﬁed as “local.” I also wish to consider
the ontological and epistemological meanings of “local” in the context
of direct farm products sales: What is understood as “local food” in farmers’ markets? Where are these “local” food products coming from? Why

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do both producers and consumers perceive “local” to be important? Inorder to address these questions, I focus on why and how producers
represent and emphasize the “local” in selling their products in farmers’markets, and how consumers, on the other hand, perceive the “local” differently from producers. Hereafter I will use the term “localism” todescribe the promotion of local-scale production and consumption as
opposed to the national or the global scale. I argue that speciﬁcation ofa product’s origin not only represents the producer’s recognition of geographical scale, but also functions to reproduce and strengthen the ﬁxed
scale of “local” without deﬁning what “local” actually means. Various
studies show that consumers are much more interested in local products
than they used to be.11 This paper, therefore, discusses what exactly thephrase “local foods” speciﬁes, and shows how ambiguous the term actually is. To address these points, my analysis examines how the term
“local products” relates to the geographical location of actual production
sites, many of which indicate producers’ farms or residences. This study
is mainly based on qualitative data obtained from informal interviews,
textual analysis of signs, and ﬁeld observation at farmers’ markets.
II

1)

TRANSFORMATION OF KENTUCKY’S AGRICULTURE AND
THE EMERGENCE OF “LOCAL” FOOD

The Restructuring of Burley Tobacco Production and Its Disadvantages
For many decades agriculture remained one of the most important
industries in Kentucky. In spite of the relatively small size of the state,
in 2002, Kentucky had the ﬁfth largest number of total farms in the UnitedStates.12 What was unique about Kentucky was that its burley tobacco
production, the state’s major cash crop, had a signiﬁcantly higher income
per acre compared with other grains and cash crops. Such conditions, inaddition to the lack of capital investment, the need for intensive labor,
and topographic conditions, kept the state’s acreage of farmland per farm
much lower than the national average. In this sense, burley tobacco wasa critical product for Kentucky farmers, because very few products could
provide as substantial a revenue in relation to the size of the farmland as
burley tobacco did. Furthermore, price support programs for tobacco
production, which began in the New Deal era and continued until several
years ago, helped farmers to maintain a stable income.
With an increase in international competition and a decrease in do-

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mestic consumption, the USDA started to reduce quota allotments for
tobacco production after the late 1990s. This decision created dramaticchanges in tobacco-oriented agricultural economies. Unlike corn or
wheat, where the market decides the price and producers can farm
unlimited acres of land, the establishment of the price support program
meant that tobacco growers’ production was highly regulated by anallotted quota limiting the acreage and pounds they were allowed to grow.
Burley tobacco is typically labor and land intensive, requiring only asmall acreage to produce a substantial income. Therefore, when the quotas were cut by more than 50 percent, producers were left to seek alternative crops that would yield a similarly high income on limited acreage.
Some farmers have converted to agritourism, such as pick-your-own,
or hosting school tours, which attract visitors by providing the experience of touching farm animals and experiencing farm life. Other farmers
have shifted their production from burley tobacco to alternative but
traditional products, including major grains (corn, wheat, soybeans, andsorghum) and beef cattle, or have experimented with non-traditional
products such as vegetables, fruits, ﬂowers and nursery products, goats,
sheep, poultry, catﬁsh, and freshwater shrimp. The majority of producers
have diversiﬁed their production. Between 1997 and 2002, the numberof farms that raised tobacco decreased from 46,792 to 29,253,13 while
the production of a variety of alternative traditional and non-traditional
products increased.
Several non-traditional products, however, did not have establishedmarkets in which farmers could sell their produce. Therefore, it became
clear that marketing directly to consumers was critical to farmers’ success. Unlike burley tobacco, which was taken to established warehouses
and graded for auction, selling perishable food produce for high prices
with no traditional market required different strategies. Grain production
was not competitive with farmers operating at much larger scales in the
Midwest and Plains states. Furthermore, products such as vegetables andfruits, unlike traditional grain crops, were not eligible for USDA subsidy
programs. Small-scale producers with limited land and ﬁnancial resources, therefore, needed to market their products in innovative ways
in order to earn a proﬁt sufﬁcient to sustain their production and living
expenses.
This brief context helps to clarify why selling products “locally” hasbecome so important for many Kentucky farms. In short, producing,
selling and consuming “locally” has not been emphasized only for

