Even the most ardent free marketer would not go so far as to say that Bill Gates or T. Boone Pickens has the right to own the oxygen we breathe or the words we use. Although some forms of water privatization and genetic patenting have become issues, popular opinion still demands the fundamentals of life should be shielded somewhat from the realm of buying and selling. (That’s why prostitution and the selling of organs for transplant are illegal most places.)

With one notable exception: food. As essential to our lives as air or water, food nonetheless has been widely accepted as a private commodity. It is grown, processed, packaged and sold for a profit, usually by large corporations. Few look upon it as a commons, of which everyone rightly deserves a share.

But for more than 35 years, one woman has courageously carried the message that food is more than simply another consumer product.

She is Frances Moore Lappé, author of Diet for a Small Planet and founder of the Institute for Food and Development Policy, who overturned the conventional wisdom that hunger and starvation are caused by a shortage of food. She has patiently but forcefully made the case that people go hungry because of inequality and greed in the distribution of food.

Lappé’s influence has been immense—in promoting vegetarian and whole grains diets, in broadening the scope of democracy, in opening up thinking about international food production and marketing systems. Yet she’s not convinced everyone.

A lot of news coverage on the recent food shortages around the world did not discuss agriculture, trade and social policies that keeps food out of the hands of people, but rather blamed the crisis on “not enough food to feed empty stomachs.”

That phrase came from a reporter for National Public Radio, who in a 4-part series championed pesticides, artificial fertilizer and genetically-modified seeds as the solution to food shortages and the impoverishment of small farmers around the world.

“NPR misses the real story,” Lappé writes in a blog on the Huffington Post. “On every continent one can find empowered rural communities developing GM-free, agro-ecological farming systems. They’re succeeding. The largest overview study, looking at farmers transitioning to sustainable practices in 57 countries, involving almost 13 million small farmers on almost 100 million acres, found after four years that average yields were up 79 percent.

“All over the world,” she continues, “poor farming communities are discovering their own power to work with each other and with nature to build healthier, more secure, and more democratic lives.”

Although Lappé doesn’t use the c-word, that sounds like a good working definition for an international food commons.

For more information see the Small Planet Institute

It is tempting to dismiss locally grown food as just another elite fashion, as many people surely will. But it is also true that wealthy households are often the first to validate broader market trends.

Consider it another chapter in the ongoing dance between the commons and the market. The commons lovingly advances a new ideal – in this case, the ecological virtues, social satisfactions and great taste of locally grown food. And then, after years of hippies, homesteaders and eco-evangelists beating the drum for this new ideal below the radar screen of mainstream culture, entrepreneurs suddenly get hip to what’s going on and swoop in to make money from a grassroots trend.

Photo by asmart42, via Flickr, licensed under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND license.

Some things never change. We are at that special inflection point in the evolution of social attitudes that are mysteriously propelling the rise of a new market niche. Its customers, the aficionados of local food, even have a name – “locavores.” There are also novel sorts of new businesses.

As the Times reports, Trevor Paque has made a business in San Francisco planting vegetable gardens for affluent suburbanites who want to eat garden-grown food, but who don’t like to garden. So Trevor does the planting, weeding and harvesting. A company called FruitGuys will deliver boxes of locally grown, sustainably raised or organic fruit to people in San Francisco and Philadelphia.

Soon mega-millionaires like Bill O’Reilly and Rush Limbaugh will rail against the trendiness of local food. That’s their schtick, after all – to invent elite foils for themselves so that they can cast themselves as Main Street populists. Real Republicans only eat red meat and potatoes, it would seem.

This is just a shell game in the culture wars, however. I am convinced that local food is going to become a steady, long-term growth market. For its taste, cost and eco-friendliness, local food has already become a symbol of social virtue. People are starting to realize that it is not so good for the planet to haul meat from New Zealand, wheat from South Dakota and fruit from Caifornia. Social demand and sheer economics are starting to buoy local growers, and supermarkets are looking for new ways to call attention to their local produce. The trend lines are clear.

The spending of local money for local produce is surely a virtuous cycle for local economies. It is also likely to promote greater personal connections among people locally, stronger commitments to one’s local community, and a more stable and diverse local economy.

Two days after filing the local foods article, Kim Severson, the same Times reporter who wrote about the elite embrace of local foods, had another piece about the upcoming an upcoming festival called Slow Food Nation. The event, to be held in downtown San Francisco over Labor Day weekend, will feature pavilions devoted to foods like pickles, coffee and salami. A quarter-acre patch of the lawn in front of City Hall has been ripped up to grow a garden.

Slow Food Nation is an ambitious attempt by Slow Food USA, the American spinoff of the Italy-born Slow Food movement, to establish itself as a recognized political and cultural force. Organizers hope the festival will be, in the words of Severson, “the Woodstock of food, a profound event where a broad band of people will see that delicious, sustainably produced food can be a prism for social, ecological and political change.”

I am sure that certain elements of the Slow Food world will behave like effete connoisseurs and fawn over the local argula and goat cheese. But really, is that so bad? Why shouldn’t people start to express their affection and appreciation for local food? If cultural snobs and the wealthy can embrace a populist trend without coopting it – validating it with their presence and boosting it with their dollars – I say, bring ‘em on. Let everyone celebrate the taste of local food – and then move on to the political and economic realities that sustain it.

If local food is going to be a victim of identity politics, let it be a politics of localism: “We all live here together, so let’s find the way to support the farmers who are our neighbors.”