Blessing the Hands that Feed Us (32 page)

Freedom!

Rebellion—protesting a system you abhor—is political. But freedom—liberating yourself from the shackles of whatever you let control you—is spiritual. Seed, soil, sunlight, and water offer you freedom from dependency and freedom to participate in feeding yourself. If you cannot grow your own food, if you don't know any farmers whose food you can buy, if you are utterly dependent on supermarkets and takeout, then you are a prisoner of the industrial food system. Eating local food puts your money into nourishing local production for local consumption. It frees you and your community from unnecessary dependencies.

Seven Reasons Why We as a Society Should Eat Local Food

Fertility

Once embarked on my local food quest, I wanted to expand my own gardening knowledge. I attended a class on biodynamic farming, expecting a lecture on techniques but getting an hour lecture on “fertility,” which is, the lecturer said, a byproduct of the natural vitality of the life of the soil. We don't
put
fertility
into
soil; soil has it and we just have to encourage it. We cooperate with fertility by making a hospitable home for soil critters and water flow and sun, by treating the soil well. Most industrial farming diminishes fertility . . . and then uses fossil fuel to manufacture “fertilizer.” But the earth is naturally fertile. As life cycles through it, the fertility even increases! I realized I no longer thought about land as fertile. I thought about fertilizing land, either through chemicals or compost. I thought of fertility as an additive, not as a characteristic of life. I presumed fertility gets used up, and needs to be topped off by human intervention. But this biodynamic teacher turned everything on its head. Fertility is not scarce; it is everywhere.

Biodynamic farmers work with the fertility of the land through love and attention—as well as cow manure and special kinds of biodynamic preparations. Small-scale farmers who serve their communities, family farmers who grow for their regions, build the fertility of their soils through tending, through relationship. It may not be certified organic soil—as I said earlier, the little guy often deems certification too costly and their loyal customers know their practices are organic—but it is “relational soil,” teeming with life. These soil organisms are the ultimate “farm animals.” When you buy local food you are supporting farmers who support the fertility of their land. If people in community everywhere did the same, we would, from the bottom up, green the earth.

Security

Your local food supply cannot easily be disrupted by terrorism. It wouldn't even be on the enemy's radar—it's too small a target. It wouldn't likely be curtailed by supply-chain failures or tainted by botulism (well, if you don't take care with canning you can do this to yourself, but you'd know before you opened the jar). Unless your microclimate takes an irremediable turn for the worse, your food supply won't be choked off due to climate events. Recall the story of food riots in Mozambique when Russia stopped exporting wheat after an unprecedented heat wave ignited fires, burning much of their crop.

Rising oil prices might also impact your food security. The debate is not whether we'll run through the easy and cheap oil and be left with the difficult to exploit and costly oil—it's just when this will happen and what will replace it.

We the eaters of the United States have little comprehension of what peak oil means for our daily bread. Oil is everywhere in the industrial food system. It runs our farm machinery—tractors, seeders, weeders, harvesters, combines, and even airplanes to spray the herbicides and pesticides. It is the raw material for fertilizer and many other agricultural chemicals. It is used as a fuel for picking, processing, packaging, shipping, and delivery to stores we get to in our cars. What a miracle. What a victory for human cleverness. Yet what a vulnerability.

When Russia cut oil exports in half after the 1990 collapse of the Soviet Union, Cuba's economy went into a tailspin. Their fossil-fuel-intensive food system nearly collapsed, and the nation mobilized to grow food in every square inch of the cities.

The good news from Cuba is that necessity was the mother of a great deal of creativity and community. With the strength of government mandates and their own ingenuity, Cubans transitioned from a highly mechanized, industrial agricultural system to one using organic methods of farming and local, urban gardens. They didn't go all the way back to the horse and plow—they used fuel precisely where it was needed and applied their ingenuity to finding elegant ways to produce ample food using traditional methods. They moderated their expectations too—becoming less enslaved to the “more is better” mind-set. And they worked. And they ate less. And they lost weight. And they were still plenty healthy, aided by establishing—in their times of constraint, even—universal health care. They became a people working together, and they survived.

Relational eating, being an “eater-in-community,” can settle our fears about being fed on every level. When you have no relationship with food other than the megamart, you seem well supplied but are helpless without that store. When you stand in the middle of a living food system, growing some, trading some, buying some local and some from afar, you have more power to assure that you are fed—and fed well. Relational eating doesn't necessarily mean local food; it means that you, the eater, understand your place in the world.

Local Prosperity

Buy Local campaigns ask people to spend their national currency locally, circulating dollars through their neighbors' wallets rather than through the coffers of distant multinational corporations. Local farmers are businesses, so spending your dollars with them means those same dollars will probably pass through the tills of the feed store, the local restaurants, the local thrift store, and more. Some say money is like manure—it's good only if you spread it around. Buying from local growers fertilizes the local economy. This is good.

Farmland

Preserving agricultural lands—keeping them from becoming shopping plazas or strip malls—requires more than individual eaters putting their mouths on the line. Your eating a local rutabaga doesn't of itself do anything to protect farmland, but it is likely to increase your commitment to preserving farmland (through investing, donating, volunteering, advocating, activism, organizing) now that you recognize how crucial it is to your well-being. In the industrial mind-set, farmland is like everything else: invisible and someone else's responsibility. We imagine rolling fields and red barns, and small blond children in pinafores running in the meadow with dandelions held high like pinwheels. The closest we get to this bucolic image, though, is a Sunday drive in the country—or playing the Internet game FarmVille.