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ideological and ethical purposes, but also as an economic strategy for
producers and their home communities more generally.
2)

Increase of Farmers’ Markets as a Niche Market
Farmers’ markets in the United States existed widely in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries until the evolution of preservation technologies,
packaging, and the practice of marketing through specialized grocery
stores transformed the American food system. Farmers’ markets wereonce the core focal point for selling fresh products in central urban systems.14 When cities grew larger and motorization developed, the significance of farmers’ markets in urban centers gradually declined.15 As thescale of food retailers increased their operations and food prices became
more competitive, fewer products were available for local sale directly
to consumers living in proximity to farm producers. While the current
availability of a diversity of goods from around the world may beneﬁt
consumers in terms of ﬂexibility of choices and prices, what people eat
is becoming less tied to the places where people are, representing lost
opportunities for nearby producers. On the other hand, with an increasein health concerns over issues such as obesity and the use of pesticides,
consumers have begun to demand more fresh products that are high inquality and rich in food values. With the general increase in awarenessof food quality and nutrition in recent decades, people’s demand for fresh
food products brought a re-emergence of farmers’ markets. The passageof the federal Farmer-to-Consumer Direct Marketing Act of 1976changed farmers’ markets dramatically, and since then some states havewitnessed a doubling or even tripling in the number of farmers’ markets.16 For consumers, purchasing high quality products has become acritical opportunity, and purchasing food products through direct market strategies such as farmers’ markets or CSA has become much more
attractive. Consumers can buy directly from producers and gain moreproduct information, leading to positive perceptions of quality.
As of 2006, there are 108 farmers’ markets in Kentucky.17 Larger cities
such as Louisville, Lexington, and Bowling Green have had their own
markets since the 1970s. For smaller cities and counties, however, it was
only within the last decade that farmers’ markets opened. Nearly 60
farmers’ markets in Kentucky opened after 2000, an increase which canbe partially attributed to farmers’ reactions to the need to seek additional
income in the wake of decreased tobacco production. This illustrates twothings. First, there were few venues of substantial market size alreadyMADE IN KENTUCKY

215

available for direct sales of food products. Second, the idea of “local”
food began to attract attention in recent years, not as a continuation of
tradition, but rather as a newly constructed concept. People who hear thename “Kentucky” may not ﬁnd it difﬁcult to associate the place namewith Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC), a fast food franchise that originated in Corbin, KY. This does not necessarily mean, however, that
Kentucky, or even Corbin, is known for raising or consuming chickens.
On the other hand, Kentucky produces more beef cattle than any otherstate east of the Mississippi River,18 but because the majority of beef
cattle are raised for breeding and later sold for ﬁnishing to ranches inMidwest and Plains states, Kentucky receives little recognition for its
beef cattle industry. Few consumers, therefore, would associate the name“Kentucky” with steak or hamburgers. This lack of association between
actual production sites and the perception or reputation of places prompts
us to consider how “local food” is constructed discursively and how that
discourse is related to direct sales.
III
1)

CHARACTERISTICS OF FARMERS’ MARKETS IN KENTUCKY

Market Rules and Seasonal Changes
Most of Kentucky’s farmers’ markets begin their seasons between
April and June, and continue until sometime in late September toNovember. Differences in opening and closing of markets depend on thelocal growing season and whether or not the market accepts out-of-state
shipments of consignment farm products. Market operations vary: someare open every day, while some are open only once or twice per week.
Understandably, the weekend markets tend to be more crowded andpopular than weekday markets. Types of customers vary from elderly
citizens to couples and families with children and pets, though elderly
women tend to be the largest customer group. Not all vendors operateon all available days every week, because many small vendors have nonfarm jobs during the week.
The products sold at farmers’ markets vary signiﬁcantly from one
vendor to another: some vendors sell vegetables and fruits, while others
specialize in ﬂower sales. Total product inventory may include ﬂowers
and small garden plants, vegetables, fruits, bakery products, honey products, and in some cases meat and poultry products, while seafood, wines,
snacks, natural cosmetics, crafts, dog treats, cooking sauces and seasonings, and seasonal specialties are also available.

