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Meeting the Challenge of Local Food

Posted on: Friday, 24 March 2006, 09:00 CST

By Bedford, Christopher B

To rebuild community food systems based on local fresh food, the revolution may begin on the farm but it will succeed only in our kitchens.

THE HUNDRED MILE DIET. The 250 mile diet. The Local Food Challenge. Today, eating in the U.S. is becoming a kind of extreme sport ala Fear Factor or Survivor where finding a meal involves a lot more thought and effort than dealing with the choices of a Mc Donald's drive thru menu. In California, in British Columbia, in Minnesota and Oklahoma and numerous other places, consumers are daring to eat cangerously and confine themselves (gasp!) to ONLY eating locally grown food.

In California, a group of "concerned culinary adventurers" called Locavores committed to eat only foods grown or harvested within a 100 radius of San Francisco for one month, August, 2005. As they noted in their blogs, "one can eat royally, every day of the year, on locally grown and produced food," with the virtual cornucopia of foods grown in the San Francisco Bay bioregion.

J.B. MacKinnon and Alisa Smith took the challenge to the next level and lived solely on local food for one month while living in Devil's Elbow in northern British Columbia during a summer holiday. "What amazed us is just how achievable a Hundred-Mile diet actually is here on the 55th parallel - and beyond." The couple feasted on local trout, potatoes, celery, zucchini, moose and deer meat, beans and Saskatoon berries, a local delicacy.

In Northern Minnesota, seven teachers and others associated with White Earth Tribal College spent the summer eating on a 250 mile diet. "We ate very well," said one well fed adventurer.

"The goal is not for this to be a selfflagellating cult," reported Dan Gunderson of Minnesota Public Radio about the experiment. "We want to make this something anyone can do and not feel like they're suffering or sacrificing." Gain with no pain.

Of course, what these culinary adventurers are doing, with much fanfare and news attention, is what their great grandparents did every day - eat food that was produced locally. Two generations ago, virtually everything Americans ate was grown within an overnight train ride from where they lived and often much closer.

The hoopla that surrounds the "eating locally" movement today reflects just how out of balance our nation's food system has become. The US food system's dependence on industrially grown, globally raised produce and animal products makes it fundamentally food insecure - a fact that has profound implications for our economy, our environment, and our health. The local food movement represents a grassroots response to a growing crisis.

THE GREEN REVOLUTION

The story of local food's rebirth in the US begins with its disappearance over 50 years ago. After World War II, the Green Revolution substituted inorganic chemicals, drugs, and other inputs for ten millennia of human knowledge about growing food in balance with nature. The immediate result was a doubling of yields - a miracle that saved an estimated one billion people from starvation in the quarter century from 1945 to 1970 (according to the Nobel Prize Committee in 1970).

This early success bred a five decade long expansion of industrial agriculture, agriculture that, in the words of Professor John Ikerd of the University of Missouri, "was a dead mechanistic system that could be controlled with inputs like a product on an assembly line."

Once industrial techniques appeared to lift farming up above Nature and her processes - particularly Nature's prime directive for relentless expansion of diversity of life through adaptation to place - industrial farming proponents perceived few limits on how far they could go.

Standardized monocultures spread across the globe. Today, industrial interventions in our food supply include massive use of human-needed antibiotics, growth hormones to promote milk production, and direct manipulation of the genetic makeup of crops and food animals.

As "place" (read here "local") became less and less important to the industrial food system in a biological sense, "place" became more important in an "economic" sense. Differences in wage costs, degree of regulation, and government subsidies increasingly made the US food system global in scope as monopoly food corporations sought competitive advantage around the globe. Today, we eat apples from China, asparagus from Peru, blueberries from New Zealand, and even, soybeans from Brazil.

A recent study by the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University of 16 fruits and vegetables consumed in Iowa found that they traveled over 25,000 miles from farm-to-market in the industrial food system. The same fruits and vegetables grown locally traveled a total of 716 miles. In a time when the price of oil is being driven ever higher by rapidly expanding global demand and a static, perhaps declining, global oil supply - the current long distance, oil fueled global food system titters on collapse threatened by failures like Mad Cow and disease like avian flu pandemics as well as the price of the gasoline/diesel pump.

