Blessing the Hands that Feed Us

by Vicki Robin

  I begin the book by telling the story of who I was when I took up the 10-mile diet challenge, including the worldview that primed me to want to do it and the scramble to find the hands that grew the food that would feed me that month. You will meet Tricia, the market gardener who grew most of the food I ate, as well as other gardeners, farmers, and ranchers. Then you will follow, week by week, the ups and downs of my 10-mile month. After it’s over, I’ll evaluate the experiment, mine the gold. You will also join me on a hunt for answers to the question How dependent are we and do we need to be on the industrial food system to feed ourselves and the world? My tale ends with some key ideas about what weights we can put on the local side of the scale to give regional food systems a larger role in nourishing us all. I refer to these flourishing local food landscapes as “complementary food systems,” not supplanting the global supply chains but expanding consumer food choice. The goal, of course, is fair, affordable, accessible, healthy, delicious, and nourishing food for all. Who could disagree?

  You will develop a new sense about feeding yourself, which I call “relational eating.” It is the shift from being a lone eater in the endless food courts of the industrial system, treating the hands that feed you like vending machines, to standing in the middle of your food system, with nourishment all around in the gardens, fields, farms, forests, and waters of your region. You are in relationship with these ever-widening circles of food, from daily habits to windowsill sprouts to backyard vegetable plots to neighborhood farm stands and gardens to the stores, CSA (community supported agriculture) membership farms, farmers’ markets, and more in your community, your regional food sheds, and beyond.

  I make no effort to be definitive, exhaustive, or authoritative. If I waited for that, I’d never give you my mostly baked notions for your investigation. Also, local food is a passion and practice in rapid cultural ascendancy. A book cannot contain all there is to know as the field is changing daily. I’m sure that people in the know will challenge or correct me and that many of my readers have their own stories to tell and expertise to share. Being part of a rising tide of knowledge in the making is part of what makes local food so delicious. We’re in this together.

  Hope

  This is not just a story of food, though. It is a story of rekindling hope at a time when positive change seems harder than ever, when solving our global energy, economic, and environmental issues fairly and squarely seems almost impossible despite how much our politicians try to cheer us up with promises.

  I’m a boomer. Those of us who chose to use our postwar birthright of opportunity to change the world made great strides in justice, fairness, environmental protection, and cultural transformation. I and my personal team (the New Road Map Foundation) set ourselves the wee goal of ending overconsumption in North America, of teaching, supporting, and even cajoling people to live within their means. By the end of the last millennium I had to admit that despite writing a best seller, despite the tens of thousands of people who say Your Money or Your Life changed their lives, we had failed to reach the larger goal we’d set: that Americans would collectively and voluntarily resize our consumption to what the earth can sustainably provide.

  Coming out of my cancer years, the only hope I could see was adaptation to the consequences of inaction and ignorance: a diminished and changing earth. I found the relocalization movement and a pinhole of hope opened. But the 10-mile diet set off a gusher of natural hope, a confidence that the conditions for thriving and resilience are all around us and that food—revitalizing regional food systems—is a collective project worthy of our best efforts.

  Is Local for You?

  Local uniquely connects you, an eater, with the hands that feed you—your farmer, the food s/he cultivates and harvests, and the place you both live. Every one of us has this opportunity to reinhabit the land that nurtures us—that gives us life.

  Before we began to “eat” fossil fuel—before this concentrated energy source changed everything about what and how we eat—most of us were involved in home production—whether growing or preserving or preparing from scratch our daily fare. Two hundred years ago in the United States, local was the way everyone ate, and farming was the primary profession—90 percent of Americans lived on farms. “Takeout”—eating food from nowhere, cooked by people you don’t know, put in Styrofoam to eat at home, possibly alone—is not the way any of us had been raised—until now! As much of a miracle as this disconnected way of eating is for busy people who want to do and make and influence more than dinner, we need to acknowledge that it has literally ungrounded us.

  Making some small commitment to eating within a radius of where you live is an act of reconnection. It is an act of honoring the hands and lands that feed you. Food becomes where you live and who you live with, not just another consumer item. Thus eating local food becomes ethical and spiritual as well as all the other reasons to do it—sociability of farmers’ markets, freshness, unique and diverse cultivars, greater nutrition.

  Local also matters in a larger context. Our apparently lush food system is like a giant flower on a spindly stalk. Look at the flower and everything is beautiful and right. Peer underneath at the stalk and you realize how precarious it is. You enjoy the bounty—yet every day you wonder when it will snap. The system itself assures us that nothing is wrong. But we now know that every aspect of that beautiful flower depends on fossil fuel not just to transport crisp apples from New Zealand or grapes from Chile but to fertilize those distant soils and protect those faraway plants from pests and even support the rapid prototyping of new hybrid seeds. New technologies may let us extract more oil now than before, but the basic supply is finite. That voluptuous dahlia of the fresh food section at your Whole Foods market is like a painted curtain or a projected image—real enough, but not really real for really long.

