Thinking locally

by Julie Cummins

I spend more time thinking about food than I spend eating it. I shared dinner with a friend the other day, and at the end she commented that it was nice to hang out with someone else who could pass a couple of hours talking about nothing but food. I said, "We didn't talk about food the whole time!" But when I looked back on our conversation, I realized that she was right. Food pervades my consciousness the way oxygen permeates the air.

I went to three food-related talks in the last week and a half. From the local to the global, they gave me even more food for thought. Here's a summary what I learned about local eating:
1. Eating local is a privilege
2. Eating local helps transform the global food system
3. Eating local is not the only answer; policy change must accompany changes in consumer behavior
4. The 2007 Farm Bill is the biggest opportunity we've had in a long time for a change in food policy.

To explain further...
Eating local is a privilege. Let me expand that to say that, sadly, simply having enough to eat is a privilege. In the US over 30 million people go hungry every day. The number in San Francisco is 150,000. Globally, over 800 million people are hungry. But even those who have enough food to eat do not always have access to fresh, healthy food, and even fewer have an easy source of the locally grown bounty I (almost) take for granted. Food deserts--areas where people experience physical and economic barriers to accessing healthy food--are common in low-income areas. For example, in the the Bayview-Hunters Point neighborhood of San Francisco, there is only one grocery store, and now a farmers' market. It is much more convenient for the 33,000 residents to shop at the over 40 liquor stores in the area. I am so fortunate to be able to snack on a pear grown by someone I know and to bypass the Jif at the supermarket in favor of locally-produced almond butter.

Eating local helps transform the global food system. Consumer demand really does make a difference. There are now 4,000 farmers' markets across the US--twice as many as there were 10 years ago. Consumer demand is driving nationwide retailers and distributors to supply locally grown produce. Both Whole Foods and the giant food distributor Sysco have announced local purchasing initiatives (disclaimer: I don't know whether Whole Foods is walking the talk. Does anyone know? I also don't know whether Sysco's program is working. It is being piloted in New Mexico, and it sounds like it is hitting some snags).

For better or for worse, people are thinking about where their food comes from, and even corporate food giants are listening. Here's an inspiring story told by Michael Pollan: The GMO potato was pulled from the market because of consumer pressure. Consumers told McDonalds (and Frito-Lay and other potato chip companies) that they didn't want GMO fries and chips. Since the genetically engineered potatoes weren't better or cheaper, the food giants switched back to conventional potatoes. Without a market, Monsanto stopped selling the GMO potato altogether.

Eating local is not the only answer. While voting with your fork is an important way to bring about change, a major transformation of our food system will also depend on shifts in policy. According to Christopher Cook, the root cause of most of the problems with our food system is the corporate stranglehold over every aspect of our food. The loss of small family farms, poor farmworker conditions, the unwanted substances in our food, the long distance our food travels from farm to plate, and many other woes can all be traced back to the profit motive of the companies that control our food chain. If we want to see a food system that supports human and environmental health, we need to vote with our fork and support policies that incentivize good agricultural and corporate practices.

The enormity of the problem can be overwhelming. We can't expect to change everything overnight; we need to think of it as a long-term project. We all have the power to chip away at the problem. That's how social movements operate: slowly change public opinion and policy, with the eventual result that certain things are no longer acceptable.

The 2007 Farm Bill is, according to Ralph Grossi of the American Farmland Trust, "the best opportunity in a generation to change the way the public funds agriculture." This 100-billion-dollar bill, half of which goes to farm subsidies and other agricultural programs and half to nutrition programs such as WIC, will be passed in late summer 2007. The bulk of the agricultural half goes to subsidizing commodity crops: corn, soybeans, wheat, rice and cotton. The congressional committees that work to formulate each new Farm Bill are generally stacked in favor of the status quo, and little changes from year to year, though the last Farm Bill was the biggest one to date. This time, however, the amount of interest in food and farming is unprecedented, and there is tremendous potential for change. Now is the time to contact our members of congress and let them know that we care about farm policy. What if the money could be directed to programs that were truly of the highest public benefit?

For regular updates on US farm policy: http://farmpolicy.com/

The speakers who inspired these thoughts are:
-Ralph Grossi of American Farmland Trust, talk summarized here by DairyQueen of The Ethicurean
-Percy Schmeiser with Michael Pollan and Ignacio Chapela. Video podcast should be available soon.
-Eating locally, thinking globally: a panel discussion with Christopher Cook, author of Diet for A Dead Planet; San Francisco Supervisor Sophie Maxwell; Eric Holt-Gimenez, Executive Director of Food First; Gwendolyn Smith from Literacy for Environmental Justice; and Paula Jones of San Francisco Food Systems. Moderated by Temra Costa of Community Alliance with Family Farmers.