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Each market has its own rules, which are approved by the market board
and/or its members. Rules generally regulate the fundamentals of market operation: for example, when and where the market will be operated;
who can sell products; from where vendors are allowed to bring in products; what kind of products are acceptable for selling; and whether sellers are required to specify product origins. These rules have a signiﬁcant
inﬂuence in determining the characteristics of each market, which are
based on normative presumptions. For example, some markets are constituted solely of vendors who are also growers. If vendors’ regulations
did not exist, however, not all farmers’ market vendors would be farmers in those cases, nor would all products sold in the market be farm products. If the market rules allow, even vendors who sell farm products may
specialize in re-selling products from outside Kentucky by trucking themin directly. For the majority of growers-only markets, however, consignment of products from out-of-state is prohibited. In this way, individual market rules shape whether farmers’ markets are “farmers-onlymarkets,” or markets that consist of both local farmers’ products andthose shipped in.
Many farmers’ markets accept vendors that come from areas immediately adjacent to the market’s county, while there are also several markets that speciﬁcally limit vendors to farms within the market county.
Because of climatic limitations, not all products sold are grown in
Kentucky throughout the year. This is especially true at the beginning of
the market season, such as in April or May, when many of the products
are brought in from other warmer states and their origins are displayed,such as Florida, Georgia, Texas, and California, or USDA certiﬁed products (Figure 1). At this time of the year, ﬂower vendors have a signiﬁcant market presence, as ﬂower growers are likely to have their own
greenhouses that are not affected by severe winter weather. Early season
food products include asparagus, radishes, greens, and green onions. As
the growing season progresses, vegetables such as tomatoes, sweet corn,
green beans, squash, zucchini, potatoes, onions, and green peppers,
along with fruits such as berries, peaches, watermelons and cantaloupes,
start to arrive at the market and are sold as long as their season lasts. As
the growing season continues and the weather gets warmer, the variety
of products increases, as does the number of vendors and customers. The
Lexington Farmers’ Market, for example, had thirty vendors one
Saturday in April 2003, while in August that year it had ﬁfty-seven.19

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Figure 1. Scene of Lexington Farmers’ Market, 2003 (Picture taken by author)

2)

Branding “Local” Products
While there may be ten vendors in July that sell the same kinds oftomatoes, they may all have signs that explain how their tomatoes aredifferent. Because many vendors sell the same products (especially fruits
and vegetables), they try to differentiate their products from others byemphasizing their attractive qualities. Some promote an environmentally-friendly production method, such as certiﬁed organic farm products
or eggs produced by free-range chickens. Others promote their products
through geographically speciﬁc signs that emphasize where the products
have come from. All certiﬁed organic farmers, for example, use signs
that state both “certiﬁed organic” and the place the products were grown,
mostly by the name of the county (i.e., Franklin County). The Kentucky
Department of Agriculture (KDA) provides ﬁnancial assistance forpromoting and branding state producers’ quality products with stickers
and cardboard signs that include the logo “Kentucky Proud” (Figure 2).
Therefore, by using these logos, producers can show consumers they are
selling products that were grown and raised in Kentucky.

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Figure 2. Sales of 4th of July tomatoes along with Kentucky Proud logo at Owensboro
Farmers’ Market, 2006. (Picture taken by author)

As spring moves into summer, more “local” food begins to appear onvendors’ tables. This is a sign that the growing season has progressed
and that farmers’ own products have matured and can now be harvested
to replace shipped products. The farmers’ own produce is geographicallyspeciﬁed with terms such as “home grown,” “locally grown,” “grown in
Scott County,” or “grown in Berea, Kentucky.” For those products notgrown in Kentucky, vendors often specify which states the products
came from (Figure 3). Differences between these terms represent various
meanings or interpretations of geographical scale. Producers try to belocationally speciﬁc and accountable for what they are selling. Producers
also recognize that speciﬁcation of certain place names is essential for
informing consumers about how “local” a product is. For example,“Kentucky grown” potatoes may be perceived as more “local” than
“Texas grown” potatoes, even though the type of potatoes may be exactly
the same. The degree to which “local” matters, however, depends on how
thoroughly consumers demand accountability for the products they buy.

