Blessing the Hands that Feed Us (35 page)

Local Everywhere?

What better way to nourish life than relational eating! It's a daily act. What we eat is one way we vote on the future—a mouthful at a time. Also, buying local “buys” more local food capacity, which increases food security, soil fertility, and local prosperity. So I asked myself how my 10-mile experiment might have value for more than just me and my farmers and a few other people crazy enough to try it. Can local be one of those positive options that actually alters the outcome?

I like heading into the unknown with a powerful question so I asked, Can local really scale up to feed the people?

At first blush, scaling up local sounds ridiculous. You can't have large-scale small-scale. Local by its very nature is diverse, entrepreneurial, adaptive to microclimates, individualistic unto quirky. Local is relational.

Organic could scale up because it's about standards for growing food—seeds, practices, and inputs. There can be “organic everywhere,” but local everywhere seems a contradiction in terms.

Do you scale up eaters? Increase the proportion of local for each eater in a locale? Increase the number of locavores, full converts, in a locale? Aim at 50 percent of your eaters on a 50/50 diet year-round?

Do you scale up farms? More cows for the Long family or more garlic from Georgie? Is that asking inherently small-scale family farms to grow beyond their natural lands, acquire more property, become an ever more vertically integrated business. Would “Long's beef” or “Georgie's garlic” become rootless brands, product pulled from anywhere. Cascadian Farms did that—grew beyond Gene Kahn's original berry patch and became a powerful brand. In doing so, it left the community behind—the berries came from everywhere—though not the values.

Do you scale up land in production, get new farmers onto fallow land so that we double, triple, or more the number of five-acre-and-under properties in production? More farmers on fallow land would increase farm stands, CSAs, farmers' markets, supplies for grocers and restaurants. That's closer, but if these new farmers are going to fare well financially, they need a system of financial fairness, not just a few customers who can afford to pay the true cost.

I sat with these contradictions until the next key insight showed up. I realized I had stumbled into a rigged fight. How can local win in a contest for who will feed the world? If “scale up” means to get big enough to pump food out to the masses, it's guaranteed that local would lose.

“Put everyone on a local diet,” the industrial system says through its many mouthpieces, “and people would starve. Civilizations would collapse. We'd be back in the Dark Ages, serfs with hoes. With seven billion people on the planet, there is no alternative to the food industrial complex.”

There is no alternative. Where had I heard that before? Ah, a dozen years earlier when Margaret Thatcher, speaking for neoliberal economic policies, said TINA—there is no alternative—to corporate globalization. What global civil society said on the streets of Seattle in 1999, protesting the WTO (World Trade Organization), and in every year since, was “There are many alternatives! And we are living them now!”

Maybe local can't feed the world the way the global industrial system does, but “locals feeding locals” can multiply sideways, linking arms. In fact, this is already happening. The strength of local is the very everywhere-ness of it, the guerrilla-ness of it.

Now we are on new ground with a new question. How can local scale sideways—and feed the world? I like that question. In it I see the hope I've been seeking, a place to stand, actions to take, and a humble attitude. No longer fixated on fixing or stopping things, I can participate in restoring, regenerating, and relocalizing life. You could call it “relational hope.” In fact, I think I will.

It Takes a System to Feed a Village

If vertical integration is the key strategy of global brands, then horizontal distribution with webs of relationships is the strategy of scaling local sideways. We need to repair our food web. We need a system to support all the people and institutions that bring local food to our table: the growers, distributors, butchers, packagers, processors, marketers, retail outlets, chefs, lenders, advocates, educators, and artists. It takes a system to feed a village, to paraphrase the old African proverb.

Local food scales neighbor to neighbor, network to network, relational every step of the way, putting trust and community first. We can see that clearly in farmers' markets. The market itself is a technology for connecting growers to the public and to one another such that everyone wins. We can see that through Mike Nichols of Whidbey Green Goods, who increases local production by encouraging small growers to grow a bit more for market—and then sells their food to his customers. We see it at Grange meetings and at county fairs, those once-a-year extravaganzas for the food, farming, animal husbandry, processing, educational, and commerce communities to strut their stuff, dance, gossip, and meet and greet.

