Blessing the Hands that Feed Us (38 page)

Now pause to consider their findings about meat. They calculated how much land might be needed to raise livestock for consumption. For each type of meat they calculated how much land would be needed to produce 100 percent of what is consumed in the county. For example, for beef it would take 372,000 acres to raise all the beef that county residents consume. Given that they have only six thousand acres, they could produce only 1 percent of what's needed. The same is true for all meats—except chicken!

They can supply 100 percent of their need for chicken because chickens cohabit gardens. Think chicken tractors—mobile coops to use chicken's natural scratching and pecking to till new garden plots. Think New York City, where people raise chickens on roofs for fresh eggs! Think a roast chicken, green peas, and potatoes along with that apple pie.

I suspect goats could cohabit yards as well, providing some meat, milk, and cheese. Think a bit of cheese beside that apple pie.

Think, “Hmm, what about where I live?”

Complementary Food Systems

Of course this is a report about potential. There's a lot of work to actualize the potential—in King County and in your four-hundred-mile “local” area.

Regional food systems won't replace the global industrial one anytime soon—if ever. My hunch, however, is that we can revitalize and rely on them, bit by bit, as complementary food systems. In medicine, as good science verified the efficacy of alternative treatments, such practices were sanctioned—and insured—under the rubric of “complementary medicine.” The same could happen with food—a more integral way of feeding ourselves.

Richard and Phyllis began their food policy work through the door of community resilience—the ability to weather short-term emergencies. Restoring the vitality of regional food systems could be seen as a strategy for longer emergencies arising from climate, energy, or economic disruptions. We need backup systems that can grow into complementary systems. In Russia, after the Soviet Union collapsed, people who had dachas, plots of land in the country, grew food. In Cuba they'd mobilized for food production and survived. In Greece and Ireland, as their economies shrank, people with ties to families in the countryside were able to grow food. Heck, in the United States during World War II, 20 million Americans planted victory gardens, providing up to 40 percent of all the vegetables consumed nationally.
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Living with Less Meat

For those of us who believe that such changes are on the way—and are vegetarians—this King County food system report is extremely good news. We meat eaters, though, will need to eat less—especially less red meat—and only sustainably raised, pastured meat.

There are three ways to do this other than cold turkey, which of course is a very poor choice of metaphor.

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First is the sustainability-as-an-extreme-sport approach of “I can do anything for a month.” Set a constraint on your meat eating and live within it for a month. At the end see what you honestly have learned and want to carry forward. As I've said, my meat constraint in my 10-mile diet was that it cost so darn much I halved consumption and doubled investigation of my assumptions about protein. Prior to the 10-mile diet, I averaged six to eight ounces of meat a day. Now I'm down to two to three. I eat meat as a treat—and it really is! I take pleasure in that first rush of meatness, but by a few bites I'm back on automatic, so why eat more?

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Second is the 10 percent trick. Eat 10 percent less. Then another 10 percent less. Keep going until you've gone too far. Anyone can imagine doing 10 percent more or 10 percent less of anything. You could easily eat 10 percent less meat by skipping meat one day a week (that would technically be 14 percent) or eat 10 percent smaller portions—six ounces instead of seven.

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Third is to raise your own meat. Keeping chickens—within limits—is legal in hundreds of cities in the United States, including New York. If you raise, slaughter, and butcher your own animals, you tend to honor that meat. At the rate I eat meat, a chicken a month would be sufficient—plus I'd get a few eggs a week. At the rate I travel, though, I can't keep animals, so I happily pay my neighbors for raising my meat and eggs.

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Of course there are others, like Meatless Monday (or whatever day you choose), mentioned earlier.

Hope—After All

The King County report is now part of what gives me hope. It is natural for our region to feed us. It can be done. Even though our way of life—our gadgets, our assumptions, our entitlements—might be severely compromised, “we”—the whole community of life—is not off the cliff. We are simply crossing a great divide, which we have done many times before as we've evolved for billions of years on this planet. I mourn the suffering, I mourn what is dying, but I am now free to participate in what is growing. Okay, so I'm not Moses, but this careful examination of our prospects has at least parted the Red Sea of despair in my own mind.

Serotiny

Anytime I feel that hope requires that hypermissionary zeal that exhausted me in the nineties, I ground myself . . . literally. I go into my yard and let life fill me. However paved the earth, however complex our lives, however large our problems, I take comfort and refuge in the fact that under the surface life is going about its business, waiting for the right conditions to send up a shoot and have at it again.

I saw this miracle in practice many times in my years on the road. I often camped in landscapes recently devastated by fire—yet carpeted in magenta fireweed, a plant designed to come alive when a forest is mowed down. The tall fireweed becomes the shelter where other seedlings, like lodgepole pines, can develop. The cones of a lodgepole pine are sealed tight with a resin that melts only in the heat of a fire, releasing the seed to begin “foresting” again. This “coming to life after fire” is a type of serotiny—delays in blooming until conditions are right.

These pines remind me that what is scarred is merely cleared. What is burned is nutrient for what comes next. The fireweed isn't the winner, but simply the herald of a succession of lives, the beginning of the next mature forest. In life, hope is hospitality—making a good bed where the next guest in the landscape can find shelter. This is how life always behaves.

From the point of view of the forest, cities look like a firestorm came through, cutting down most everything standing. From the point of view of the seed, wherever there is soil, there is opportunity.

Life has more tricks up her sleeve than any of us will ever know in our lifetime—serotiny being one of them. What other seeds are in the soil, waiting to sprout—be they mustard seeds of faith or fireweed of youth or even ancient seeds from a previous interglacial period?

