Slow Food, for example, is an essential organization, with its declaration of a universal "right to taste" and its mandate to ...
... oppose the standardisation of taste, defend the need for consumer information, protect cultural identities tied to food and gastronomic traditions, safeguard foods and cultivation and processing techniques inherited from tradition and defend domestic and wild animal and vegetable species.
The group has undeniably done important work internationally toward those goals; yet its U.S. branch tends to throw pricey events accessible only to an economic elite.
Examples like this abound.
New York chef Dan Barber has been a tireless champion of small farmers and local food. Backed by a pile of Rockefeller cash, he's created a sustainable-food paradise/restaurant in the Hudson Valley called Blue Hill at Stone Barns. The "farmers feast" menu there runs $95. Clearly, the target consumer is not farmers but Wall Streeters and wielders of corporate expense accounts.
In my farming project, Maverick Farms, we've pledged to "promote family farming as a community resource"; yet we ask $40 a head for our biggest fund raiser, our monthly farm dinners. (We do offer a lower-priced work-exchange option.)
The problem is essentially structural. Small-scale farming is labor-intensive. We charge chefs $20 a pound for salad greens; but our produce is meticulously hand-picked and rinsed, "graded in the field," which means chefs can take our greens from the bag to the plate without culling bad leaves.
From a business perspective, it's a bad model. Despite our $40 dinners and $20 bags of greens, no one here gets paid a dime beyond room and board. We'd be much better off selling the farm and buying a McDonald's franchise.
Historically, people of limited means have tended to scrape by on what's locally available, while the wealthy have used their resources to draw in fancy food from far away. Now, that situation has turned upside down.
Economies of scale brought on by increasing consolidation, vast subsidies, and wholesale, unchecked exploitation of immigrant labor have created a system of cheap, plentiful, and dreadful food.
Industrialization, mass culture, wage stagnation, and Puritanism (e.g., prohibition) have almost completely destroyed traditional foodways here, allowing McDonald's and the home convenience-food industry to fill the void. A bad-feedback loop thrives; the food industry shovels billions of dollars into marketing and controls school lunches, leaving vast swaths of the population innocent of alternatives and ignorant of what real food tastes like.
In the meantime, a backlash against industrial food is mounting in the Anglo-American world. It started when Americans like Julia Child and Brits like Elizabeth David travelled to southern Europe at the precise point when industrialization was swamping our food culture. A prosperous middle class, buoyed by the post-War boom, travelled to Italy and France and tasted farm-fresh food prepared with flavor -- not portability, volume, and profit -- as the primary motivating factor. Hence the birth of the yuppie food revolution.
But middle-class wages have since stagnated; real growth in wages since the early '70s has been minimal, save for a blip in the 1990s. So the bulk of the people who frequent Dan Barber's restaurant or Alice Waters' place in Berkeley tend to be pretty well-heeled.
Chefs gained celebrity status starting in the 1980s, when the yuppie food revolution gained force. I predict that in places like New York and San Francisco, the age of the rock-star farmer is not far off.
I am reminded of a line from Baudelaire's notebooks:
If a poet demanded of the State the right to have a few bourgeois in his stable, people would be very much astonished, but if a bourgeois asked for some roast poet, people would think it quite natural.
Welcome to the era of roast farmer. Micro-farms dot the areas outside metropolises, producing hand-picked, highly nutritious, and pungent microgreens to be plopped on lawyers', accountants', and high-tech professionals' plates for astronomical prices. Meanwhile, the people who staff the vast services economy get the dreck served up by thriving companies like Smithfield Foods.
Strains within the system are starting to show. Simply put, industrial food is making the people who rely on it sick and fat, to the point that U.S. life expectancy looks set to decline for the first time in two centuries.
In a nation whose biggest employer (and grocer) -- Wal-Mart -- hangs its business model on its ability to low-ball workers, it's difficult to see how people are going to start, en masse, paying top dollar to niche farmers at farmers' markets.
