Blessing the Hands that Feed Us (2 page)

I begin with the proposition that eating is an agricultural act. Eating ends the annual drama of the food economy that begins with planting and birth. Most eaters, however, are no longer aware that this is true. They think of food as an agricultural product, perhaps, but they do not think of themselves as participants in agriculture. They think of themselves as “consumers.”

—Wendell Berry, “The Pleasures of Eating,” December 10, 2009,
The Contrary Farmer Blog

“Local food? In New York all food is local. You go down to the street and it's right there.”

—Phyllis Wertzl (Vicki Robin's alter ego)

Introduction

I
n September 2010, I undertook an experiment that turned out to be one of the greatest adventures of my life. It was so small at the start, but it eventually grew—and blew me wide open.

A farmer friend wanted a guinea pig to test whether she could actually feed another human being for a full month from what she could grow on her half acre. I wanted to test, from a sustainability perspective, if we here on Whidbey Island could survive without access to that cornucopia called the grocery store. We called the experiment a 10-mile diet.

I've done other “sustainability as an extreme sport” experiments many times. I've fasted—from food for ten days, from talking for a month, from air travel for a year—anything that would bring me closer to a life of integrity. I think sustainability is meant to be put into practice, not just debated.

The 10-mile diet was simply the next in the series. I did this experiment in hyperlocal eating wholeheartedly in September 2010, on Whidbey Island in Puget Sound in the Pacific Northwest. Whidbey is a gentle place. The island connects to the mainland via a twice-hourly ferry to the south and a bridge to the north, so our culture here is rural with an urban flair. Our climate is moderate. Driving up the long midisland highway, you might think—and tourists do—that it's a bucolic and bountiful land with a few cities strung like precious pearls on a long chain. True, but there is much more to the story.

Almost all of our daily fare comes in on semitrucks on those ferries. Our grocery stores, apparently stocked to the gills, have only a three-day supply of food. If energy prices double again—as they have in the past decade—our transport-dependent pantry might get pretty bare. But what about all that rolling farmland? Some of those crops are for export off island. Some are to feed our animals. Not everyone who owns a farm, farms. What the owners do with their land is up to them, and many who can afford big spreads don't need farming income. Then there is the wild card called climate change. Will the crops that grow well on Whidbey now grow well in the future? This year we had a late blooming summer and then months without rain. At the moment that's a pity for the farmers but not for consumers. Our “local” suppliers are not from here. Grocers buy from whoever has a reliable supply—which could be Thailand or Chile or New Zealand.

Only some Charles Addams ghoulish character would contemplate these uncertainties with delight. Most of us simply don't want to contemplate these conditions at all. After all, what can we do about it? This for me is where the “extreme sport” comes in, the real life game of skillfully reshaping assumptions and choices in light of the most likely scenarios. I know that change can be rapid, unpredictable, thrilling, but not always pleasant. I like to get ahead of the curve and surf. And, knowing my destiny is inextricably linked to my community, I like to build arks, not just surfboards. Call the 10-mile diet prototyping arks.

There is no special virtue in a 10-mile diet. Or a 50-mile or 100-mile diet. The miles are simply markers for something else: bringing our eating closer to home. Why? We have lost touch with “the hands that feed us” to our detriment, and this story is meant to show you what's at the other end of the industrial food scale, to help you see that there are reasonable and heartening alternatives.

This book, then, is not about pious restraint. It is not about sucking it up and making do. It's a banquet of good stories and possible skillful interventions that can tilt us toward food sufficiency. I describe the hows and whys of my 10-mile diet experiment, what I discovered, what I loved, what I hated, what I missed, what I learned, and a level of body and soul satisfaction I barely knew existed. It was only a month of that extreme, but they say new habits take twenty-one days to anchor, and so it was for me.

The 10-mile diet changed me. I blogged every day, diving into food issues, awakening sleeping-beauty skills of cooking and gardening and reengaging with an old passion for social change, sidelined while I recovered from cancer. Best of all, I finally landed somewhere on earth, in a real place with real soil and forests, a real community where I belong the way my skin belongs to me. I am part of life; not at a remove in self-sufficiency but connected in reciprocity, mutuality, and care.

Whidbey was a perfect place to run this experiment. In fact, if I lived across Puget Sound in Seattle, a 10-mile diet would have been far harder. Even with all the backyard gardens there, it's mostly paved and built up. When I lived there, I always had a patch of lettuce and kale in the yard, but little about Seattle says, “Eat here,” so a 10-mile diet might not even have occurred to me. The point, though, isn't for you to replicate what I did. I scouted out a possibility and documented it here because it points at a way out of our dependency on the centralized, industrial scale food system. As you will see, when you look at a broader definition of local food, we can all provision ourselves regionally—if we commit to personal and political change.

I begin the book by telling the story of who I was when I took up the 10-mile diet challenge, including the worldview that primed me to want to do it and the scramble to find the hands that grew the food that would feed me that month. You will meet Tricia, the market gardener who grew most of the food I ate, as well as other gardeners, farmers, and ranchers. Then you will follow, week by week, the ups and downs of my 10-mile month. After it's over, I'll evaluate the experiment, mine the gold. You will also join me on a hunt for answers to the question How dependent are we and do we need to be on the industrial food system to feed ourselves and the world? My tale ends with some key ideas about what weights we can put on the local side of the scale to give regional food systems a larger role in nourishing us all. I refer to these flourishing local food landscapes as “complementary food systems,” not supplanting the global supply chains but expanding consumer food choice. The goal, of course, is fair, affordable, accessible, healthy, delicious, and nourishing food for all. Who could disagree?