The USDA's definition of local as four hundred miles—as silly as that seems to hyperlocavores—actually helps us imagine “local everywhere.” Four hundred miles delineates a region, not just a city or even county. True regional agriculture is defined more by geography and climate than by distance, yet at least this four-hundred-mile local opens up that space of relational hope. We can link up and strengthen regional food systems so that appropriately-sized farms, stores, distributors, and processing plants can flourish together, leapfrogging from one success to the next.

Could such regional food and farming networks supply even 10 percent, or a bodacious 25 percent, or a miraculous 50 percent, of what their eaters need to survive? Could each of us stand in the middle of where we live, as I was learning to do, and look out on a flourishing landscape of food as far as the eye could see? In cities we'd see yards and rooftops and community gardens. Farther we'd see farmland and dairies and ranches oriented around feeding their region. Farther we'd of course see larger-scale operations with a global reach, hopefully with fair wages and good working conditions and healthy practices and good corporate citizenship. Farther still (if you live in a temperate climate) you'd see the tropics, with coffee, tea, fruit, and spices, grown sustainably and traded fairly.

Take a moment now and look out from where you live to the landscapes of food, the windowsill, the yard, the neighborhood, city, region, nation, and communities around the world. See food everywhere—all of it relational, as in knowable by you. Now imagine someone a thousand miles away likewise standing and looking out on his or her food system, eventually overlapping with yours. Imagine everyone everywhere being able to stand in food systems that feed their people and feed their hope.

A Local World

To do this exercise for myself, I simply got out my map and ruler. The 50-miles-as-the-crow-flies diet I undertook in February got me south almost to Olympia, north almost to Bellingham, west out to Sequim on the Olympic Peninsula, where Nash's large market garden is, and east to the foothills of the Cascade Mountains. This is, in fact, Puget Sound, a natural basin that nourished the Coast Salish tribes for millennia and the early settlers of the region for a century plus. One hundred miles, a more common measure for locavores, would reach over to the Yakima Valley to bring me ample warm-weather fruits and vegetables—tomatoes, peaches, apricots, grapes, peppers, as well as hops (yum, beer), oats, wheat, and barley—plus a lot more meat. A USDA “local,” four hundred miles, would reach into Oregon, northern California, Idaho, and Montana and well into British Columbia, almost to Manitoba. Exploring these food ranges, I realized how well we would eat should we, by choice or necessity, confine ourselves to a four-hundred-mile radius.

Oh, yeah? you might say. What about New York City? Gotcha.

Out came the ruler and another map.

Ten miles was ridiculous. Measuring from Times Square, you'd get a bit west of the Jersey Turnpike, south to Coney Island, east to Bayside, Queens, and north to the Bronx and Yonkers. When my mother was born you'd find farmland in that circle. Not now. Even with the advent of gardens and chicken coops on rooftops—and CSA gardens in the city limits—these are barely pinholes of hope. But when you look at that USDA four-hundred-mile range, hope seems less like a dream and more like reality. As the crow flies, you could get to Detroit or Raleigh or Quebec from Manhattan, with thousands of acres of beautiful farmland in every direction.

Food 2020

I decided to start testing this notion of “local everywhere” by investigating my own Whidbey Island food system, then fanning out to the hundred-mile six-county region. What is growing, in terms of food but also innovations, within this circle? How can I, a lowly eater, contribute to creating a dense, rich food web here?

Fortunately, a Transition Whidbey action group had produced a comprehensive food system report several years earlier (see box below).

More and more communities are far more systematic in their approach.

The Center for Whole Communities inspired a dedicated group of citizens and professionals to develop the Whole Measures for Community Food Systems, which is a mapping tool for the following comprehensive factors:

Justice and Fairness

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Provides food for all

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Reveals, challenges, and dismantles injustice in the food system

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Creates just food system structures and cares for food system workers

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Ensures that public institutions and local businesses support a just community food system

Strong Communities

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Improves equity and responds to community food needs

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Contributes to healthy neighborhoods

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Builds diverse and collaborative relationships, trust, and reciprocity

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Supports civic participation, political empowerment, and local leadership

Vibrant Farms