Locavore
Drum roll please…
…The New Oxford American Dictionary has announced that its Word Of The Year is Locavore.
Tah Dah! A Locavore means someone who eats locally grown food.
I can’t help but think the selection of this word was highly influenced by the general popularity of “organic” food and America’s ever-increasingly burdensome industry of food production. Certainly, we will eventually grow weary of the E. Coli outbreaks, the threats of Avian Flu and mad cow disease and eating locally will become not an idle interest and ideal but a necessity for survival. Once gas prices get high enough we won’t be able to afford food shipped across the country and definitely not across an ocean.
Specifically, I’m sure the choice of Locavore also had a lot to do with the successes of Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and, of course, the one that started it all, Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation.
Locavore is a good word, a fine word, a relevant and significant word. The above books are only a mere sampling but indicative of the beginning of a sea change about how we as a culture are thinking about our food.
So I’m fine with the selection of Locavore as a Word Of The Year, whatever exactly a word of the year is.
However socially conscious and culturally relevant Locavore happens to be, it just doesn’t have the punch or controversy of the American Dialect Society’s choice in 2006: “plutoed,” to demote or devalue someone or something, as happened to the former planet Pluto.
w00t w00t - is all I can say about the selection of locavore, AuthWhore.