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219

Figure 3. Sales of apples and gourds that were produced in Scott County, Kentucky,
and Indiana, both sold at Lexington Farmers’ Market, 2003. (Picture taken by author)

Another reason why producers choose to employ the “local” label istheir understanding that attachment to place is a signiﬁcant factor in customer shopping practices. As mentioned above, some customers believethat “local” products are better because of freshness, quality, or othercharacteristics. Others identify with “local” producers with whom they
develop a trusting relationship over time. Both producers and consumers
attempt to build close personal relationships by selling and buying local
products. In fact, the newsletter published weekly by the Lexington
Farmers Market always concludes, “Thank you for supporting your local
farmers!”20
What, then, are the differences between a “home grown” tomato anda “grown in Franklin County” tomato? Whether the signs describe spaceat the county or municipal level, speciﬁcation of a “local” producing area
does not necessarily competitively differentiate product quality unlessthe place names themselves add certain imagined values to products (i.e.,wine in Napa, CA, onions in Vidalia, GA, and many others). Signs may
distinguish the vendors, and obviously some vendors attract more customers than others selling the same products because of the products’220

TARO FUTAMURA

shape, freshness, price, or manner of display. As to consumers’ selections, however, absolute geographical location is not the key factor inevaluating the quality of the products they purchase. This is a criticalpoint, because producers are not trying to sell themselves through labelsof speciﬁc locations, but are relying instead upon the relative locationalterm “local.” This is different from other cases, where “place” is commodiﬁed as a key to the credibility of high quality (such as the case of
Napa and Sonoma, CA, for wines), and in which the place becomes a“brand.” In contrast, even though many farmers’ markets in Kentucky
are aware of the importance of local products, the association with absolute location and the meaning of geographical location is veiled by theterm “local.”IV WHAT IS “LOCAL” FOOD IN KENTUCKY?
The more farmers’ markets and their related food products are examined, the more complex seemingly simple questions become. What is“local food” in Kentucky? As I have already indicated, they are not simply products that are produced within the state boundaries. Then why dopeople shop for these products? There is a variety of answers to thisquestion, including a desire for freshness, interest in food product nutrition, concerns with environmental and social awareness, and an eagerness to interact and identify with producers. These answers are tied tothe preference for “local” products rather than products that are shippedfrom distant locations or available for purchase in a nationwide grocery
chain.
The idea of the “local” scale in food production requires critical examination. First, the term “local” is relative; it does not specify whether it
refers to the site where the raw food product is grown, the site where itis processed, or the site where it is prepared for home or commercial consumption.21 Second, as I have shown in the empirical evidence above,
people associate “local” with different geographical scales: the particular name of a community, city or town, county, or state. Some, for example, consider “local” as the space within a state boundary. Others
consider “local” as the county of the producers’ or consumers’ residence,or their home. In short, compared with a city or state where a boundaryis politically delineated, “local” is a social construct: unﬁxed, and usually deﬁned contextually rather than on an explicit scale.22 With theemphasis on labeling food as “local,” for all people who are involved it

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is important to not only be speciﬁc with the site of production and processing, but also to consider mobile spatial scales between the production, distribution, marketing, and consumption of “local” food.
Producers and consumers construct food localism differently. Fromthe producers’ point of view, localism is practiced when they strategically emphasize that their products are locally produced and/or sold. Thisis done by providing high quality products to consumers, which they
assume will make them competitive, and promoting these products as
locally provided; they thus link the image and identity of place to thecommodity. Therefore, the site of production as “local” becomes part ofthe commodity. To reinforce this relationship, producers and farmers’markets reproduce normative “local” market conditions by regulating
which vendors are allowed to sell their products based on where they are
from, and what products can be sold based on where they are grown. In
other words, each farmers’ market deﬁnes the products and their people
based on territorial space (where the acceptable products are from) that
permits products to enter and exist in a certain place (farmers’ market)
and therefore the right to be labeled “local” food.23
From the consumers’ point of view, localism is practiced when producers are local: not a producer who lives in Mobile, AL, for example,
but someone living nearby. A linked assumption is that the markets’
products are also local, grown by the person selling it, instead of someone living in the same town and going elsewhere to purchase wholesale
produce and sell them “locally.” Local food creates an aura of trust, credibility, and assurance that consumers seek when buying products fromlocal individuals or particularly people they know.24 When consumers
have a direct relationship with the producers, consumers assume that producers are “local” people who are tied to the place of production. Suchassumptions are not necessarily valid, however, because even “local producers” may sometimes be providing products from “non-local” sources
such as through an out-of-state consignment system. A market’s rules
will distinguish between local and non-local products, but very few markets overtly display their rules to customers, and signs showing place
names make available only limited information to enable the consumers
to understand the meaning of “local.” Hence, “local” food promotes or
requires additional attention to the site of production and/or processing.
In either case, it is clear that some type of social relationship between
producers and consumers is critical to the construction of localism. The
term “local food,” therefore, not only refers to the commodities produced