  I will introduce you to what is real to me—the interesting and informative farmers and gardeners and chefs and institutions of Whidbey Island in the far Northwest of the United States. Meeting them you will see how local works in reality, and the extraordinary joys as well as challenges of rehabilitating local food systems.

  Will Local Make You Thin, Rich, Healthy, and Eternal?

  Let’s get this self-help promise over with. Half a century of relentless advertising and half a millennium (at least) of fire-and-brimstone religion have stoked our darkest fears of being cast out, lonely, sick, rejected, unloved, and vulnerable. We’d buy anything that could save us from that fate, which is truly worse than death.

  The self-help industry thrives on these fears and offers personal salvation. Let’s see how local measures up.

  Want to Get Thin?

  Once you participate in growing food or at least in the lives of the farmers who grow your food, you are less likely to waste it.

  Industrial food is easy and cheap and loaded with sugar and fat. The “business” of food is profit, so we, the eaters, are cajoled, exhorted, and enticed to eat too much, broadening our bottoms as we feed the corporate bottom line. And food in the United States is surprisingly cheap; no people on earth spend as little as we do on food as a percentage of our budget. This means that we have few speed bumps on our highway to overeating.

  On my 10-mile diet I lost six pounds in a month, partly because I ate no grain, but also because I ate with reverence and respect for my “feeders.”

  Want to Get Healthy?

  Unless you live next to a megafarm, feed lot, or some food-processing plant where one or more of the hundreds of nonfood ingredients found in many food products get added, local food means simpler, more basic, and less toxic food. While this is not a screed against manufactured food, it is an invitation to rethink what, beyond real food, goes into your body and whether those additives are truly necessary for food to be delicious and easy to prepare. I loved the rich, flavorful food I ate in my 10-mile month—and beyond. I had energy all day long—and my bad cholesterol went down and good
cholesterol went up.

  Want More Money?

  Even though local food is often more expensive—sometimes far more expensive—than manufactured food, you get some of that money back through the nutritional value. According to the Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture, the high heat of canning causes some loss of vitamins C and B.1 And, as you will learn, industrial agriculture is like the Red Queen and locally produced food is like Alice. The rules change often and immediately to favor the imperious monarch. The playing field isn’t level or even a gentle slant. Local producers have to huff and puff up some very steep hills of regulations and just can’t compete on industrial agriculture’s terms. It’s not up to you and me to make up for all that, to spend more in service to our local growers, but it is up to all of us to participate in some way in changing the rules enough to make farming viable for young and new farmers. Currently less than 2 percent of our population farms. The average age of farmers is close to sixty. We needed a generation of scientists for technological prowess in the era of Sputnik and beyond. We now need a generation of farmers in order to eat well into the future.

  Want to Live Forever?

  No one can give you that. Religion may promise you an afterlife, which could be quite appealing if you are suffering in this one, but there is no tangible proof of it. Here’s what local food can promise in that domain. Love. You are supporting your neighbors—and they are feeding you. You are weaving your community together in the most basic way. You are rewarding the hard work of those who farm in some measure by hand. The industrial food system of my youth, just when it was flexing its muscles, promised that your food was “untouched by human hands.” For our families in the fifties, disconnection was white bread was love. Local food is touched by human hands and that is the point. You are loving and serving the hands that feed you. Love, according to all religion, is the highest value. And who knows, that may get you into heaven.

  Thriving Together

  Local eating could seem like a personal choice that only hippies or Yuppies might make, but it is actually a collective project for a shared future. How to do that is the question. How do we have our (local) cake and eat it too (not sacrifice the benefits of anywhere food)? This is the challenge. By what agreements, compromises, laws, customs, rituals, or celebrations will we bring forth on this earth a future of common resilience, flourishing together?

  In the seventies when we were waking up to spirituality, we’d say “the longest journey is the twelve inches between head and heart.” Now the necessary journey is “from me to we,” from self-interest to common interest, from YOYO (you’re on your own) to WAITT (slow down, we’re all in this together). The task now is to gather up our hard-earned freedoms and apply them to shaping a future that works for all. As it says in the Bible in Matthew 5:45, “He makes his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust.” Same with the earth’s living systems—what affects them affects us all. The sun and rain of climate change fall on everyone. No one has the option of cutting loose from the collective, presuming she can make it on her own or survive at the expense of others.

  We need to find a way to be free—and cooperate. To be creative and work for the common good. In short, to be part of a community and to be fully ourselves. What I call relational eating—being in relationship with the food, farms, farmers, forests, waters, soils, air, and other critters in a local living food system—is such a path.

  The Age of Resilience

  I believe we are in a new age, the age of resilience—the capacity to roll with the punches. Smart people in the age of resilience are resourceful—able to make the most of what’s at hand. Relocalization is bringing more of what we need closer to our hands. Fear, though, will weaken both resilience and resourcefulness. I want to inspire you to live this adventure, to whatever degree you choose, with me and all of us in these times. I want to be inspired and motivated by your creativity and heart. Research shows that people rise to the occasion when they must—they muster courage and help one another and offer solace in the face of loss. What’s ahead is an occasion we will all rise to—and we’ll all do it right where we are: on islands, like me; in forgotten rural communities; in suburbs and cities. There is hope everywhere. Even in regions around the world impoverished for a host of reasons, communities are taking control of their destiny, relocalizing.