Julie Cummins lives in Oakland, CA and is Director of Education for the Center for Urban Education about Sustainable Agriculture (CUESA).

Comments

[Tana]

Excellent post and information. Thank you.

[jen maiser]

Great post, Julie. Thanks. I really need to start paying attention to the Farm Bill, and appreciate those links. I hope we can continue to spotlight that here.

Another great link is the Commonwealth Club's Food Politics discussion which was moderated by you!

I was just thinking about this post this a.m. when your lovely voice came across my iPod on that podcast. I'm terrible about linking to podcasts, but you can search for "Commonwealth Club" on the iTunes store to find it.

[Sarah (Mrs. Irani)]

Great post! I am curious about the bill. How will it help the small family farmers? One thing we need is a different set of laws governing small farming operations. Right now, the USDA approved slaughter houses are too expensive and expansive for a family farm to afford. Also, the raw milk issue. There is demand for safe raw milk, but states are so strict about it.

[Julie Cummins]

Jen, thanks for the plug! You can listen to the Commonwealth talk via streaming audio or subscribe to the podcast here: http://www.commonwealthclub.org/broadcast/index.php#podcast

Sarah, you pose an important question. The current Farm Bill doesn't do much to help small farmers. I think that's one reason it's important to advocate for some change. The vast majority of the funds (I think he said over 90%) support large commodity programs. One thing American Farmland Trust is proposing is a block grant program that would allocate funding to states, who could then issue the funds to worthy projects such as farmers' markets, CSA programs, etc. These could potentially help small farmers. AFT is also calling for a green payments program that would offer rewards for environmental stewardship. There are already some environmental programs in the Farm Bill (about 3% of the funds), but there's not enough money to fulfill all the requests. Does anyone know if any of these Conservation Title funds go to small farms?

[Marc]

Thanks for a very thoughtful post. It is good to be reminded that I need to be grateful for my local food resources---this week especially. And thinking about this reminds me that I should give generously to my favorite food-related charities.

There is a "factor of 1000" typo in your post in the farm bill section. You wrote that the Farm Bill spends $100 million, but in fact it allocates spending in the billions. The current farm bill (passed in 2002) allocated about $40 billion per year (reference:10-year estimate in a CRS report). My earlier post at ELC gives some more details on how the Farm Bill spends our money (and---thanks to deficit spending---the as-yet-unearned money of our children, grandchildren and probably great-grandchildren).

[Alan Whitaker]

Why don't we take it one step further and abolish the Department of Agriculture? Restrict imports and use tariffs to keep excessively cheap foodstuffs out of our supply chain. For every dollar of imported food, the domestic price slips.

[Julie Cummins]

Marc, thanks for catching my error! The number that Ralph Grossi gave is not $100 million but $100 billion. (I'd better go back and change that). Your July post spells it all out in much more specific detail. Thanks!

Alan- the cheap foodstuffs are not just coming from overseas, but rather from subsidies of our own commodity products. Our subsidies are also having a global effect, contributing to poverty around the world because many farmers can't compete with heavily subsidized US commodity crops.

[Erika]

There was a great post on Wired News about "locavores." Unfortunately, some ignorant person posted this in reply:

"This is just the first step in a broader "Localisation" philosophy which includes the following:

-Only drink water from wells in a 100 miles radius. River water is usually not ok, except if you live within 100 miles of its source.
-Restrict your reading to books written by your 20 immediate neighbours
-Use locally produced soap, shampoo, toilet paper and detergent.
-If it didn't happen within 100 miles, it's not important. Cancel your national newspaper subscriptions.
-Listen exclusively to live local music. Unless you live in an oil rich area, the plastic in your CDs and electronics probably came from elsewhere, so throw them away.
-Use means of transportation produced locally in their entirety. Once you try them, you will find that stone wheeled carriages are not that bad after all.
-Change your wardrobe to animal skin or locally extracted fiber. No silk though, Silkworms are originally from china.
-Get rid of your satellite receiver. You don't need that for watching locally produced content.
-Do not have any contact with individuals born outside the 100 mile radius zone. This will become easier as more people apply the next rule.
-Do not venture under any circumstances outside your 100 mile radius zone (measured from the place your were born)

Before objecting that this way of life is impossible to follow, you must note that it has already been fully and successfully adopted by a large population: medieval peasants"

It was funny at first, and then started to get extremely over the top. Someone else later on posted that that person had "done an comprehensive, and excellent, job of mocking you self-inflating enviro-heroes. Letting the gas out of you guys is necessary; it's nice to see that it can be done artfully."

It made me so angry! I controlled myself in the response, being very civil and explaining there is much more to it than the environment, that they should understand what it's about first before being so incredibly judgemental. I just could not believe this. How can people think this way?