by Vicki Robin
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 CO2
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.
We can put our money where our mouths are—literally. We can invest in local or regional farms. Jason Bradford, an early relocalization activist, has partnered with a venture capitalist to reclaim abused farmland in the Bay Area and systematically return it to health. They are laser-focused, numbers-oriented, unsentimental, on a mission, and intending to profit, but they are also committed to implementing the best science-based organic farming practices they know. We can facilitate farm loans for small producers who want to innovate; the Local Investing Opportunity Network (LION) model currently spreading in the Pacific Northwest is one mechanism. It’s not an investing club. It’s an investing network that connects people who want to invest locally with local businesspeople—including farmers—with projects that need $1,000—or $100,000. The network merely facilitates meeting. Beyond that the lenders and borrowers are on their own to make whatever deals they want. We just started one here on Whidbey, called W.I.L.L. (Whidbey Island Local Lending). You hear it coming . . . “Where there is a W.I.L.L. there is a way.” Or you can donate money through organizations like Kickstarter. Vicky Brown, our local goat milkmaid, ran a successful Kickstarter campaign to expand her business. Or you can help farmers research what government grants might be available to them.
If we are businesspeople ourselves, we can notice opportunities and build businesses that support local growers, like food hubs. According to the USDA a food hub is “a centrally located facility with a business management structure facilitating the aggregation, storage, processing, distribution, and/or marketing of locally/regionally produced food products.” Some are teaching centers as well. Some are associated with commercial kitchens where people can turn their dollar-a-pound produce into five-dollars-a-pound chutneys, sauces, and soups. On Whidbey there are several new businesses as of this writing. A lavender farmer is opening a dry-pack facility—open to the public—where she can package her lavender rather than shipping it out of state to a packer. A group is discussing buying a grain mill and putting it into very visible operation so grain growers can grind the emmer, kamut, wheat, and barley they’ve grown; local bakers can work with fresh-ground flours; and local eaters can make nutritious cracked-grain cereals. As small enterprises, they may flourish or die on the vine, but they are indicators of this fertile climate for local business development.
Is any of this easy? Nope. We’re dealing with human beings here, and business partnerships of all sorts are frau
ght with challenges. Yet investing in local agriculture is a financial way to support local food beyond your willingness to pay a little extra for those beets, squash, and chickens.
We can be educators as well—as I am doing now. We can form and work for nonprofits that support local farming. We can frequent restaurants that take pains to serve as much local food as possible. Jess Dowdell, formerly of Ca’buni café, housed in the Mukilteo Coffee roasting warehouse, is starting a new catering venture. For sure I’ll stop there for sandwiches. Pickles Deli has a local menu. All the chefs and farmers who contributed recipes are committed to using local ingredients.
Is local food a miracle cure? No. It takes time. It challenges your habits and abilities. Your local dollars spent at the farmers’ market could as well go into a purchase at a big box store as into your local barber’s pocket. It may not be more nutritious if it’s many days old or grown in depleted soil. As a commitment to address big global issues, it’s truly a drop in the bucket. Unless you grow your own in abundance, you are likely spending more money. As for relational eating, what if you don’t really like your farmers after all? What if you like the idea of local food but not the fact of it happening next door—with a quack quack here and a hee-haw there and a manure pile by your fence. Local food. But NIMBY (not in my backyard).
No, local is not the new black. Or green. It is, however, a lens that brings a lot into focus, and it is right at hand, actionable, and beneficial, at least to your farmers. It is a point of entry into making a difference in very earthy (I can’t say concrete) ways.
For me the most profound result of a commitment to local is leaving a legacy of hope and health and, in my lifetime, enjoying the benefits of belonging to a place and a people—the security and love and mutual aid.
Relational eating—eating as an act of belonging—is what I offer you, along with these dozen other motivations that now seem true enough to me to base my life on them.
Now What?
Having wrestled with all these questions and issues, with my inner comfort-food demons, with how I cling to frugality, with my preferences for convenience, and with my desire to relegate food to basically inexpensive refueling for a busy life, I finally surrendered my right to food ignorance. Now when I eat, I understand the web of relationships that brought this food to my lips and the web of relationships I am developing by which hands I choose to feed me. I understand this viscerally, emotionally, and ethically.
While it may seem easier in the short run to just grab a burger and drive on, I think the freedom of being awake is in the long run more satisfying.
So I am inviting you to look under the hood of industrial eating to recognize what it is not giving you and invest some life energy in building up around you a food system that gives you what’s missing.
Now It’s Your Turn
What motivates you to change?
It’s time to ask yourself whether and how you might want to shift your eating closer to home. I’ve shared my long list of benefits for eating locally. Of course for me the linchpin was relational eating—how eating the food grown by my community made me part of that community. Belonging, for me, is not just a warm fuzzy feeling; the place is ever more the grounding force in my life—where I come from when I venture into the world, where I return to to be restored.