"It is time to reinvent our food system," says educator Paul Keiser of Agriculture Health Alive of Marne, Michigan. "We need to return to a local food system in a balance with Nature. Actually, the need is pretty urgent, given the state of the world today."

GLOBALIZATION PROBLEMS

The potential problems with globalization first came to many Americans' attention through the work of E.F. Schumacher, the author of Small is Beautiful, published in 1973. Schumacher argued that the optimal economic community size had little to do with political boundaries and that intermediate technology was often more appropriate for sustainable growth than advanced technological solutions.

In the early 1970s, Schumacher's vision combined with Robert Rodale's and the Rodale Institute's work on "regenerative agriculture" - an agriculture that renewed and rebuilt soil health while producing food - to help launch a new generation of "back- tothe-land" farmers interested in smallscale, organic agriculture.

"We are part of the back-to-theland, small is beautiful generation," said organic farmer from the 1970s, Bill Bobier of Hesperia, Michigan. "We had 40 acres, a hoe, a shovel and eventually a Troy built rototiller."

"And kids, who we wanted to feed healthy food," added his wife Patrice.

In the beginning, these new farmers had a hard time selling food locally.

"Beginning around 1978, we tried to sell some of our farm's vegetables to local people," remembers Patrice Bobier, "But no one was interested. A lot of rural people grew their own gardens - albeit with chemicals - and the nearby farmers markets in the city were dominated by resellers. (Farmers who resold industrially raised produce they bought whole-sale). We just canned a lot."

I have a dream. A fundamental change - like the development of local food systems in the face of the globalization tidal wave - must be imagined in the public consciousness before it can become real. In our time, this imagining of a different possibility happens most often in the mass media.

By this measure, the local food movement began with McDonald's decision to build golden arches in Rome's Piazza Spagna in 1986. An Italian named Carlo Petrini was so outraged by tbe introduction of Mickey Dee's into his country's millenniums old cuisine that he organized the Slow Food Movement in Italy and Slow Food International in Paris in 1989.

"Being Slow means that you control the rhythms of your own life," said Petrini to Carl Honore in his book, In Praise of Slowness. "You decide how fast you have to go in any given context. Today, if I want to go fast, I go fast; if tomorrow I want to go slow, I go slow. We are fighting for the right to determine our own tempos."

Today, Slow Food International is worldwide and celebrates local culinary diversity based in place (in the ecological sense) through educational campaigns and events. Although Slow Food members are small in number, the movement they participate in helped launch a reconsideration of our nation's fast food culture. The organizing of the Chefs Collaborative 2000 by leading chefs/restaurant owners on both coasts added fuel to this fire. Alice Waters's reinvention of a local California cuisine through her pioneering restaurant, Che Panisse in Berkeley was particularly important to this chef-led effort. But it was the publishing of Eric Schloesser's Fast Food Nation in 1999 - the food equivalent of Tom Paine's Common Sense - that pushed this reconsideration to revolutionary status.

In the 1990s, the local food revolution was most often expressed through the spread of CSAs - community supported agriculture arrangements - in which consumers purchased a local farmer's crops. But there was little official policy support for the concept of local food and the farmers who would grow it. An emerging concern about the public costs of poor nutrition began to change this situation.

In 1992, Congress established the WIC Farmers' Market Nutrition Program (FMNP) to provide low income pregnant and breast feeding women access to "fresh, unprepared, locally grown fruits and vegetables". A secondary goal was to encourage and support use of and sales at farmers markets. The WIC program, now in 44 states, typically provides rec\ipients with coupons (sometimes as little as $20 a season) that they can use only at farmers markets to purchase fresh, local food.

Other federal initiatives (in the 2002 Farm Bill) include section 4125 of the Food Stamp Act for "Assistance for Community Food Projects" and Sections 4303 and 4305 of the Child Nutrition Act which encourage schools to use "locally produced foods for school meals, to the maximum extent practicable and appropriate."

Senator Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) also sponsored passage of a pilot program to provide free fruits and vegetables each day to schools in small programs in four pilot states (Michigan, Iowa, Ohio, and Indiana). The presumption was that these free healthy snacks would be grown locally.

BABY STEPS OR POLITICAL SOPS

But these federal programs were baby steps - some would say political sops to the growing call for reform in exchange for continued support of federal commodity subsidies that spent tens of billions of dollars annually to prop up conventional industrial agriculture.