Evidence of class-based distribution of diet-related maladies abounds. This recent AP article shows that in rural areas the child-obesity rate is even higher than the brisk national average. The evidence dispels "a long-held belief that in farm communities and other rural towns, heavy chores, wide expanses of land and fresh air make leaner, stronger bodies," the article says.
The article points to three factors contributing to surging child obesity in rural areas: mechanization of farming, the rapid rise of satellite dishes and cable television (which arrived later, but spread much faster, in rural areas than in urban ones), and rising poverty due to the decline in farming and other economic activity.
"The only other place where researchers are finding obesity rates similar to rural America is in the poorest, most troubled urban neighborhoods, suggesting that poverty may be the overriding cause," the article states.
Interesting connection. Just as manufacturing jobs have for three decades been fleeing inner cities in search of cheaper labor in points south, falling commodity prices for farm goods have been throwing farmers out of work. Likewise, the rural jobs provided by extractive industries like coal-mining are inherently short-lived. As a development strategy, mountain-top removal has natural limits, and when they're reached, capital must and does move on.
But why would poverty, which has historically led to starvation, cause people to be overweight? The U.S. spends less on food as a percentage of GDP than any nation in the world, probably than any nation since the rise of the nation-state. The cheap-food machine we've created -- fuelled by our cheap-oil policy and underwritten by billions each year in commodity-agriculture subsidies -- means that poor people can get almost limitless calories. Nourishment, however, is not part of the game.
How, then, can the sustainable-food movement mount a challenge to industrial food's hold on the bulk of the population? People aren't just addicted to the jolt provided by food laden with high-fructose corn syrup; they're also addicted to the cheap price tag.
In many urban areas, rising demand for quality food has provided a robust market for small farmers in outlying areas. For seven or eight months out of the year in New York, for example, a consumer who makes a conscientious effort and who has sufficient expendable income can satisfy just about all of her caloric needs from delicious food grown within 100 miles of the city. That's true for an even greater part of the year in California's population centers.
Theoretically, as demand for sustainably grown food grows in such places, increased supply will push its price down, meaning that lower-income people can afford it. And groups like Just Food in New York and efforts like Alice Waters' Edible Schoolyard in Berkeley are doing important work toward broadening the range of sustainable food in urban areas.
But there's an important limiting factor at work here.
According to a U.S. Dept. of Ag study, in the period of 1994-1996, the average price for an acre of agricultural land was $850. But an acre of land in an area defined as "urban-influenced" -- close enough to a city to be attractive for suburban or second-home development, e.g., NY's Hudson Valley -- was $1880. Land in non-urban-influenced areas -- i.e., out in rural areas -- was $640. (Precise citation to come.)
Herein lies the paradox of the sustainable-food movement. Demand for locally and sustainably grown food is concentrated in cities; but prices for farmland near cities are severely inflated by development pressure. Where farmland is cheap, people are poor and accustomed to industrial food. Where people are wealthy and attracted to healthy food, farmland is dear.
And that dearness limits the entry of new farmers into areas such as the Hudson Valley. In short, a young person who'd like to buy 20 acres to grow heirloom tomatoes to sell into the thriving NYC market has to compete against deep-pocketed developers thinking about second homes for corporate lawyers (the same people, ironically, who provide a market for those tomatoes).
Pricey land limits supply of local food; limited supply keeps food prices up; high prices maintain the class problem of the sustainable-food movement.
Untying that knot will require structural changes. That won't happen in Washington, where giants like Archer Daniels Midland and Monsanto have the resources to keep politicians in line. But there are challenges to the brutal class politics of food being mounted all over the nation, in urban and rural areas alike. A Los Angeles-based group called the Community Food Security Coalition, whose annual conference I recently attended in Atlanta, has been an incubator and information clearing house for such efforts.
I'll be reporting on those initiatives in Gristmill in the days and weeks ahead.