  This, then, is where the 10-mile diet landed me. I could easily go back to old habits, but I haven’t. I am aware of where my food comes from. I buy from my neighbors if at all possible, buy from my region as much as I can, and buy fair trade for food pleasures from afar if I can. I also buy those foods I love that come from everywhere/nowhere—and there are plenty of them. I’m transformed but not reborn. I simply like being acquainted with my food. I like cooking from scratch. I like eating less with more gratitude. I like growing what I can. I like being part of a global conversation about local eating—and adding my spice to the stew. I like the political puzzle—which policy shifts and personal choices and skillful practices will rebalance our food system. I like being part of this unfolding story, the shared adventure in security, sovereignty, and safety; in health, prosperity, and yum. And I like being relaxed about it all.

  Food is our primary form of consumption. Transforming our relationship with food and the hands that feed us transforms so much else. I invite you to sit down at this banquet of stories and new ideas and nibble and graze and chew and digest and see how it all goes down. I invite you to simply enjoy yourself. If you find things you want to try, do so in a spirit of curiosity and good cheer. At the end of each chapter, a section called “Now It’s Your Turn” offers some action steps that, once you’ve read the whole book, you can come back to and try out. Between chapters are some wonderful recipes using regional ingredients from the creative kitchens of fine local chefs, assembled by the star chef in the book, Jess Dowdell. There’s something for everyone to savor—the gourmet, the activist, the lover of good tales. Bon appétit!

  CHAPTER ONE

  Localize Me?

  July 4, 2010

  The sun was warm, the sky clear, and, frankly, hyperlocal eating was nowhere on my radar. My only interest in eating locally was grabbing a bite of some German potato salad gracing the banquet table—dead ahead—laden with potluck dishes. Yet amazingly, I was about to sign on to an experiment in 10-mile eating that would redirect my life. Join me in my final hour of “anywhere eating.”

  Let me set the scene. My clan of friends had come out of their home offices and back from their travels to celebrate the Fourth of July at our annual potluck picnic near Maxwelton Beach, one of the original settlements on the western shore of South Whidbey Island. Soon we would, with heaping plates of food, watch the funky-to-the-max Maxwelton Parade: the classic cars and political protest floats and whale puppets and waving political candidates and belly dancers and children wearing gossamer wings—all of whom promenade at two miles per hour along the dead-end beach road, throwing candy at us gawkers. We’d ooh and aah and eat and socialize and relax and watch the sun set behind the Olympic Mountains across Useless Bay.

  Two hundred years ago, had you looked out over that very stretch of beach, you might have seen Lower Skagit First Nations people feasting on salmon, deer, perhaps duck supplemented with nettles and camas roots. A hundred years ago the Salish would have been gone and you occasionally might have seen thousands of people from all around the region gathered for a Chautauqua, a two-week festival of entertainment, edification, and inspiration. They would have carried picnic baskets filled with eggs and garden vegetables and meats and pies, almost all of it local food. People from miles around came to the five-thousand-seat amphitheater, built with the abundant lumber on the island by the first settlers, the Mackies, who’d arrived in 1905 on a steamboat, barging all their possessions ashore except for their milk cow Bossy . . . who swam.

  Now here we all were, transplants to this island
, many of us earning money off the island as consultants, writers, knowledge workers, and retirees, enabling us to live the good life here. Ahead of us were tables filled with dishes from every part of the planet: teriyaki chicken wings and hand-rolled sushi from Japan, fried rice from China, tabbouleh salad from the Middle East, potato salad from South America, chutneys from India, pasta from Italy, potato latkes from Poland. All of them considered American foods now.

  The green salads alone were the world in a bowl. Lettuce from the Central Valley in California, cucumbers from China, tomatoes from Mexico, avocados from the tropics, salad oil from Venezuela, vinegar from China, pepper from Vietnam, and salt from the Himalayas. The sugar in the desserts was probably from Brazil.

  I was a pretty sick puppy when I transplanted myself to this island in Puget Sound five years earlier. After decades of “saving the world” it seemed the thing I actually needed to save was my own life. I was diagnosed in 2004 with stage-three colon cancer. Strangely, the news seemed less like a verdict and more like a hall pass from carrying the world on my back as if I were the sole refueling ship on the way to the space station and the stars. It might have been the surgery that saved my life. It might have been the bit of chemotherapy I received that proved so vile I quit. It might have been, though, that I faced myself and changed my life—and I was officially well, though exhausted. That’s when I came to this motherly island, and was brought back to full vitality by the very waters and mountains across the way and by the very people on that potluck line. I was healthy, I was happy, and I was ready to jump into life again.