RECONNECTING A LOCAL FOOD CULTURE (Click a PDF version)

I’d like to begin with a blessing, as if we were all sitting down to a meal together.  So close your eyes for a moment if that’s comfortable, perhaps join hands with your neighbor, especially if that neighbor is a stranger, imagine the breakfast you ate this morning. 

We are so blessed.  We are so blessed.

Perhaps that breakfast began with an energetic brood of chickens, combing a farmyard for tasty morsels.  Or maybe it started in a waving field of oats or wheat, concentrating the sun’s energies into rich grains.  If you’re lucky, your breakfast also included some greens (because we love to eat our greens, greens, greens) or yellows or reds or blues, the colorful fruits and vegetables that paint health and vitality into our lives. Now, as you expand this mind image to include the meals you’ve had this week, this month, this year, think of the diverse soils of our big mitten state, mineral rich gifts from the glaciers, alive with an unfathomable community of organisms.  Taste the fresh, cool water of our Great Lakes basin that makes all life around us possible.  Reflect on the times this summer that you were able to submerge your ENTIRE BEING in fresh water – we are so blessed!

Consider the sun and the air that exchange energies with us so freely.  Try to grasp the miracle of the tiny seed.  Reach out to the farmers that lovingly nurture that seed, assuring that it has what it needs to create our sustenance.  Now hold in your hearts the bakers, food processors, abattoir operators, all artisans of their craft, carefully applying culture to transform nature’s gifts into delicious food.  Remember the food distributors and grocers that convenience our access to food.  And the chefs and cooks that inspire our senses to remember the beauty and pleasure not only in eating food, but also in preparing and sharing it.

Now open your eyes and look around this room of beautiful Bioneers.  Hold in your hearts everyone in this room that has nourished you in the past year.  We are nourished in so many ways – through music and the arts, through friendships and community, and, of course, through food.  The true gift of nourishment is that, when offered from the heart, it is reciprocating – the giver as well as the receiver is nourished.  Look around and send blessings to everyone that you have fed this year.

We are so blessed. 

Thanks for that.  I think we all just reconnected to a local food culture.  Food truly is the great connector.  Not only does it offer a chance to interconnect our human community, but it also offers, arguably, our most direct and intimate connection to the natural world.  Our food is that part of the environment that sustains and nourishes us.  Along with air and water, it is the part of the world around us that becomes us.  You are what you eat.  And yet, as an American society, in this time and place, we are so severed from that connection, or at least blind to it.  What is an American food culture?  I remember doing country reports in middle school, and among the things we copied out of the encyclopedia was the food of the people – what it looked like, tasted like, why the people of this geographical place interacted with their food in the way that they did.  But what would we write for the good ole USA?  Of course, we all know what that food is, but in reality, do we want that to be our identity?  The Standard American Fare is cheap, fast, and calorie dense – which translates as processed and loaded with sugars and fats derived from corn, soybean and factory-farm animals. Indeed, since 1975, our consumption of “added fats” has increased by one-third and our high fructose corn syrup is up ten-fold.  About a third of the calories consumed in the US now come from what we would all call “junk food.”  We’re in the midst of an obesity epidemic, 4 of the top 6 killers in the US are diet related, and the economic burden for cardiovascular disease in Michigan alone reaches $6.8 billion.
           
I could go on for the next 20 minutes on the disastrous state of food and agriculture in the US, but I get bored pretty quickly with those fear statistics, and I’m sure you do to.  The report I wrote while at U of M on sustainability of the US Food System has been affectionately dubbed the “doom&gloom” report by the students of a colleague who has used it in class.  So, no, we won’t go there.  What I would like to talk about, though, is how we’re getting out of the mess. 

throughout the summer, I shared some of my ideas with the zucchini and beets in my garden, and I can only assume by their productivity that they agree.  A few weeks ago, I picked up a copy of Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle.  I think my zucchini would agree with Barbara as well.  The book tells the story of her family’s move to a farm in southern Appalachia, and their journey into creating their own local food culture.  I’d like to read an aggregated set of passages from the first chapter of her book:

Food cultures concentrate a population’s collective wisdom about the plants and animals that grow in a place, and the complex ways of rendering them tasty.  These are mores of survival, good health, and control of excess.  Living without such a culture would seem dangerous…And here we are, sure enough in trouble…We have yet to come up with a strong set of generalized norms, passed down through families, for savoring and sensibly consuming what our land and climate give us.  We have, instead, a string of fad diets convulsing our bookstores and bellies, one after another, at the scale of the national best seller…What the fad diets don’t offer, though, is any sense of national and biological integrity.  A food culture is not something that gets sold to people.  It arises out of a place, a soil, a climate, a history, a temperament, a collective sense of belonging.  Every set of fad-diet rules is essentially framed in the negative, dictating what you must give up…A food culture of anti-eating is worse than useless…People hold to their food customs because of the positives: comfort, nourishment, heavenly aromas.

For me, reconnecting to a local food culture is about creating a general higher level of understanding – not just book knowledge, but visceral understanding - of how and where our food is produced – what fresh veggies look like in the garden, the provenance of the plants and animals that we eat, and our relationship to them.  I don’t think this means that we all have to produce our own food, though even a little bit of that would help immensely, but it does mean having a cultural knowledge.  It goes beyond the capacity - or potential capacity – to grow food locally, and includes how we talk about food, how we prepare it through the seasons, how we interact with it in our landscape, how it creates part of our identity, how it says who we are.  WE ARE WHAT WE EAT, right?

I need to share a story with you.  How many of you have heard the Something Fresh CD that SEEDS and Earthwork Music put out a couple years ago.  If you haven’t you need to get one – it’s a CD loaded with great songs by Michigan musicians, all inspired by recipes from Michigan foodies.  I was somehow in the right place at the right time and managed to slip a song onto the album called the “Got no Kale Blues.”  Well this summer I had the honor of cooking food for the hundred or so big and little kids at the Earthwork Farm Family Gathering and one young family with 3 spunky, free-thinking kids came up to me in the kitchen and said, “We’d never really even thought of kale before that song, but when we heard it we thought, well this guy’s singing about it, we should at least give it a try.”  So they bought some kale and cooked it up and the KIDS WENT NUTS OVER IT.  Kale is now a regular part of their diet, it’s what they prepare when they want to make a special meal for the family, and it’s always the first thing to disappear from the table.  I happened to have some kale seed in my truck, so I shared some and now they have kale growing in their yard.  All over a silly blues song!

I think that many of us would agree that eventually we will, as a nation, have to learn how to feed ourselves differently.  Our cheap, industrialized, globe-trotting food system is propped up by inexpensive fossil fuels, and they’re running out.  The impact of industrial ag. on our environment cannot be sustained.  Thanks in part to the diet we’ve been feeding them, our kids are now the first generation of Americans to have an expected lifespan shorter than their parents.  Our climate is changing in ways that could make food production even less predictable.  Either we get busy now in re-learning how to feed ourselves in mutual relationship with our human and natural community, or we leave a sink-or-swim desperate mess for our kids.  But here’s the rub.  Far too often these big “social change” projects get framed in what you have to give up.  Stop driving.  Stay away from the blood-stained diamonds.  Don’t buy sweatshop Nikes.  To again quote Kingsolver, “Food is the rare moral arena in which the ethical choice is generally the one more likely to make you groan with pleasure.”  Fresh, local food tastes great.  Knowing your food, where it comes from, and how it connects you with the natural world is pleasurable.  It might even be considered an indication of health.  And then there are all of the secondary benefits: building community, keeping dollars in the local economy, maintaining vital local farms and open space. 

The great thing is, we’re well on our way, especially here in northwest lower Michigan.  I’ve been living in the TC area for less than a year, so I’ve gotten to see things with fresh eyes, and I’m happy to report that there is a good deal of momentum in the local food movement here.  Farmers’ Markets across the region are growing in number and popularity.  Locally grown and locally produced food is showing up in more and more small grocers.  MLUI’s Taste the Local Difference directory and campaign are making it easier for sellers of local food to connect with buyers of local food.  I’ve had the opportunity to work in two new-this-year licensed kitchens in the area that are dedicated to delicious, traditional artisanal food products for local consumption.  Of course I’m talking about Leelanau Cultured Veggies and Pleasanton Brick Oven Bakery.  There are 30 schools in the 5-county region that have served some local foods in the school.  Students in the Frankfort-Elberta schools in Benzie Co. went from eating 1 bushel of apples per week to 5 when fresh local apples replaced the bland out-of-state ones.  Kids know the difference.  Even Munson Medical Center has been getting into the local food action with their “Meet Your Farmer” special lunches in the employee cafeteria