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Comments
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Forrest Posted 6:43 am
12 Oct 2005
It seems that if land prices are higher in the Hudson Valley, so are the potential profits from farming. In Iowa, land is cheap, but you might not be able to sell your brandywine tomatoes for $5 each. Doesn't this mitigate, at least to some extent, the higher prices that Hudson Valley farmers pay for their land?
I think you are underestimating the role of education and culture in teaching people what food they eat. Friends of mine eat entirely off of food stamps - and buy almost exclusively fresh, local, organic food. They save money by staying away from processed foods, making things from scratch, and buying the less expensive fruits and vegetables (even in Manhattan farmers markets where individual tomatoes cost $5, you can get alot of collards or kale for $1. And those greens have more nutrients in them than the tomato anyway.) This might be more difficult in some neighborhoods (I live in rural Oregon, where access to fresh, local, organic foods is widespread).
I'm not saying I have the answer. But I don't think land prices are the source of the problem - maybe just another factor.
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Tom Philpott Posted 7:12 am
12 Oct 2005
Forrest,
Agreed that there's a lot more money to be made selling into the NYC market than the rural Iowa market. (Although people tend to underestimate the latent buying power in depressed rural areas, just as they do in impoverished urban areas. If Iowa's farmers stopped growing for global commodity markets, and started growing for their own region, they'd be much better off. But that's a topic for another day.)
However, you can't grow enough $5 tomatoes on a small farm in the Hudson Valley to economically justify farming. Selling your land to an i-banker to plunk down his country home is a much smarter move--economically. The flipside is that no bank would ever loan someone the several million bucks it would take to buy a few acres in the Hudson Valley to start a new farm. The bank would never get paid back, no matter how much NYC chefs or Greenmarket shoppers paid for tomatoes, etc..
The farms currently operating in the Hudson Valley are old family farms that have been passed down; they were bought when land was cheap. Those farmers are heroes not to have taken the money and run; despite their $5 tomatoes, they're not getting rich. They're scraping by.
I agree that "land prices are the source of the problem - maybe just another factor." Another factor, as you point out, is culture. And with several billion per year in marketing cash to burn, the industrial food system has done a pretty good job of lining up that factor on its side.
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Tom Philpott Posted 7:21 am
12 Oct 2005
in the last paragraph of the above comment, i mean to say that I agree that land are not the source of the problem.
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josefski Posted 12:35 pm
12 Oct 2005
Sustainable Growth.
I live in Portland, OR, where as you drive from the center of the city and head west the progression of development goes a little something like this, inner city, suburbs, and then WHAM! farmland. It's almost as if some artificial boundary has been imposed that limits growth to a certain point about 20-25 linear miles from Portland city center, thus preserving farm communities and the infrastructure they need to survive.
Well guess what, there is such a line, and we call it the Urban Growth Boundary, or UGB for short. We are so emphatically in love with our UGB that we even have a fourth layer of government called Metro that sets the UGB and acts as a central planning body to whom all local governments in the Portland area are beholden when setting their development and zoning strategies. The size of home lots has shrunk dramatically inside this boundary within my short (24 years) lifespan and I must say, it's quite a trip when you live 20 minutes from downtown and 5 minutes from farmland, all in a metropolitan area of 2 million people.
Imagine the effect this must have on the price of fresh produce. We have more farmer's markets per capita than any other city in the nation, so HA!
The problem of accessiblity to nutritious and affordable food will not be solved until the other cities in this country commit themselves to a growth strategy similar to Portland's, where the emphasis is sustainable growth.
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Tom Philpott Posted 1:17 pm
12 Oct 2005
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bastish Posted 6:16 pm
12 Oct 2005
Certainly each single item I buy from the local farmers' coop is more expensive, but that added cost is more than made up for by the money I save through my concious decision to eat out less, not buy food I don't need that is imported from places far away, and/or excessivly packaged.
Look at it this way.