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TARO FUTAMURAby small-scale farmers in proximate sites, but it also implies that consumers believe that locally grown food products are likely to present
desired qualities.
Such theoretical grounding applies to the current formation of
Kentucky’s local food movement. Different actors have different goals
in specifying their products as “local.” For individual producers, in order
to explain that they raised their products, or that the products were grown
at home (or in a certain county or town in Kentucky), the speciﬁcationof where it was produced or if it was “home grown” is the most criticalinformation to provide. Market managers and farmers’ market groupmembers that include the market board, however, deﬁne eligibility formembership by the location of the producer’s farm and residence. The
groups, therefore, construct territorial boundaries that delimit what andwhere constitutes “local.” In other words, mutual group surveillance of
where products come from deﬁnes their own sense of “local,” placing
less concern on where “local” actually is in absolute terms. This is an
ironic disjuncture because market institutions within Kentucky deﬁne
spatial scale differently. The Kentucky Department of Agriculture, state
government, promotes the branding of Kentucky producers’ productswith the “Kentucky Proud” logo as quality products that were grown andraised in Kentucky. Meanwhile, some county farmers’ markets alreadydeﬁne their marketable products with labels such as “home grown inHenry County,” whereby products that were grown outside of thatcounty are not considered local to that market, even though they werealso “grown in Kentucky.”25 The scale of “local” is not deﬁned in absolute terms but is socially constructed, while consumers seek a standardof credibility yet assume some variability within the scale of “local.”
V CONCLUSION
Over the past century, more people have become concerned about theirhealth and diet as well as the impact of industrialized agricultural production, and therefore, food has received increasing critical attention.26
Considering consumers’ increasing interest in food and diet, “the geography of food” is also likely to receive increasing attention along withthe expansion of farmers’ markets.
This paper illustrates how the representation of spatial scale inﬂuences
the adoption of “local” food through the case study of farmers’ markets
in Kentucky. With the collapse of tobacco-based agriculture, production

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and direct marketing of food products have become a critical factor for
producers’ economic survival. Consumers are also affected by thismovement through increased access to fresh, high quality food products.
To connect these groups, two important conditions must exist: substantial consumer demand for fresh produce that global retail chains cannot(or do not) supply, and ample quantities of fresh produce supplies fromnearby producers. Rapid increases in the number of farmers’ markets
throughout the state indirectly reﬂect that the demand for locally grownproduce exists already. Indeed, according to Glasscock (2002), quantitatively, given the total volume of vegetable products produced in
Kentucky, the state and producers could theoretically feed the citizensof Kentucky without relying on external products.27 In that sense, farmers’ markets, along with other direct marketing strategies, play a criticalrole in sustaining both producers’ incomes and consumers’ access toquality food, thereby strengthening “local” and regional-level foodsecurity.
For researchers, what remains to be understood is what exists beyond
the idea of local scale. It is important to consider the contemporary conditions of American local food systems in their geographical contexts.
Although farmers’ markets are strongly tied to small-scale agricultural
production, distribution and availability of products as well as consumerproducer relationships are highly embedded spatially, and their networksof social relations eventually produce places, including farmers’ markets.28
In Kentucky, it appears that farmers’ markets are attempting to ﬁx themeaning of “local” food or food “made in Kentucky.” This trend, however, masks the micro-scale importance and signiﬁcance of the geography of food. To understand the process of Kentucky’s agriculturaltransformation—including its diversiﬁcation of production—it is important to recognize the characteristics of places that are now forming theirown identities. In the context of post-tobacco agricultural restructuring
and attempts to promote direct farm product sales, I argue that the signiﬁcance of place for selling Kentucky food products will be criticalbeyond relying on the idea of the local scale. The shift from tobaccodependent agriculture to rapid increases of alternative non-traditional
products such as fruits and vegetables has expanded the number of direct
sale opportunities such as farmers’ markets. This has offered broader
access to “local” food for both producers and consumers. In order toadopt food localism as one of the ways to support small farms in