Knowing this, even hope seems too small a ground to stand on. I now have trust. Hope allows us to act with expectancy. Trust allows us to relax into what is, into the resilience of life itself. Hope is our relationship with the future. Trust is our relationship with the eternal present. Hope lets us try. Trust gives us assurance that we are not inventing but rather cooperating with forces more powerful than our little human wills.

It is in this spirit of trust that I invite you to read on. To ask, “How can I, where I live, engage in this work of food system restoration?” You'll be cooperating with a movement that's growing, well, like weeds. Young people in droves want to farm now. In fact, most of the young people I now know consider my generation and me the fireweed and lodgepole pines. They are about to grow a new forest.

Mapping a Food System

Here's an overview of the work of restoring regional food systems. As the Island County food system report mentioned earlier reveals, there is more to a system than farms and farmers and eaters.

These are the typical food system elements—whether industrial or complementary:

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Farm suppliers that provide seed, compost, starts, equipment, and more to gardeners and farmers

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Farmers, large and small, growing for subscription customers, for farmers' markets, for chefs and stores

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Enterprises that process and package produce and meats

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Slaughterhouses and butchers where local grass-fed animals become the shrink-wrapped, frozen, and canned foods we can buy retail (or process a quarter of an animal for our freezer)

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Markets, from farm stands to farmers' markets to grocery stores

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Distributors, from personalized delivery services to warehouses and food hubs

These elements are usually put in a line—the food value chain—starting not with seeds but with harvest and ending not with compost but at the checkout counter. Life's cycles don't count. Only the business cycles. Relational eaters know that the value chain is just a delivery system, not a food system. We need to put nature back in as the context and culture back in as the major driver.

The Butcher, the Baker, the Candlestick Maker

Culture is in a way the “customer” of this food system. It's our human preferences, social customs, religious taboos, and economic structures. It is eaters, but it is also how people in their social and professional roles influence the system. Once you see the variety of actors who affect our food choices, you see how much power we each have in shaping our food future.

Here's my list of system transformers:

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The eaters—that would be all of us—who grow, cook, share, dine, educate, promote, lobby, fund, donate, and are the ultimate customers for what this amazing system produces.

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The markets, large and small, that stock local food and farmers' markets and farm stands and CSAs that bring us produce cut and washed at dawn.

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The market makers that brand and promote. The industrial system is great at this piece of the food puzzle! People internalize product jingles and develop brand loyalty.

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The nonprofits that support local and organic and homegrown and artisan values and protect farmland and support young people learning to farm. They research legislation, develop business incubators, and engage in land preservation.

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The educators, who teach, write, and speak about food, gardening, and food systems. Michael Pollan seems to be the current educator-in-chief for local food, but there are literally countless K-16 courses about food, systems, politics, good practices, and more.
Mother Earth News
is the grandmother journal, but just the other day I saw a new magazine at the grocery checkout called
Urban Farmer
.

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The activists who challenge the system, muckrake, expose, and advocate for change. This advocacy space is full and getting larger as groups and individuals press against the “get big or get out” agricultural orthodoxy. Every issue is on the table: safety, sovereignty, transparency, justice, conservation, ownership, subsidies, education, security, sufficiency. Every issue has dozens of champions, heroes, bulldogs, and educators. Progress is slow but the pressure is implacable.

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The financiers, large and small: the credit unions, banks, donors, investors, and lenders who help small enterprises get off the ground and grow.

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The chefs who serve their customers local food and teach people to use local ingredients through restaurants as well as culinary schools, community colleges, adult education classes, online videos, and gourmet magazines.

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The institutions that feed their students, patients, and residents in schools, hospitals, and cafeterias—and are eager to serve fresh, natural, wholesome foods. They are making markets for local products at a rapid pace.

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The event producers that celebrate and uphold local food, county fairs, and community potlucks.

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The food banks that grow, glean, buy, and receive donations of fresh food.

An Agenda for We the Eaters

Understanding the food system and understanding who the transformers are, I could come back to those resolves I made to bless the hands that feed me here on Whidbey. In chapter 6 I enumerated them. Now I reviewed them:

1. Get farmland into the hands of young and new dedicated farmers . . . or at least get them reliable, affordable, and long-term secure access to farmland that they can invest themselves in and reap the rewards from for years to come.

2. Do something about the cost difference between local food and industrial food. Buy local—not only farm produce but milk and meat, jams and jellies, canned dilly beans, and such.

3. Yes, regulate the industrial system. Protect supermarket shoppers who want to think only about what's for dinner, not where it came from . . . but make “scale-appropriate” regulations for the little local guys.

4. Inform myself—and others. Get up off my consumerism laurels and learn enough to really help.

5. Do that 50 percent within fifty miles in February. Rise at least to the challenge of a local winter diet.

I am pleased to see how much progress I've made. Number five is done and the result is that I am now a year-round local eater when possible. Item four is in your hands. This book arises from that resolve, as well as whatever I write or speak about from this day forward.

Now for the tough stuff. Items one to three.

There are two policy directions in the United States that I believe are crucial to seed and cultivate the flourishing regional food systems of the future. They aren't a full agenda, just two levers we can pull to change the flow of events and the course of history:

1.
Scale-appropriate regulations,
which would liberate neighbor-to-neighbor trade from the regulations and fees imposed to protect the national food supply. People who raise animals for their milk and eggs and people who raise, slaughter, and butcher animals for home consumption and sell livestock would be able to sell to people they know. This is community-based food security, with performance-based measures (is the food healthy?) rather than production-based regulations (is the milking parlor painted correctly?). People growing food for their neighbors need to be seen as Good Samaritans, not as outlaws.