In communities across North America, organizations are working to keep farmland out of development and in agricultural productivity. For example, the Ebey's Landing National Historical Reserve on Whidbey Island resulted from a unique partnership to preserve prime farmland, working farms, and the history of farming on the island. Likewise, the Marin Agricultural Land Trust in California raises money to conserve farmland, protecting it from development. I found that making a commitment to local food soon leads to the “hard stuff”—finding mechanisms to protect farmland and support farmers. At this writing I have one loan out to a farmer; payback is scheduled for three years and I'm taking my interest in vegetables. My community has developed an innovative lending mechanism—relocalizing is becoming everyone's business.

Bringing this issue really close to home, I live on the edge of a few of the original local farms. The town has crept up the hill from the water's edge, yet several pastures remain where sheep, horses, and cows graze and hay is cut in the summer. When the matriarch of one of the families finally passed away in 2005, and it was possible that their farm would also pass, into a subdivision, the family instead chose to make it a community asset. Dorothy Anderson, granddaughter of Anders and Bertine Anderson, who arrived in Langley in 1907, set aside a chunk of her family's twenty acres to be used for the city's first community garden. Dorothy is having the time of her life bringing life back to the farm. (There are now goats, steer, and a large field cultivated by Chris Korrow, a biodynamic farmer.) If she had her druthers, we'd all move up there and live together. Talk about relational farming! But mechanisms exist to help owners of farmland to harvest money from their property without selling to developers.

Waste

Both the emotional investment in relational eating and the money investment in buying local makes you far less inclined to waste food.

The industrial system has no such signals. In fact, the more food you buy (whether you eat it or not), the more profit for the producers. If food is cheap, waste is easy.

American per capita food waste increased to more than fourteen hundred calories per person per day in 2009, an increase of approximately 50 percent since 1974. According to Jonathan Bloom, author of
American Wasteland:

We don't eat 25% of the food we buy. We throw away $2,200 each year in uneaten food, from spoilage and plate waste

97% of discarded food ends up in landfills, producing methane, a greenhouse gas 25 times more heat trapping than CO
2

20% of edible meat ends up in landfills.
2

From the
Ecocentric
blog I learned more useful—albeit overly simplified—ways to frame the issue, including:

•
Because we use 10 units of fossil energy to produce one unit of food energy, feeding the population requires 10 percent of the total annual U.S. energy consumption.
3

•
If we wasted just 5 percent less food, it would be enough to feed 4 million Americans; 20 percent less waste could feed 25 million Americans annually.
4

According to Marian Nestle, author, nutritionist, and professor at New York University:

Our version of capitalism requires companies to grow and report growth to Wall Street every 90 days. This puts the pressure on short-term, not longer-term, profits. I see that as at the root of a great deal of difficulty in the obesity problem. If companies have to grow, they're going to have to produce and sell more food, not less. But all of them can't succeed in that because we already have too much food—3,900 calories per day per capita in the US, twice the average need. . . . They can make better food, but it doesn't sell as well, it's more expensive to make, and those cheap food products are immensely profitable.
5

This is not just a North American problem; an equal amount of food is also wasted in less-developed countries because it rots in the fields or on the way to market.

Local food does nothing about that problem, but it promotes food conservation.

Kids

Healthy school lunches are now beyond a good idea; they are a shared cause. Alice Waters, who pioneered the use of fresh local ingredients at Chez Panisse in Berkeley, is now pushing for edible school yards where kids get their hands in the dirt, learn about the cycles of life, and put fresh very local food on their lunchroom tables. There are stories like hers all over the country. On Whidbey, teacher Kimmer Morris organized the garden at Langley Middle School so students could learn to garden and love produce; they also send hundreds of pounds of fresh produce to the food bank. Ann Cooper calls herself the renegade lunch lady. She started her quest to combat childhood obesity by serving Long Island kids regional, organic, seasonal, sustainable food—and is now a passionate speaker, writer, author, and crusader for healthy school lunches, struggling against the mighty forces of pink slime (a heat and ammonia-gas-processed beef slaughter byproduct added to some ground beef) and chicken nuggets and ketchup as a vegetable. If you experience the food from your local farmers as more wholesome, nutritious, and delicious than industrial food, you'll want to support kids eating it as well.

The Future!

If you have a concern about the effects of the triple crisis on the generations who will inhabit the earth once we are gone, you want with all your heart to leave this world better than you found it. I've lived that value through my activism, figuratively doing chin-ups on the overconsumption bar trying to lower our collective impact. This has been rewarding and exhausting. I've also run personal experiments in sustainability—and written about it—as well as worked on changing the mind-set of the culture from “more” to “enough.” Maybe you, like me, have battled the forces of decline and are tuckered out, though still in the game. My shift to local food has both settled me down and fired me up. Because I am now grounded and I have energy to give. My work is not abstract—a response to information. My energy doesn't just come from fear or anger—it comes from the actual food as well as the relationships that sustain me.

We've all talked a blue streak about the need for change—and God bless the talkers because they awaken the people. But for me the relational farmers are primary builders of wealth for the generations. Perhaps now, as I approach seventy, I am more aware of the fact that others will inherit the earth. I'm just a word farmer. As a gardener, I dabble. As a local eater, I'm partial but at least aware and intentional. Yet tending my life toward relational eating allows me to be carried along toward the end of my life with great satisfaction. Local food has been a doorway into greater security than I could ever have by buying long-term-care insurance. I am my community's long-term-care insurance, and I'm beginning to really trust that they will be there for me as needed.

You and I don't need to be farmers to get our Girl Scout badge in local food. There are so many ways eaters can influence the future of farming.

We can get politically active. In the next chapter I'll talk more about my own search for policies that support young farmers and policies that liberate local small-scale growers from some of the regulations designed to assure the wholesomeness of industrial food. Your issues may be different, but if you simply pick one farmer to care about, and eat their food while learning about their joys and challenges, you will be on a similar hunt for solutions.