From that core, all the many other benefits radiate for me. Your core might be different. Your motivations to start might be different. So here’s a self-test to see what might move you to make the local shift. Rate each item on a scale of 1–10, with 1 being “not for me,” 5 being “I’ll try anything once,” and 10 being “absolutely yes.”
Possible Motivation for Local Eating
• Curiosity—I want to learn about myself, my food habits, and the food system.
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• Health—I want to be healthier, and local brings me fresh, nutritious food.
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• Fresh—I love fresh food and don’t care for packaged and processed food.
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• Financial—It’s worth the extra money, and by growing and trading I can afford it.
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• Accessible—I care that everyone has fresh food in their neighborhood.
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• Safety—I trust my local growers more than I trust the industrial system that brings us such delights as E. coli and mad cow disease. I want food free of GMOs, toxins, antibiotics, herbicides, and pesticides.
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• Security—I want to know that I and those I love will have enough to eat if/when food supply chains fracture or are financially not feasible.
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• Sovereignty—I want to take back control of my food from the corporate system.
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• Soil—I want to rebuild conditions for fertility in our soils and water.
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• Seed—I want to participate in preservation of genetic heritage.
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• Nature—I want to be in nature, protect nature, understand nature.
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• Competency—I want to be self-reliant—to learn to cook, garden, raise animals, forage, and fish. The more skills I have, the safer I feel.
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• Climate change—I want to think now about how climate change affects me and my community, and set up adaptive systems.
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• Peak oil—I want to support alternatives to the current fossil-fuel-intensive form of agriculture.
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• Justice—I want to help assure that everyone in my community has access to healthy, affordable, and abundant food.
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• Children—I want our children to have healthy, nontoxic, plentiful food.
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• Care for the generations to come—I want to assure that our grandchildren will have healthy, accessible, affordable, and abundant food.
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• Belonging—I want to put down roots where I live and be part of a community.
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• Ethics—I want the impact of my eating to be a blessing for others and the earth.
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• Community—I want to strengthen the ties of community.
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TOTAL
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Where to Begin
If your total number is over 125, I’d say it’s worth picking someplace to begin and giving it a try. You can begin with any of the following:
• What you grow: even sprouts.
• Where you shop: Try a farmers’ market, farm stand, or CSA in addition to your regular stores.
• What you buy: Pick at least one food to buy from your region. Pick a local producer—perhaps a baker or a soup maker—and buy their product no matter where the ingredients come from.
• What you don’t buy: Avoid overfished species, factory-raised animals, nonorganic produce.
• How you spend your money: Invest in local food to build your local food system.
• What you eat: Learn what grows well in your area and base some meals around those foods.
• How you cook: Cook from scratch with what’s on hand. Learn to use a pressure cooker.
• Whom you eat with: Increase your sit-down meals with others.
• How your meat is grown: pasture-raised, organic feed.
• How much you eat: Moderate your eating in honor of the life embodied in your meal.
• What you order in restaurants: Look for words like local, catch of the day, seasonal.
• What you choose for a career: Does it help in any way to regenerate the vitality of regional food systems?
; • What you advocate for in your school, workplace, place of worship: Influence your networks to eat simple, local foods; influence your food-service people to grow and serve more local foods.
• How you vote: Understand issues affecting small-scale regional farmers and farming and vote for candidates who advocate for these.
• What you say: Write or speak about local food; stick up for it.
Meaning to do everything, we often do nothing. Thinking the task is big, we often don’t begin. Begin with just one step, though, something that appeals to you, and you enter into change. Who knows where that will lead?
My Shopping Criteria
I like to buy what is grown locally . . . by someone I know . . . who probably sends her kids to local schools . . . frequents local restaurants . . . and maybe acts in plays or plays in a jazz ensemble or calls square dances. I put my community at the center of my eating.
This means I also eat with the seasons as much as possible, and will do my own canning and freezing to have those same pleasures off-season.
I like to “reward” with my dollars regional producers who are pioneering local production of a food I like. I get my raw milk from a regional legal dairy. I buy regional grains and beans if possible and baked goods from regional bakeries that favor regional flours. I can’t always stomach the price differential, but I know my values and inch toward integrity.
When the price is right I buy organic when I can’t buy local—“right” for me being under twice as expensive. It’s my investment in soil. Many friends choose organic no matter what the cost. I’ll get there. Eventually.
I buy my staples—beans, grains, oils, spices, nuts—in bulk rather than prepackaged. Yes, I reuse my plastic bags and bottles when possible so I’m as close as I can get to simply taking handfuls of whole foods home.