Perhaps, the most important of these baby steps, at least conceptually, was the Healthy Farms, Food and Communities Act (HFFCA) of the 2002 Farm Bill which sought to provide small amounts of federal dollars to seed community food projects from urban gardens to local food system planning.

Impetus for HFFCA came from proposals made in 1995 by the Community Food Security Coalition, led by City Planner Andy Fisher. The Coalition is the most important grassroots gathering of local food advocates in the country and hosts a listserv (comfood) through Tufts University through which much of the national conversation on local food occurs.

Mark Wynne helped jumpstart this conversation in the late 1970s with the pioneering Hartford Local Food Project (Connecticut) which was one of the nation's first attempts to reinvent a local food system around a major urban area. In the 1990s, Tim Bowser led a statewide effort to connect local farmers to urban consumers through the Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture. The Practical Farmers of Iowa's Rick Hartman initiated an "Iowa grown meal" project for public events.

In the late 1990s, these threads of change were picked up and added to by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation's Food Routes Project which "worked in partnership with ten community based organizations to increase their capacity to design, launch, and implement successful 'buy local' campaigns and market education initiatives."

Food Routes's funding supported research by Rich Pirog and others at Iowa State University's Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture on "food miles" - calculating the distance the average Iowan meal traveled (over 1500 miles). Pirog's research, in particular, gave local food advocates the data needed to fuel the public policy conversation at the state and local level.

In Minnesota (Land Stewardship Project), Iowa (Practical Farmers of Iowa), Maine (Eat Local Foods Coalition), Michigan (Michigan Integrated Food and Farming Systems), Montana (Alternative Energy Resources Organization), California (Santa Cruz's Community Alliance with Family Farmers), North Carolina (Appalachian Sustainable Agriculture Project), Oregon (Ecotrust), Pennsylvania (PASA), and Louisiana (Baton Rouge Economic and Agricultural Development Alliance), the Kellogg Foundation's Food Routes partners launched aggressive Buy Local food campaigns. Virtually all Food Routes partners created on-line state directories of farms marketing local food directly to consumers.

In Maine, the campaign focused on spend "$10 a week" on food purchased from local farmers - an act that could "pump as much as $100 million into Maine's farm economy over the length of a growing season."

Other leadership emerged outside the Kellogg Foundation's initiatives. In Philadelphia, Judy Wicks funded the Fair Food Project through the White Dog Caf and White Dog Caf Foundation which connected local farmers to Philadelphia area restaurants, sponsored a Fair Food Farmstand in Philadelphia's Reading Market, and published a local food guide.

Nationally, a software designer and activist from Santa Cruz, California - Guillermo Payet - created the LocalHarvest website in 1998 to offer farmers nationwide free listings for their farms and their products. A consumer can search for local food in their area by visiting the LocalHarvest website (www.localharvest.com) and typing in their zip code and search diameter. LocalHarvest currently has over 8,000 farms listed and adds an average of ten new local food sources each week. It offers a major portal to local food for computer savy consumers.

HEALTH AND LOCAL FOOD

The growing public health concerns of obesity and diabetes combined with state budgetary concerns about funding for Medicaid have given the local food revolution a major new push.

"The link between good health and eating a healthy diet, including more locally grown fruits and vegetables, is undeniable," said New Jersey's Secretary of Agriculture Charles Kuperus. "Eating more of these nutritious foods will help make residents healthier, reducing medical costs, which typically increase with age."

Latino and African-American children have a disproportionally high risk - one in two will develop Type 2 diabetes in their lifetime. That's half of all children alive today.

"The diabetes epidemic in the United States is a disaster of immense proportions," said Niel Ritchie of the League of Rural Voters. "We cannot afford to wait. We must take action now to change the diets of these children. We must get them fresh local food."

To demonstrate the economic feasibility of local food as one answer to this growing problem, Robert Waldrop of the Oklahoma Food Cooperative (another local food innovation) attempted to eat locally as much as possible on a Food Stamp allowance (for two people) of $61.87 a week. He called his experiment "Slow Food for the Poor" Challenge.

