We often think that farmers markets are products of our times as they spring up in cities and small towns across the country. Truth is, a farmers market is the traditional way of selling agricultural produce around the world.
The really nice aspect of this transaction is that the farmer receives just compensation for his product and the eater can be assured the product is fresh, local, and grown in a manner that is acceptable to all. If these criteria are not met, the consumer can look for another farmer whose products better suit his or her needs.
After the industrialization of agriculture, farmers still sold at farmers markets, but it was just a matter of time before supermarkets were developed and farmers started selling to large companies that moved food all over the world; many Americans stopped planting gardens because it was so much easier to get "everything" at the store.
We certainly have gained something through the globalized food system: more variety, foods we cannot grow in cold climates, and, of course, cheap food that is mass-produced by underpaid farmers and farm workers. Some good news, some bad. I certainly like coffee and chocolate, but I want to know the growers and workers were paid fair wages and that the crops were grown in an environmentally-responsible manner. I would like to be sure all the food I need to buy meets those same standards, whether imported or locally grown.
So, we come back to farmers markets -- local, fair, green, and affordable. I am, as you can tell, a big fan of farmers markets and it's not just because we are vendors at the farmers market in Madison, Wisconsin. I, too, can get vegetables that don't grow well in our garden, as well as pork, eggs, fruit, chicken, and lamb. I know all the growers personally, where they live, their children, and we get to enjoy each others' company every Saturday morning. True, getting up at 3:30 a.m. to get to the market isn't always so much fun, nor are those occasional cold or rainy Saturdays when few customers show up.
Understandably, not everyone feels the same about farmers markets. One of our customers, who we see very infrequently, showed up with his wife the other day and said going to the market involved three of his least favorite things: getting up early, shopping, and crowds. Well, to each his own.
While the supermarket may eliminate getting up early, it still involves shopping and crowds and has little to offer in the way of fresh, local, or fair food. Affordable, yes, but we know the affordability of mainstream food relies on low-wage farmers, and industrial farming practices that in turn rely on heavy use of chemicals, large-scale animal production, and hidden costs to the environment.
We also know that the nutritional content of that supermarket food has been in steady decline for decades. We know most of our winter vegetables are imported and possibly grown in a manner that is not healthy, fair, or green. Even the USDA, which touts our food as the safest in the world, (despite dramatically increasing numbers of food poisoning incidents) is critical of the declining nutritional content.
According to the USDA, Americans are increasingly deficient in calcium, potassium, magnesium, and vitamins A, C, D, and E. This lack of vitamins and minerals in our diet is indicative of depleted soils world wide, caused by industrial farming practices. A comparison of today's soil mineral content across the world with that of 100 years ago shows an average decline in mineral levels of roughly 80 percent. No wonder supermarket food is lacking in nutrition!
Another statistic from the USDA's Economic Research Service indicates that if all Americans were to eat in accordance with the dietary guidelines establish by USDA, we would need an additional 14.1 million acres for fruit and vegetable production and would be short 111 billion lbs. of milk per year. Granted, Americans will never eat according to the USDA guidelines, which are probably too heavy on milk and meat and way too short on vegetable consumption. Still, even the USDA concedes we are a food deficit nation; globalization is apparently not working, for we depend on the rest of the world to feed us while many of those countries are starving.
While the practices of the industrial "Green Revolution" did increase food production, it appears it did little for food quality. Industrial production of the cheap food that fills our supermarkets is slowly starving us. It all adds up: food safety scares, declining food quality, the world food crisis -- all these abysmal failures of food production and marketing will eventually bring food production back to the local level. Local producers quickly learn that caring for the soil and making it healthy again produces healthy, nutrient-dense food for both people and animals.
Could we be entering a renaissance in food production and eating? Many think we are, for many small reasons that together add up to the overwhelming conclusion that we can no longer ship our food 1,500 miles or more from farm to table; industrial farming has crested the hill and is on the downhill slide.
Oil will never be cheap again and climate change has made world food production very uncertain. Developing countries can produce more food that is more appropriate to their cultures if they are allowed to use traditional production practices as opposed to industrial farming practices. Local producers worldwide know that hands-on farming affords a better way to care for the soil and produce healthy food.
Woody Allen's 1973 movie Sleeper speculated on what the future of food might look like: from giant chickens to hose-fed, genetically engineered bananas the size of cruise missiles. I know, it's just a movie, but Monsanto may be working on it. Forget the movies. The future of food is local.
When one farms locally, or supports local agriculture, he or she may, at first, miss the convenience of the old cheap, globalized food system. Change for the better is seldom easy, but always worth it. There will still be getting up early, shopping, and crowds, but in the end, I think, local farmers and eaters have more fun and live better for it.
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Comments
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Wolverine Posted 7:24 am
26 Jul 2008
I love chocolate too, but I'd easily be willing to give it up to stop globalized trade, including globalized food.
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Tauger Posted 9:55 am
26 Jul 2008
I agree that it has been taken to extremes but reverting to a diet of half rotten potatoes and moldy cabbage during the winter months really doesn't appeal to me.
I have taken the concept of food miles to heart but living in California's central valley means I don't have to forego much. The only oranges I eat are those grown locally and in season. No more toxic bananas and definitely no garlic from China. However, living without, chocolate, coffee, tea and all the other little luxuries of life is impossible for me.
Rather than cut out all well traveled food, why don't we simply minimize the amount we eat? Insisting on country of origin labels is a step in the right direction.
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Jim Goodman Posted 11:41 am
26 Jul 2008
I am content to eat strawberries for example, only when they are in season in Wisconsin, but I think buying fair trade coffee and chocolate can help growers in developing countries if they are paid fairly. That is how trade should work, globalization as we know it is nothing less than legalized corporate pillaging of the world.