1 local bunch of carrots = 300 yen
1 bunch of carrots from China = 100 yen
200 yen loss right? Yes, on that bunch of carrots, but eating sustainably also means that I don't buy the pineapple or bannanas that I would otherwise. This now saves me the same 200 yen. I also see a package of cookies that is wrapped up in a huge plastic bag... my decision to eat sustainably causes me to bypass it. I loose weight AND I save 200 yen. My current food bill is now 200 yen less than what it would have been -and I am eating more sustainably. In fact, since I have made the decisison to eat local and sustainable, I eat healthier, tastier, and my food bills have been almost cut in half.
I do, however, admit to some sacrifice (which seems to be a dirty word.) For example, I don't indulge my urge for raisons near as often as I would like because I can only get those imported from California.
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accel2 Posted 12:57 am
13 Oct 2005
A number of big cities are making a point to put real supermarkets back into neighborhoods that are currently only served by bodegas for their groceries.
A lot of groups and people are working to bring more farmers markets to inner city neighborhoods, at least here in NYC. More and more people, including the mass media, seem to be making the connection between health, nutrition, poverty, food supply, local food, the environment and the economy.
Here's one: http://www.justfood.org/jf/
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rh Posted 6:26 am
13 Oct 2005
If you're looking for more information about what's happening in your area, you might want to see what the local college is up to.
Just a thought.
rh
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misty Posted 3:11 am
14 Oct 2005
One exception I am aware of:
http://www.growingpower.org/
Others?
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rlegro Posted 7:20 am
18 Oct 2005
A cover story on Allen's operation, which has spread its wings regionally, appeared in the 9/22/05 issue of the Shepherd Express, Milwaukee's main alternative weekly. Check it out at:
http://www.shepherd-express.com/9_22_05/cover.htm
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sbab Posted 4:12 am
19 Oct 2005
"The U.S. spends less per capita on food than any nation in the world, probably than any nation since the rise of the nation-state. "
The US may spend a smaller percentage of it's income than any other nation, but actually spending less in absolute terms? Than countries where the average person makes a couple of dollars a day? If that's for real, i'd love to see a source...
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Tom Philpott Posted 4:51 am
19 Oct 2005
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malatron Posted 8:18 am
19 Oct 2005
But I've decide to post it anyways, as I think it can serve to show an example on the myriad propblems we face tackling this very imporatant issue of the class divide in sustainable food.
Thru my own experience, and lack of.
The comment follows:
When Gristmill says:
"Where farmland is cheap, people are poor and accustomed to industrial food. Where people are wealthy and attracted to healthy food, farmland is dear."
It seems that you should clarify you statement to better reflect what seems like your true intention. Which was to intend it towards the high quality --organic or otherwise-- food market. Micro produced honeys, cheese, heirloom tomatoes, etc...
Otherwise...
That statement is just simply not true. Not in my experience. It might be true for some areas and people, but it is way too broad a statement to be making, as it simply is not universally true. I read the article, and they make very valid points, that I'm sure are true for some, maybe most? people. I just don't know.
They're is a class divide in sustainable food. No question. But there are steps you can take to insilulate yourself from that. With compassionate community building being the common denominanator in any and all steps you might take.
Don't wait for someone to do it for you. McDonalds is not going to take initative.
The farmland here, though affected by the astronomical increase in value that affects the entire Northeast, is still cheap in some places. Specifically those not zoned for developement. Some poor here dine on locally grown food for two reasons.
One, by necessity, as buying locally grown tomatoes, potaotes, and other product straight from the farmer is noticeably cheaper that buying it at stop and shop. I can attest to that as I have purchased much local produce for restaurant use. It is ALWAYS cheaper. Without fail. And they only deliver the best products. That may or may not be due to a loyalty factor, but nonetheless, it's is an example of how such a sweeping generalization does not hold true for everybody.
The second reason being the level of eduacation in this area of the benefits of locally grown produce. Many here know locally grown food is better and cheaper, and widely available. I don't know anybody who thinks otherwise.
(again, here in the valley)
You know, I could go on and on with examples from my life that disprove Gristmills very presumptous and possibly self-defeating statement. My father, though poor when we were younger, never approved of us eating school lunches, though we did. He took steps to see to it that we grew up with food that others seem to enjoy paying more than they have too for.