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Kentucky, however, the meanings of “local” scale need to be examinedfurther, as interpretations and the value of the scale vary across the range
of involved actors. Kentucky has 120 counties, the third largest number
after Texas and Georgia, and each county has distinctive characteristics.
In that sense, clearly, the unique characteristics of distinct places, as they
emerge in space at the intersection of social relations and identities,29
will be critical to the successful production of diverse “local foods” inthe 120 counties of Kentucky. To illustrate, all farmers’ markets in
Kentucky may be selling tomatoes, but not all markets and not all tomatoes are the same because place matters to production, distribution, marketing, and consumption of food.
Contextually speaking, the same thing can be said of any other market in the United States. From California to New Jersey, numerous farmers’ markets exist nationwide across each state, but each has different
rules for deﬁning market rules and what qualiﬁes as the scale of “local.”As I mentioned in the beginning, however, we tend to neglect theconnections between what is grown and where it is grown and how a
product is branded as “local.” Why are cantaloupes produced in Posey
County, Indiana regarded as more special than “Kentucky Proud” cantaloupes? From the standpoint of supporting small farms and providing
fresh produce, “local food” will continue to play an important role in the
US food system. An increase in publications that advocate the “local
food movement” in the United States reﬂects these trends.30 But the word“local” is not innocent: it can be used for various political ends by those
who try to (and who have the ability to) determine its meaning.31 An
understanding beyond the deﬁnition of “local” scale in food becomes
important not only for researchers but also for producers and state governments who are involved in policy making for restructuring processes. The examples from Kentucky that I have discussed in this paper only
tell us that we have a lot more to investigate in order to understand thesigniﬁcance and multiple meanings of “local food” in the United States.

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NOTES
1
Richard Pillsbury and John Florin, Atlas of American Agriculture: The American
Cornucopia (New York, NY: Simon & Schuster McMillan, 1996); Willard W.
Cochrane, The Development of American Agriculture: A Historical Analysis, 2nd ed.,(Minneapolis, Minn: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).
2
John Fraser Hart, The Changing Scale of American Agriculture (Charlottesville, Va:
University of Virginia Press, 2003).
3
For example, Alessandro Bonnano, Lawrence Busch, William Friedland, Lourdes
Gouveia, and Enzo Mingione, eds., From Columbus to Conagra: The Globalization ofAgriculture and Food (Lawrence, Kans: University Press of Kansas, 1994); David
Goodman and Michael J. Watts, eds., Globalising Food: Agrarian Questions and Global
Restructuring (London, UK: Routledge, 1997); Peter Atkins and Ian Bowler, Food inSociety: Economy, Culture, Geography (London, UK: Arnold, 2001); David Goodman
and E. Melanie Dupuis, “Knowing Food and Growing Food: Beyond the ProductionConsumption Debate in the Sociology of Agriculture,” Sociologia Ruralis 42, no. 1(2000): 6–23.
4
Helena Norberg-Hodge, Todd Merriﬁeld, and Steven Gorelick, Bringing the Food
Economy Home: Local Alternatives to Global Agribusiness (Bloomﬁeld, Conn.:
Kumarian Press, 2002).
5
Richard Ulack, Karl Raitz, and Gyula Pauer, eds., Atlas of Kentucky (Lexington,
Ky: University Press of Kentucky, 1998).
6
Bill Estep and Jack Brammer, “Tobacco Settlement Division is Reached: State Fund
Would Get 65% with 35% Sent to Counties,” Lexington Herald-Leader, 13 April 2000;
Marcus Green, “Farm Ventures May Yield Bounty,” Louisville Courier-Journal, 7 July
2003.
7
Department of Agriculture, 2002 Census of Agriculture: United States Summaryand State Data Volume 1, Geographic Area Series (Washington, DC., 2004), 227–35.
8
Claire C. Hinrichs, “Embeddedness and Local Food Systems: Notes on Two Typesof Direct Agricultural Market,” Journal of Rural Studies 16, no. 2 (2000): 295–303.
9
Green, “Farm Ventures May Yield Bounty,”; Joann Loviglio (AP), “Farmers Markets
Sprouting—Growers, Shoppers Enjoy Beneﬁts of Dealing Direct,” Lexington HeraldLeader, 7 June 2005; US Department of Agriculture, “Kentucky Farmers Market,” 11September 2003, http://www.ams.usda.gov/farmersmarkets/States/Kentucky.htm (retrievedon May 1, 2006).
10
Jim Duncan, “Place,” in Dictionary of Human Geography, eds. R. J. Johnston, Derek
Gregory, Geraldine Pratt, and Michael Watts (Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishers, 2000),
582–84.
11
Gareth Enticott, “Lay Immunology, Local Foods and Rural Identity: Defending
Unpasteurised Milk in England,” Sociologia Ruralis 43, no. 3 (2003): 257–70; Michael
Winter, “Embeddedness, the New Food Economy and Defensive Localism,” Journal of
Rural Studies 19, no. 1 (2003): 23–32.
12Department of Agriculture, 2002 Census of Agriculture, 227–35.
13
Department of Agriculture, 2002 Census of Agriculture: Kentucky State and County
Data (Washington, DC., 2004).
14
Don Shakow, “The Municipal Farmer’s Market as an Urban Service,” Economic
Geography 57, no. 1 (1981): 68–77.