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Wolverine Posted 12:07 pm
27 Jul 2008
Fine, globalize all you want on foot or horseback. And if you don't like the native diet where you are, you should move to somewhere you'd like it. But no one has any business eating bananas if they don't live in South America, for example. And saying that it's impossible to live without luxuries is completely wrong by definition. The only thing you need is necessities.
As to the serious issue, here's why globalization, especially that done with engines of any kind, is bad for the Earth:
Moving cargo is done by consumption and burning of fossil fuels. The harms done by this include destruction of ecosystems in order to remove oil from the ground, oil spills that result from drilling and transporting the oil and from transporting goods, massive unnatural noise, and air pollution including greenhouse gas emissions that contribute heavily to global warming. I won't go into the details, anyone on this site should know all this.
Most cargo is moved by ship. The hideous monstrosities that are now cargo ships are so large that larger and large channels must be dredged in order to allow them into and out of ports. Dredging, aside from the direct damage and insult to the Earth by digging into it, causes toxic pollution of the water by releasing natural elements that are fine so long as they're below the surface, but that cause harm once release, just like uranium.
There are so damn many cargo ships and military ships on the oceans making so much noise that the whales can no longer hear each other over adequate distances. While this might not seem like much of a problem unless you're a whale, but it's equivalent to having constant noise in your home, like planes flying overhead or a jackhammer just down the street.
The ridiculous amount of global trade and movement of people that now goes on is directly responsible for massive amounts of harmful non-native species invading ecosystems and negatively altering them forever. San Francisco Bay, where I now live, and the Great Lakes, where I grew up, are both devastated by invasive species that are only there because of international trade.
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spaceshaper Posted 1:34 pm
27 Jul 2008
The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.
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Wolverine Posted 6:50 am
28 Jul 2008
However, for the sake of argument let's assume that most people would not support ending or greatly reducing international trade. The reason you think there's a discrepancy between my two posts is that on this thread I'm discussion what I would do if I had the power to do it. On the other one, I was asserting how to create a more representative government, and the problems that its lack has caused.
The issue you raised invokes the conundrum of how to organize a governing system that will provide the best results considering the facts that 1) most people are just worker bees who have neither the interest needed in order to make the effort properly study issues nor the wisdom to make good decisions, and 2) if you try to set up a dictatorial governing system run by those who will make the best decisions, say Buddhist monks, what you'll get is decision makers who are the most aggressive and egotistical members of a society, because people like Buddhist monks have neither the desire to govern nor the ability to defend themselves from the attacks of the more aggressive people who would take over.
For now, the only answer is to make societies as representative as possible and try to educate the population as much as possible. Of course, neither of those things is being done, because doing so does not serve the interests of those in power, including those whose power derives from their material wealth.
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spaceshaper Posted 8:37 am
28 Jul 2008
Good luck with your poll of suicidal farmers. Especially those who have just lost their export markets because of your ban.
The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.
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Wolverine Posted 8:53 am
28 Jul 2008
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mooser Posted 11:42 am
28 Jul 2008
I would be delighted if this was so, but from what I can tell from the California certification for Farmers' Markets (http://www.cafarmersmkts.com/cfmarulesregs.pdf), there is no rule that requires fair labor wages be paid to the workers of the producers who sell at the markets. My guess is that many may pay fairly out of personal conviction.
I'm curious if this is stipulated in other markets in the US. Being Californian, I only have the point of view from within this state. Thanks!
Always learning...
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spaceshaper Posted 9:44 pm
28 Jul 2008
Well I'm glad we got that sorted out. We just need to let everyone else know, right?
The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.
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John former Marine Posted 12:26 am
29 Jul 2008
Farmers are told by the middlemen that the french fry factory wants a particular type of potato. The french fry factory is told by McDonalds and Burger King which type of fry they want. In the end, the farmer chooses a large "brick"-shaped potato that has a poor nutritional profile and no flavor. It has been bred and engineered for uniform size, shape, and color. It has been perfected for disease resistance or herbicide/pesticide tolerance.
This is the equivalent of telling an artist that they have to mass-produce paintings so that everybody everywhere in the world can have the same soulless, cheap painting.
As for the people in developing countries who are dependent on their export markets...there's this whole theory as to why Latin America has been 3rd World so long...Dependency Theory. Basically, the Mayan farmer in Chichicastenango or Momostenango may be tending 100 acres of coffee plants today. But his great-grandfather was growing the necessities of life - corn, beans, squash, amaranth, onions, tomatoes. They built their own homes, educated their children, and had health care provided by the local medicine man. Today, the Guatemalan countryside is littered with plastic packaging and soda bottles. The people are not self-sustaining but dependent upon the economy of some spoiled Gringos to the north. They wouldn't be growing coffee if they didn't have to.
On a recent visit to a farming region in the pacific northwest, I met farmers, gov't officials, and pesticide-company representatives who told me that nearly 100% of the labor force was from Michoacan and that 85% of them were undocumented. If we were to have a crack-down on illegal labor, there would be no asparagus, cherries, apples, and a huge number of other crops that are labor-intensive to cultivate or harvest.
A farming system that is almost entirely dependent (once again...dependency being the key word) on an illegal labor, huge energy inputs, and tons of chemicals doesn't seem to make a lot of sense. We might sustain it for a while longer but I think it's overdue to collapse.
Going back to local food produced with local labor and local energy would be a good thing. I know those poor Guatemalans wouldn't have corporate coffee plantations to work on anymore, but I'm sure life would go on. I'm fairly certain they can do without our cheap corn, our missionaries, our invasive culture, our invasive soft drinks, and our invasive language.
I honestly don't know how you can even call a 5,000-acre wheat field a "farm."
Il faut cultiver notre jardin.
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