If you are "just too busy" to do what it takes to build a community that reflects your ideals and visions, than, fine. Eat at McDonalds.
We may be poor, but we are not dumb. And we adapt. And we do so smartly and quietly.
And with help from those farmers you unintendedly insulted. Selling your tomatoes for x amount might not be "economically" viable. But I will attest to the belief that economics, save for a fair profit, is hardly a motivating factor with ALL of the farmers I know, or they would have long ago sold out. They hold dear the community they live in, and the people that comprise it, just as we do they. And we work together to make our lives enjoyable. And that has always been the motivating factor for all of us.
To create a community that we all can prosper in, and enjoy, inspite of the powerful forces that work against that.
The rest of them?
Well...
Let them eat heirloom cake.
Dumb americans.
p.s. those cards that the supermarket give you for a discount?
A discount with hidden costs elswhere. Get rid of them. They are causing you to be at an economic disadvantage. http://blog.stayfreemagazine.org/2005/10/shopping_cards.html
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malatron Posted 8:21 am
19 Oct 2005
Northampton, Hadley, Amherst, and Hatfield specifically.
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malatron Posted 8:27 am
19 Oct 2005
"Boosting Valley produce - In new deal, UMass commits to buying 15 percent locally
BY DAVID FONSECA
Joe Czajkowski pulls into the dusty drive of his Hadley farm and wastes little time unpacking leeks. He's a busy man with mouths to feed.
The farm stands within sight of towers at the University of Massachusetts, home to some of his newest customers.
Under a contract drafted by Communities Involved in Sustaining Agriculture, the university's dining services pledges to use 15 percent of its $1 million yearly produce budget to buy from local farms."
This is an important developement in this arena. Namely, demanding that powerful public institutions reflect the wants and desires of the local community. This is a start. But yet still not enough. We must demand more.
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Tom Philpott Posted 10:39 am
19 Oct 2005
All of that said, and even though U Mass is admirably dedicating 15 percent of its food budget to local farmers, I still hold that, well, the sustainable food movement has a class problem.
Take New York City, home of Just Food, a wonderful community-garden base, a vigorous Slow Food branch, and superb farming projects in such unlikely places as Red Hook and East New York, both in Brooklyn. Walk into a public school in a poor neighborhood in NYC and see what the kids are eating. Walk around the neighborhood and note what food-shopping opportunities people have.
You may have a friend on food stamps who lives on organic local collard greens. Produce at your local farmers market may be cheaper than the dreck at the nearest Wal-Mart (though I find this scenario difficult to believe). The flagship state school in your town may have just rolled out a "buy local" program. I applaud all of these things. But most people in this country still lack access to delicious, nutritious, and fresh local food.
And that won't change with concerted grassroots effort and straight talk.
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malatron Posted 3:30 pm
19 Oct 2005
I want only to speak for myself here, without being overly emotional, though this is a topic that does illicit strong emotions from me. And I want not to try and discount what you wrote, for what you write might be true.
But for me, when you say...
"most people in this country still lack access to delicious, nutritious, and fresh local food...And that won't change with concerted grassroots effort and straight talk."
It is exactly what changed it for me.
And I am poor.
But I also have no children, which is an economic burden I am not familar with.
In the world I grew up in, anybody who has been identified as a member of this class struggle is recognized as such. And the farmers would sooner sell their farms for developement than charge a member of this struggle a fair market price. As in the land of affluence we live in that is the Northeast US, a fair market price has no limits.
I guess you could say I live with market protection. Which is how it should be, as anybody of affluence is readily familar with.
This is only my experience. I believe it is one that can be duplicated, but I understand that you find that debatable. I agree to disagree.
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marciaduffy Posted 11:49 pm
19 Oct 2005
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Sishongjerry Posted 1:04 am
20 Oct 2005
To the point here, processed, industrialized food is cheaper to an extent. If all the money I have is 10 dollars, I can go to McDonalds and purchase 2 double cheeseburgers, and fries, for under $3.25 with tax included.