Waldrop and his partner purchased 73 percent of their food locally, coming $ 1.44 under budget in the process. Key to this success was preparation of meals from basic ingredients (no processed food) and good food storage.

"We were able to meet the challenge even though local meats, eggs, and dairy products are typically more expensive than usual supermarket fare," reported Waldrop. "Our grandparents knew how to prepare all this local, fresh stuff. There has been a tragic collapse of transmission of heritage food information across generations."

Robert Waldrop's Oklahoma local food challenge underscores the real local food challenge of the future. If we are to rebuild community food systems based on local, fresh food, consumers will need more than new sources of food; they also will need to learn how to prepare and preserve their local bounty. This revolution may begin on the farm, but it will only succeed in our kitchens.

OREGON SUPERMARKET CHAIN CARRIES LOCAL SHELF TAGS

THE CEO of New Seasons Market stores in the Portland, Oregon region - Brian Rohter defines homegrown as food grown, caught or processed in its region, the Northwest, including Northern California. In his stores, locally grown items carry yellow shelf tags. Of the 30,000 items on each store's shelves, 8,142 (or 27 percent) have yellow tags. His company was founded in 2000, and Rohter and his partners have three more stores about to open, but do not plan to open any beyond Portland's suburbs. "I believe it would fundamentally change the way we do business," he told The New York Times. He gives advice constantly to others who plan to start their own versions of New Seasons in other areas.

The editor of a supermarket online journal praises the company. "The New Seasons model is a brilliant concept because it brings back the days of food co-ops, the feeling of being closer to nature, to the food supply, to the neighborhood. What they are saying is, we are your store and we want to build a relationship with you. That lack of relationship has been the downfall of supermarkets." New Seasons' decision about what it will and will not sell are based on a balance of its owners' standards and what shoppers want.

Continues the Times' report by Marian Burros: Staff members make frequent visits to farms, ranches, dairies and farmer's markets, looking for new products. And farmers who sell to the chain can deliver directly to the stores without going through a central distribution warehouse.

"The opportunity to sell locally has kept some area ranchers from going out of business in Oregon and nearby states. Doc and Connie Hatfield, who founded the Country Natural Beef cooperative in 1986, said the co-op now has 70 ranchers who raise beef on a vegetarian diet free of hormones, antibiotics and genetically modified feed. Nineteen years ago we were going broke," Mr. Hatfield said. "Now we are paying income taxes." He was also pleased about an unexpected by- product of selling locally: the bond forged between rural and urban residents.

If there is any doubt about the impact purchasing locally has on nearby farms, the USDA's agriculture census shows that the number of farms in Oregon has risen, from 26,753 in 1974 to 40,033 in 2002.

The growing public health concerns of obesity and diabetes combined with state budgetary concerns about funding Medicaid have given the local food revolution a major new push.

QUESTIONS TO ASK BEFORE BUYING FOOD?

* Who profits from this sale?

* Are you buying this product from a national chain, or buying locally from an independent business, co-op, or family farm?

* Where was this item grown or made?

* How far did it travel?

* Were farmers' or workers' rights protected?

* Did the producer receive a living wage?

* Is it certified organic or Fair Trade?

* Is the company making or selling this item socially responsible?

* Is this product genuinely ecological & healthy?

TEN REASONS TO EAT LOCALLY

1. Locally grown food tastes better.

2. Local produce is healthier for you.

3. Local food preservesand encourages genetic diversity in food plants and animals.

4. Local food is more likely to be GMO-free (Genetically Modified Organisms Free)

5. Local food support local independent family farmers.

6. Local food builds community.

7. Local food preserves open space near populated areas.

8. Local food producers contribute more to the local tax basis (an average of $1 for every $.34 of services used).

9. Local food production preserves and restores environmental quality and integrity.

10. Local food production makes a community more secure economically.

Adapted from a list by the Minnesota Food Association

Christopher Bedford is president of Sweetwater Local Foods Market based in Muskegon, Michigan. He can be contacted via e-mail at chrisbedford@charter.net. His previous contributions to the pages of In Business include: "Food Market With Big Big Promise" in the section on Building Vibrant Local Economies in the July-August, 2004 issue; and "Financing A Sustainab/e Future" in January-February 2005.

Copyright J.G. Press Inc. Jan/Feb 2006

Source: In Business

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