Cultural Scale and Food System Sustainability in the Pacific Northwest: Columbia Basin Case Studies

Troy M. Wilson

To meet contemporary goals of long-term food system sustainability it is critical to analyze how people have constructed and maintained food cultures in specific geographic regions through time. This dissertation draws on theories of scale, nature, and place to examine the unique ecological relationships, practices, and social-political connections underlying existing and pre-existing food cultures in the Columbia Basin of the Pacific Northwest. Columbia Basin peoples have produced and participated in a partially overlapping succession of three historically and ecologically distinctive food cultures: tribal, industrial, and civic. For more than 10,000 years, Plateau peoples practiced a tribal food culture based on non-market subsistence fishing, gathering, and hunting. Wide-ranging seasonal and geographic variation in the quality and quantity of subsistence resources stimulated a very mobile Plateau food culture upheld by cultural patterns of movement and exchange throughout the entire region. Upon Euro-American settlement, a commercial industrial food culture quickly developed, characterized by intensive irrigation, factory farming techniques, increased yields, product standardization, rapid environmental decline, corporate consolidation, and a reliance on fossil-fuel. Despite the rapid and recent development of this globally-orchestrated food system, Columbia Basin peoples have recently grown more concerned with food quality, security, and community well-being, developing a civic (or local) food culture alongside (rather than replacing) the industrial food system. Sharing the small spatial scale of tribal food culture and the commercial-orientation of today's dominant, industrial food culture, civic food culture is characterized by farmers' markets and community gardens, smaller-scale production methods, and its central role in today's localism movement. Throughout case studies of each Columbia Basin food culture, this dissertation demonstrates how an understanding of the principles of scale explains how tribal food culture persevered for millennia, why industrial food culture has become unsustainable, and where civic food cultures may develop. Finally, this work draws on its own historical and cross-cultural case studies to examine the localism movement and the potential for constructing local and regional food systems.

Cultural Scale and Food System Sustainability in the Pacific Northwest: Columbia Basin Case Studies

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