Granted it's just one meal, but I, being broke and cheap, will buy it just the same, simly because I cannot afford to purchase each of the individual ingredients at one time.
I know this is bad for me, I know that it doesn't help my community, I know what should be done, I just cannot afford to do it. I have to work through most farmers markets anyway, so I wouldn't even be able to get there without losing money by taking time off work.
I have long been of the opinion that healthy, fresh, "clean" food is primarily harvested for the upper echelons. You don't even have to be rich, you just have to not be poor. With an average person such as myself is lucky to find a job making more than $8 an hour, ($16,640 each year). Without an income over $23,000 a year (before taxes), living in Chicago where the cost of rent alone can be $12,000-15,000 that only leaves about $5,000-6,000 for all the other bills. In the end, The food budget drops to only being $1,500 each year, that's less than $5 each day, for 3 meals.
I would have to say, and this is just observation, but everyone who argued it was not about being rich enough to buy the food, can probably afford to do such, without having to worry about living in the street because you spent that $5 on A tomato instead of rent.
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tasmonia Posted 2:23 am
20 Oct 2005
It's not enough for fresh, local, sustainably grown fruits and veggies to be available in urban settings. It's not even enough for them to be affordable. People need to actually know what to DO with these ingredients.
Poverty and cheap processed foods have been widespread for long enough in the US that in many places at least two generations have lived without the knowledge of what to do with fresh foods. Furthermore, in the past there was often at least one individual (generally mother and/or grandmother)who stayed home and would have time to take raw ingredients through the process of becoming food. Now, Americans are notoriously overworked and many live in single-parent homes. Who has time to cook beans--one of the cheapest and most nutritions fresh bulky foods--from scratch? Who has the knowledge anymore to can for the winter?
I'd also like to add that I was raised vegetarian in a family that cooked nearly everything from scratch, and when I was a CSA (community supported agriculture) member, I STILL didn't know what the heck to do with 3lbs of kohlrabi every week!
There is also an important aesthetic and cultural barrier to introducing fresh foods to those not used to them. Take this anecdote as an example: I used to work at a summer camp for urban youth, many who had never left the city. We began introducing a gardening component to the camp to acquaint campers with where their food comes from. Every week campers helped digging, planting, weeding, and harvesting the garden. We though their pride in the hard work they did would excite them about the food they produced. However, when we served lettuce from the garden at a hamburger lunch...no one would eat it! They thought it was "gross", though doubtless it contained far less pesticides and artifacts of handling than had we bought it at the local Megalomart or from Sysco. They simply weren't prepared to eat something not bought wrapped in plastic under fluorescent lights. And don't even get me started on the difficulty of introducing novel foodstuffs into the scheduled meals. It was a scandal when I snuck tofu into the lasagna.
I've been studying agriculture and food systems and advocating change for most of my adult life. It is overwhelming how many things must change before sustainability can become a reality. I enjoyed this article because here in academia, nearly every conversation comes back to the fact that we are the elite...though none of us could afford that $95 local meal, we still are able to make choices that favor local and what we hope are sustainably produced foodstuffs. Economics are still a huge limiting factor--if I can't get a seasonal tomato from a friend's garden plot, I simply can't afford to spend $5 on it at the farmer's market and I have no tomato that week. No matter how ethical I would like to be in my food choices, I do not believe that consumers should bear all the cost of this type of purchasing and nor can I. This need for change is what fuels me.
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malatron Posted 3:52 am
20 Oct 2005
Here is the link to the comments at that post.
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chrissy Posted 12:42 am
21 Oct 2005
Food growers who grow for local consumption generally grow in places where their farms are protected from development either through ordinance or because of the rural location and lack of demand for land, simply becasue that's where they can grow and still make a living. I live in the Hudson Valley, and I know there are a number of towns in the Hudson Valley have these protections) . The reason quality food is grown and available in this area is because there are protections in place for farmers. It's no different anywhere else. Of course, you will have pockets of wealthy areas where expensive quality food is grown for the elite, but for the masses, local government must be the gatekeeper to prevent the abuse of economically motivated land use.