You will develop a new sense about feeding yourself, which I call “relational eating.” It is the shift from being a lone eater in the endless food courts of the industrial system, treating the hands that feed you like vending machines, to standing in the middle of your food system, with nourishment all around in the gardens, fields, farms, forests, and waters of your region. You are in relationship with these ever-widening circles of food, from daily habits to windowsill sprouts to backyard vegetable plots to neighborhood farm stands and gardens to the stores, CSA (community supported agriculture) membership farms, farmers' markets, and more in your community, your regional food sheds, and beyond.

I make no effort to be definitive, exhaustive, or authoritative. If I waited for
that,
I'd never give you my mostly baked notions for your investigation. Also, local food is a passion and practice in rapid cultural ascendancy. A book cannot contain all there is to know as the field is changing daily. I'm sure that people in the know will challenge or correct me and that many of my readers have their own stories to tell and expertise to share. Being part of a rising tide of knowledge in the making is part of what makes local food so delicious. We're in this together.

Hope

This is not just a story of food, though. It is a story of rekindling hope at a time when positive change seems harder than ever, when solving our global energy, economic, and environmental issues fairly and squarely seems almost impossible despite how much our politicians try to cheer us up with promises.

I'm a boomer. Those of us who chose to use our postwar birthright of opportunity to change the world made great strides in justice, fairness, environmental protection, and cultural transformation. I and my personal team (the New Road Map Foundation) set ourselves the wee goal of ending overconsumption in North America, of teaching, supporting, and even cajoling people to live within their means. By the end of the last millennium I had to admit that despite writing a best seller, despite the tens of thousands of people who say
Your Money or Your Life
changed their lives, we had failed to reach the larger goal we'd set: that Americans would collectively and voluntarily resize our consumption to what the earth can sustainably provide.

Coming out of my cancer years, the only hope I could see was adaptation to the consequences of inaction and ignorance: a diminished and changing earth. I found the relocalization movement and a pinhole of hope opened. But the 10-mile diet set off a gusher of natural hope, a confidence that the conditions for thriving and resilience are all around us and that food—revitalizing regional food systems—is a collective project worthy of our best efforts.

Is Local for You?

Local uniquely connects you, an eater, with the hands that feed you—your farmer, the food s/he cultivates and harvests, and the place you both live. Every one of us has this opportunity to reinhabit the land that nurtures us—that gives us life.

Before we began to “eat” fossil fuel—before this concentrated energy source changed everything about what and how we eat—most of us were involved in home production—whether growing or preserving or preparing from scratch our daily fare. Two hundred years ago in the United States, local was the way everyone ate, and farming was the primary profession—90 percent of Americans lived on farms. “Takeout”—eating food from nowhere, cooked by people you don't know, put in Styrofoam to eat at home, possibly alone—is not the way any of us had been raised—until now! As much of a miracle as this disconnected way of eating is for busy people who want to do and make and influence more than dinner, we need to acknowledge that it has literally ungrounded us.

Making some small commitment to eating within a radius of where you live is an act of reconnection. It is an act of honoring the hands and lands that feed you. Food becomes where you live and who you live with, not just another consumer item. Thus eating local food becomes ethical and spiritual as well as all the other reasons to do it—sociability of farmers' markets, freshness, unique and diverse cultivars, greater nutrition.

Local also matters in a larger context. Our apparently lush food system is like a giant flower on a spindly stalk. Look at the flower and everything is beautiful and right. Peer underneath at the stalk and you realize how precarious it is. You enjoy the bounty—yet every day you wonder when it will snap. The system itself assures us that nothing is wrong. But we now know that every aspect of that beautiful flower depends on fossil fuel not just to transport crisp apples from New Zealand or grapes from Chile but to fertilize those distant soils and protect those faraway plants from pests and even support the rapid prototyping of new hybrid seeds. New technologies may let us extract more oil now than before, but the basic supply is finite. That voluptuous dahlia of the fresh food section at your Whole Foods market is like a painted curtain or a projected image—real enough, but not really real for really long.

I will introduce you to what
is real
to me—the interesting and informative farmers and gardeners and chefs and institutions of Whidbey Island in the far Northwest of the United States. Meeting them you will see how local works in reality, and the extraordinary joys as well as challenges of rehabilitating local food systems.

Will Local Make You Thin, Rich, Healthy, and Eternal?

Let's get this self-help promise over with. Half a century of relentless advertising and half a millennium (at least) of fire-and-brimstone religion have stoked our darkest fears of being cast out, lonely, sick, rejected, unloved, and vulnerable. We'd buy anything that could save us from that fate, which is truly worse than death.

The self-help industry thrives on these fears and offers personal salvation. Let's see how local measures up.

Want to Get Thin?

Once you participate in growing food or at least in the lives of the farmers who grow your food, you are less likely to waste it.

Industrial food is easy and cheap and loaded with sugar and fat. The “business” of food is profit, so we, the eaters, are cajoled, exhorted, and enticed to eat too much, broadening our bottoms as we feed the corporate bottom line. And food in the United States is surprisingly cheap; no people on earth spend as little as we do on food as a percentage of our budget. This means that we have few speed bumps on our highway to overeating.

On my 10-mile diet I lost six pounds in a month, partly because I ate no grain, but also because I ate with reverence and respect for my “feeders.”

Want to Get Healthy?

Unless you live next to a megafarm, feed lot, or some food-processing plant where one or more of the hundreds of nonfood ingredients found in many food products get added, local food means simpler, more basic, and less toxic food. While this is not a screed against manufactured food, it is an invitation to rethink what, beyond real food, goes into your body and whether those additives are truly necessary for food to be delicious and easy to prepare. I loved the rich, flavorful food I ate in my 10-mile month—and beyond. I had energy all day long—and my bad cholesterol went down and good cholesterol went up.