And of course there are CSAs.  How many of you are members of a Community Supported Agriculture farm?  The rest of you, I’ve got some friends I’d like you to meet.   last summer Michelle and I rode our bicycles to 31 CSA farms in Michigan Ten of those farms are in the 5-county area around TC.

Here’s a taste of what we saw:
VIDEO

We’ll be showing the full 30 minute video in here tomorrow during the workshop slot, along with a discussion about making low-budget videos, or about CSA or the bike trip or anything else you want to talk about.

The thing that has stuck with me from our summer of visiting all of those farmers is the silent activism that they are engaged in.  Not only are they providing a bunch of lucky people with fresh, vibrant fruits and veggies, but they are also creating a social space for people to relate to their food differently, engage with their food system in a profoundly different manner.  This is radical activism, but not of the shout loud and bang on signs variety that we’re used to calling radical activism.

Perhaps the biggest thing standing in the way of this kind of “radical activism” becoming mainstream is the behemoth piece of legislation that our senators are going to start marking up next week.  It’s called the Farm Bill, it gets rewritten every 5-7 years.

When we think of the farm bill, we generally think of the commodity payment title of the bill, the subsidy payments to farmers, because that’s probably the part that gets the most attention.  But the farm bill contains much more than that. Nutrition Programs – food stamps, WIC, and the like – receive the highest level of funding.  The farm bill actually dedicates more public dollars to protecting the environment than the Environmental Protection Agency.   Also includes titles pertaining to ag. research, forestry programs, bio-based energy, rural development, and international food aid.

The farm bill is what political wonks call a “Christmas Tree Bill”: every interest group has a specific program that they want to expand – an ornament to hang on the tree.  The emphasis in the debate has been mostly on the ornaments while the tree, the agricultural economy, has been forgotten. 

And the tree has some problems. The reason we have a farm bill in the first place has to do with what economists call the inelasticity of food demand.  all farmers, whether they use petrochemicals and combines or compost and hoes, try to make their land more productive.  But our bodies don’t continually need more calories.  So when farm production increases faster than the population, as it has in the U.S. since the 50s, ag. prices fall, but eaters typically don’t buy more, and farmer incomes suffer.  The Farm Bill was initially created as part of the Depression-era New Deal to stabilize commodity markets like corn and wheat by supporting prices and controlling  production.  And it worked pretty well.  But in the 70s, political ideology started to shift – international trade was the way of the future, America was going to feed the world.  Farm Bill policies encouraged PRODUCTION, OVERPRODUCTION by tying subsidy payments to how much a farmer could produce. As grain prices continued to fall due to overproduction – at times well below the cost of production – farmers became dependant on subsidies to stay in business.  Many of them went out of business.  This also sealed the deal on American farmers’ addiction to agrichemical substance abuse, much to the delight of the pushers (Monsanto et al) as more and more “inputs” were needed to produce the same yield.  And the food processing industry got busy converting the below-cost corn and soy into high fructose corn syrup, hydrogenated vegetable oil and factory farm meat, and force feeding Americans extra calories they didn’t really need.  By now I hope you’re starting to see the powerful lobby interests – the agrichemical and food processing industries – that have kept our farm policy on this crash course for the past 3 decades.  And you thought we had a Farm Bill to keep food affordable in the US.  The truth is, while the real price of soft drinks (aka liquid corn) declined by 23 percent between 1985 and 2000, the real price of fruits and vegetables increased by nearly 40 percent.  Why?  Well, the Farm Bill does almost nothing to support farmers growing fresh produce.

Let me get this straight – we have a federal farm bill that was initially created to control production and buffer price fluctuations, but now encourages overproduction regardless of the long-term environmental, social or economic impacts so that we can have cheap inputs for the processed food industry (and increasingly, for biofuels and other industrial products) so that we can afford to buy the food that we’re not supposed to eat, that is making us overweight, unhealthy, and quite bluntly, killing us.