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TARO FUTAMURA

Jane Pyle, “Farmers’ Markets in the United States: Functional Anachronisms,”
Geographical Review 61, no. 2 (1971): 167–97.
16
Allison Brown, “Counting Farmers Markets,” Geographical Review 91, no. 4(2001): 655–74. Currently the Agricultural Marketing Service of the US Department ofAgriculture has a nationwide directory that is available online.
http://www.ams.usda.gov/farmersmarkets/map.htm (retrieved on September 1, 2006)17
Kentucky Department of Agriculture. 2006. Kentucky Farmers’ Market Directory.
http://www.kyagr.com/mkt_promo/hort/programs/hort/farmer_mkt/documents/fmdirectory.htm (retrieved on May 5, 2006).
18
Richard Ulack, Karl Raitz, and Gyula Pauer, ed., Atlas of Kentucky (Lexington, Ky:
University Press of Kentucky, 1998), 155–66.
19
Author’s ﬁeld notes (April 26, 2003; August 2, 2003).
20
Lexington Farmers Market E-mail Newsletter, 4 September 2003. Available uponrequest.
21
Aurora S. Hodgson and Christine M. Bruhn, “Geographical Names on ProductLabels: Consumer Attitudes toward Their Use,” Food Technology 46, no. 2 (1992):
83–89.
22
Katherine T. Jones, “Scale as Epistemology,” Political Geography 17, no. 1 (1998):
25–28; Sallie A. Marston, “The Social Construction of Scale,” Progress in Human Geography 24, no. 2 (2000): 219–42; Neil Smith, “Geography, Difference and the Politics
of Scale,” in Postmodernism and the Social Sciences, eds. John Doherty, Elspeth Grahamand Mo Malek (New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1992), 57–79; Neil Smith, “Scale,”in The Dictionary of Human Geography, eds. R.J. Johnston, Derek Gregory, Geraldine
Pratt, and Michael Watts (Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishers, 2000), 724–27.
23
Claire C. Hinrichs, “Embeddedness and Local Food Systems: Notes on Two Typesof Direct Agricultural Market,” Journal of Rural Studies 16, no. 2 (2000): 295–303.
24
Enticott, “Lay Immunology, Local Foods and Rural Identity: Defending Unpasteurised
Milk in England.”
25
Author’s ﬁeld notes from Farmers Market Summit hosted by Kentucky Departmentof Agriculture, March 25, 2006. On the issue of “defensive localism,” also see Michael
Winter, “Embeddedness, the New Food Economy and Defensive Localism,” Journal of
Rural Studies 19, no. 1 (2003): 23–32.
26
Eric Schlosser, Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal, (Boston,
Mass: Houghton Mifﬂin, 2001).
27
Rebecca Glasscock, “The Long Road to Kentucky: A Geography of Fresh Vegetable Production and Consumption,” (Ph.D. diss., University of Kentucky, 2002), 205–
38.
28
Lucy Jarosz, “Understanding Agri-Food Networks as Social Relations,” Agricultureand Human Values 17, no. 3 (2000): 279–83.
29
Jim Duncan, “Place.” Gregory, Geraldine Pratt, and Michael Watts (Oxford, UK:
Blackwell Publishers, 2000), 582–84.
30
Brian Halweil, Eat Here: Reclaiming Homegrown Pleasures in a Global Supermarket, (New York, NY: Norton, 2004); Gary P. Nabhan, Coming Home to Eat: The
Pleasures and Politics of Local Foods, (New York, NY: Norton, 2002); Norberg-Hodge,
et al., Bringing the Food Economy Home, to name a few. In addition, Wendell Berry’s
critiques on industrial agriculture and call for supporting local farms should not be
missed: Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture, 3d ed.,(San Francisco, Calif.: Sierra Club Books, 1997).

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E. Melanie DuPuis and David Goodman, “Should We Go ‘Home’ to Eat?: Towarda Reﬂexive Politics of Localism,” Journal of Rural Studies 21, no. 3 (2005): 359–71.