Sustainability has generally been perceived as a question of better management of and control over nature. Sustainability confronts us with the role of consumer sovereignty and choices in meeting sustainability goals.
Food is the most basic issue in the larger sustainability debate.
While common food systems enable both producers and consumers to borrow assimilative capacity for waste and emissions from people with lower consumption levels and from future generations, in local food markets an attempt is made to confine themselves to the resources and capacities available at the specific time and place at a reasonable rate. These groups express dissatisfaction with the current food production system, and establish more direct links between producers and consumers. By use of Bossel's set of basic orientors, it was found that CSAs have many of the characteristics of a more sustainable food system. The analysis of membership motivations and of the receptivity of expansion of CSAs is based on data collection and investigation of members of a CSA in Upstate New York, and two distinct non-member groups. The member analysis offers an explanation for people's commitment to CSAs and the sustainability goals they stand for.