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Cleve Posted 10:34 pm
26 Oct 2005
The cost of locally produced foods decreases when you take in the length of time it stays fresh; I cannot tell you how many times my mother bought industrial food and 2 days later pulled a blackened item out of the fridge and threw it away. In contrast, locally produced foods may last 1-3 weeks longer, since they have not been sitting on a large truck for 5 days getting to your grocery store and then sitting in a crate in a back room of a large shipping area. Yes, my dollar goes further when I buy it locally since I have it to eat for twice as along.
As the writer from Japan wrote above, people make the decision to eat out rather than get fresh foods (meaning its not usually a choice between industrially produced fresh foods and locally grown fresh foods.) The cost of take out is prohibitive and lasts 1 or 2 meals only.
Farmers markets and other avenues of locally produced foods are the first wave of this movement. The money and work that is has taken to get them running is now very often being used to start community gardens in urban areas, working with states to get food stamp acceptance at markets, creating access to fresh local foods at corner grocery stores, helping schools to get access to wholesale prices for local foods and much much more. The point is that the local food movement is 20 years old and already doing very well to think of ways to expanding their reach into other areas not presently reached.
The costs of bad health are too well documented to recapture here. The need for all Americans to eat more healthy foods is not only a chance to get local farmers a livelihood, but also a chance to keep Americans alive and well.
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LaurieO Posted 11:41 pm
26 Oct 2005
As for those who say they can't afford food other than McDonald's, I'm sorry, but I've been in your shoes, and I just don't buy that argument. I can eat much more cheaply by preparing my own food than eating fast food. Education and prioritizing your time and money is the key. I began by substituting one organic item at a time at the grocery store, and learned how to shop efficiently. It does take planning and thought, but it can actually be fun if you take on a positive attitude about it. Slow Food doesn't have to be expensive or take long and laborious preparation. It is more of a way of thinking about life than a way of eating.
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Hollis Posted 12:46 am
27 Oct 2005
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Jer Posted 3:55 pm
21 Nov 2005
Thanks for this great article. Indeed, it is frustrating when our ideals do not match up to the reality on the ground. Being a local-food advocate who works with low-income communities in Fresno, CA, I know this frustration well! Yet there are many examples of efforts that have bridged the gap between sustainable and affordable. While many of these examples struggle for economic viability... they do give the movement a vision of what could be. Add to this some business-savvy, and maybe a bit of... ahem... compromise on our part and I believe that we will move toward feeding ALL people regardless of income in a more sustainable fashion.
Lately the main focus of my work has been the farm to school movement. Talk about a tough market for small farmers to break into: school food service has about 10 cents to spend on a serving of fruits or veggies - not exactly a farmers market price. This pretty much excludes organic right off the bat, which pains me. Check out a great article on the reality of going organic in the Berkeley Unified School District: http://www.fresnometmin.org/fmm/pdfs/ArticlefromSFMag.pdf
However, there are some great success stories of districts making farm to school work for them - One local district has made it work by simply replacing the juice in their universal breakfast (in the classroom) with a locally grown fruit. They went from serving 20,000 pieces of fruit a month to over 200,000!
To be successful in moving towards sustainability, I've compromised a bit on what qualifies as `sustainable'. Here in the Central Valley of CA, most of the Farmers Markets which dot the region are summertime cultural events put on by the local chamber of commerce - they don't exactly draw the low-income crowd. However, a wonderful discovery has been the Flea Markets that are hidden on back roads yet boast 10,000+ visitors on a Sunday! Here is where the people can purchase affordable produce grown by a Southeast Asian farmer, or mangos and papaya from their homeland - and they can even use their Food Stamp cards thanks to an alternative currency used at the market.
We can't have it all right away... however, if we build a little, and cultivate it, it will grow - it might end up looking quite different than what we expected.
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