If I had a pen in writing the farm bill, I’d add this quote by Wendell Berry as a preamble:
“eating is an agricultural act.  The industrial eater is, in fact one who does not know that eating is an agricultural act, who no longer knows or imagines the connections between eating and the land, and who is therefore necessarily passive and uncritical….We still (sometimes) remember that we cannot be free if our minds and voices are controlled by someone else.  But we have neglected to understand that we cannot be free if our food and its sources are controlled by someone else.  The condition of the passive consumer of food is not a democratic condition.  One reason to eat responsibly is to live free.”

As eaters, we all need to get involved in a policy that greatly influences how and what we eat.  The least we can do is pay attention enough to learn the issues, learn the language, take that first step in participating in the public dialogue.  Here is a list of websites that are good places to start, and to turn to for updated news.

• http://www.farmandfoodproject.org/
• http://www.farmland.org/
• http://www.agobservatory.org/
• http://www.farmpolicy.com/

Michael Pollan perhaps puts it best.  “the guiding principle behind an eater's Farm Bill could not be more straightforward: it's one that changes the rules of the game so as to promote the quality of our food (and farming) over and above its quantity.”

More and more groups are getting on the bandwagon.  The public health community has come to recognize it can't hope to address obesity and diabetes without addressing the Farm Bill. The environmental community recognizes that as long as we have a Farm Bill that promotes chemical and feedlot agriculture, clean water will remain a pipe dream. The development community is waking up to the fact that global poverty can't be fought without confronting the ways the Farm Bill depresses world crop prices.

While the version of the farm bill that passed through the House earlier this summer fell short of meaningful reform, there are some interesting changes on the Senate table – I wish I had time to talk about them.  Our own Debbie Stabenow is on the Senate Ag Committee and is a champion of a number of important programs that will help move policy in the right direction, programs that help build local food systems and support fruit and veggie producers.  Give her a call and let her know she’s fighting a good fight.

The reality is, however, it looks unlikely that there is the political will in Congress to make the major overhauls needed to create a Eater’s Food Bill.
And so – like thousands of communities across the country, we’ll continue to work toward change in our local food culture.  And we, the Bioneers in this room, are the cultural creatives that are leading the change.  That comes with a responsibility to be engaged at two levels,

• paying attention to, and working toward change in our individual behavior – and hey, take this piece to heart: this isn’t an all-or-nothing proposition – yet.  little changes do indeed count.  $10/week in local food makes a difference.
• But we also need to be engaged and working toward change at the level of our structural, institutional and policy behavior.  We need to make it easier for others to work toward individual behavior change.  We’re all in this together, right?

Sure, policy changes need to happen at the federal level, but much of the policy involved in building local food culture, is inherently local.  There are great structural and institutional changes that we can make in our community, through school boards, zoning commissions, hospital boards, any place where institutional decision-making is happening.  Changes that will allow a diversity of food and agriculture businesses to flourish, changes that move us toward doing better things, rather than continually trying to do the same things better.  And the next farm bill re-write is slated for 2012 – that should be interesting!

            At the heart of all of these changes, I feel, is building trust.  Local, community based food is about relationship, and relationships are built on trust.  Again, Barbara Kingsolver hits the nail on the head: “Local is farmers growing trust.”
We all need to let go of our fear training, and grow trust:
            Trust in the earth, that she will, when treated with respect and dignity, provide sufficiency.
            Trust in our communities, that we can and will cooperate, that it’s not a dog-eat-dog world out there as we were wrongly taught in elementary ecology, but one that runs on synergies, balance, and cooperation, and that, given the chance, our human communities can run that way too.
            And trust in ourselves, that as individuals and as a human race, we ARE capable of living gently on this planet, and that we WILL make the “right” decisions.

And growing trust is a BIG project.  I know that I have a lot of work to do in the trust department, but I know of no better teachers than all of you, and I know of no better training grounds than this gathering that you are about to experience.

Have an amazing conference, Bioneers.  And if any of you would like to continue this local food conversation, Todd Springer and I are leading a workshop - in the kitchen!  See you there.