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Although proponents of sustainable agriculture marched under the organic banner for over half a century, changes facilitated by the NOP led some to abandon both the term and key elements of organic movement strategy. There are now three discernable branches of the sustainable agriculture movement. The local food or slow food wing focuses on developing local food networks such as farmers markets and community supported agriculture programs. Advocates hold that closer connections between farmers and consumers are sufficient to ensure the integrity of growing practices. A second branch has created alternative privately run standards and certification schemes, some focused specifically on sustainable agriculture and others addressing environmental or social concerns not addressed by the National Organic Program. Proponents believe that consumers need third party verification, but that the state is too bureaucratic and corrupt to play this role. A third faction remains committed to protecting and strengthening the NOP. These activists have developed formal organizations with lobbying capacity and a state centered approach in order to safeguard the system into which so much time and energy has been invested.

We might not live in a sustainable age, but we’re living in the age of sustainability. The movement has gained a level of prominence in recent years that is difficult to dispute. The scholarly fields associated with sustainability have expanded dramatically; new tools and methods have appeared that help define, measure, and assess sustainability; and a broad range of organizations and communities have embraced the principles of sustainable living. Sustainability, in fact, has gone from marginal ecological idea to mainstream movement in a surprisingly short amount of time. We now see sustainability publicized at the supermarket, on university campuses, at the aquarium, in corporate headquarters, in government ministries, and in countless other places. A growing number of universities, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and corporations in the Western world possess an “office of sustainability”— replete with sustainability plans and guidebooks—but none have an “office of green radicalism” or an “office of the status quo.” In a sense, this environmental discourse has won out over rival conceptions of humanity’s relationship to the natural world. This chapter is an attempt to sketch out the different ways in which sustainability has gained a foothold in contemporary society. It is not meant to suggest that our world is sustainable. On the contrary, many barriers and entrenched interests have kept our world rather unsustainable, and Mathis Wackernagel has even argued that, since the 1990s, we have exceeded the Earth’s capacity to sustain us; we are now living in a state of global overshoot. The goal here, rather, is to show the ways in which our society has constructively responded to our ecological crisis—to demonstrate the growth and elaboration of the sustainability movement and describe some of the successes it has achieved in counteracting our bad habits. As the philosophy of sustainability has developed, so too has it expanded its scope. If we recall from earlier chapters, the concept of sustainability began in the eighteenth century as a method of managing forests, and by the 1960s and 1970s it had become a reaction to industrialism and the trend toward ecological overshoot.

The dominant themes in contemporary Kentucky cookbooks are the local sourcing of ingredients and the related idea of a sustainable food system. Some cookbook authors clearly advocate the seasonality associated with eating locally. In a way, the food system has come full circle: both the first and last Kentucky cookbooks emphasize locally sourced foods—but of course, with radical differences.