by Vicki Robin
I looked for an apt analogy for how I was feeling and could find none better than the very Russian peasants I mentioned earlier. My mother and I journeyed to Russia back in the days when it was still the USSR—back when travel was all but banned and the few tourists allowed to enter had to travel via Aeroflot planes (think of flying Model T Fords) and stay in former czarist palaces converted to Supreme Soviet–approved fleabag hotels with only cold running water and room keys made for dungeons. She was attending—of all things—a psychological meeting in Moscow. Back then we thought that Russians used mind control to quell the toiling masses. They made people psychologically ill, not well, or so the stereotype went. I was curious to travel behind the Iron Curtain and was along for the ride.
We’d flown from Latvia to St. Petersburg on an international airline, but the St. Petersburg to Moscow flight was entirely Russian and entirely different. Clutching our passports as if they were parachutes, we boarded our Aeroflot plane for our flight. Along with us—I kid you not—came a family carrying their chickens in a cage. Bringing fresh food for the journey meant bringing it live for slaughter at their destination.
I flashed back to all those third-class train rides I’d taken the year before when I studied in Spain. There too lumpy older women, black scarves tied around their doughy faces, toted large baskets of food on their trips. Later I’d see the same sight in India, China, and Southeast Asia. The local passengers knew not to assume there would be food when the train stopped in the dead of night because a cow was on the tracks or something broke and they had to wait for another train to pick them up. In two days.
Or perhaps they were taking a family member to the hospital, where they would need to cook for the patient—probably a big improvement over the institutional hospital food we get here.
Surviving the Day
My friends arrived to pick me up for our carpool to Bellingham. Without Sherpas I had to lug my bags down my front stairs to their car, feeling dowdier by the minute. Their cheerfulness snapped me out of my mood. I refocused on how far less common food scarcity is in this country; we are actually so awash in food that we throw out one third to one half of it somewhere between the field and the Dumpster. How lucky we are to be confident that wherever we go, food will be there to greet us.
We arrived two hours later. Sixty bright, creative people from Transition groups in the region eagerly swapped stories, insights, and challenges for a rich day of conversation. Everyone but me feasted at the snack and lunch tables. I, the self-excluded, nibbled through my stores, gauging hour by hour whether my food would last. By dinner I had three green beans, two carrots, and an apple left. The gnawing hunger in my gut hammered at my virtuous mind. You don’t have to starve, I said to myself. You don’t have to be such a purist. The exception proves the rule—let dinner be your exception. This is just an experiment, not an assignment from on high.
And on and on. I was afraid, though, to fall off the local food wagon. I might not have the will to get back on. My word seemed my only protection from lapsing.
As this little skirmish went on in my mind, Chris Wolfe of Transition Whatcom County took the microphone to announce that dinner was ready. As she described every ingredient and the local farmer who grew it, my resolve began to waver. She had personally looked in the eye of almost every producer for the fare she offered—greens, beets, soups, granola, apples, eggs, cornbread, berries, even lentils. What wasn’t a direct buy was bought from local organic grocers.
The food was as local as she could get, and given that she was feeding sixty people three meals that day and had never before fed more than nine people at one meal, the love in that meal—love like a fierce commitment to nourish the tribe—was immense.
“I haven’t slept much the last few days,” she said. “Oh, and I’ve prayed I wouldn’t make any of you sick.” She was as radiant as if she’d just run a marathon and this was her finish line. By eating, the group would be partaking of her victory.
I began to feel more like a sourpuss than a lover of the hands that feed me.
Then she said, “There’s plenty of food. Even if you didn’t sign up for a meal, you’re welcome to eat. Everyone should have enough to eat. Be my guest.”
That did it. In this space of love and generosity my rigid loyalty to my 10-mile food seemed petty rather than noble. To turn down food is one thing. To turn down love is another. I caved. My stomach did a little victory dance as I loaded up on spinach salad and lentil soup and sat with my new friends.
As we chatted over the meal I wondered whether in fact this food was more 10-mile food to me than what I’d hauled from my micro food shed a hundred miles south. Is 10-mile eating ultimately honoring the locale you are in, rather than a peevish insistence that only food from your patch of earth is local? Maybe our 10-mile circle moves with us as we move our bodies. Maybe the love shining in Chris’s eyes was more to the point than loyalty to my micro-foodshed.
Going Local, Wherever You Are
I was back in the circle of community, returned from the land of feeling deprived and excluded, warmed by companionship, fed. The lessons, however, would never leave me.
The first lesson is that love trumps pride—or can when we’re faced with big challenges and community is crucial to surviving. Then we discover what’s important and who are “our people.”
The second lesson is what Mark Twain advised: “Moderation in all things, including moderation.” It’s hard—but doable—to eat locally wherever you are. In Bellingham, that would be Whatcom County. On Whidbey it’s Island County. Ultimately, though, local isn’t just a ten-mile spotlight that travels with me, showing me what I can eat. Local means being in relationship with the hands that feed me, whether it’s a two-hour walk from home or a two-hour drive or a two-hour flight. In addition to being about the environment, about sustainable local communities, and about healthful foods, it’s about nourishing closeness.
Distance, then, isn’t the new, improved measure of food correctness. Fear of the post-peak-oil future, with collapsed food-supply chains and cars bumping along potholed roads burning the last drops of fossil fuel, is too small and paranoid a motivation. Community, though, is a delicious reward for local eating, whether or not we get our civilizational comeuppance.
I prefer blessed-if-you-do, blessed-if-you-don’t scenarios. I choose to try new behaviors that will certainly stand me in good stead should the global supply chain break down but will also make my life richer and happier even if the whole industrial enterprise self-corrects and survives for centuries to come.
The Transition movement partakes of this same blessed-if-you-do, blessed-if-you-don’t attitude. Transitioners are passionately engaged in resilience (diversifying local economies), resourcefulness (creatively using and repurposing what is already at hand to solve problems), and relocalization (reducing dependencies on long supply chains for our food, water, energy, tools, and stuff of daily life). These three together—resilience, resourcefulness, and relocalization—are the key to thriving in these uncertain times.
Resilient systems are diverse, networked rather than hierarchical, sharing rather than hoarding, collaborative rather than competitive, communicative rather than secretive. They flourish by increasing options and strategies for the system as a whole. Resilient people are resourceful—able to meet their needs in a wide variety of ways.
Relocalization is the process of communities becoming resilient and people becoming resourceful—so that we have more and more local options for meeting more of our needs. This is the inspiration and aspiration of Transition Towns. There are critiques of these multiplying efforts (approaching a thousand communities worldwide). They are accused of being
• Pie in the sky: at best another marginal movement, this generation’s “back to the land.”
• Xenophobic: abandoning the world’s problems, building a local fortress, and pulling up the drawbridge.
• Regressive: human destiny lies in our mastery of life, not in our adapting to limits.
• Unnecessary: the global economy will—as it always has—wobble and right itself. Some individuals may suffer along the way, but the arc of history bends toward material progress.
Most of the time, this nay-saying rolls off my back. If resilience, resourcefulness, and relocalization prove to simply be lifestyle choices and not lifeboats, so what? The emotional, spiritual, and relational benefits far outweigh the “rewards” of consumerism. Will it turn the tide or turn out to be one more good (alternative) college try? So what, if it is fulfilling, empowering, and fun for those who do it?
October Surprise: It’s Not Over!
There was one unexpected result of that Bellingham experience. Someone there said to me in a “gotcha” way, “All well and good to do this experiment in September. Try doing it in January.” Smirk, smirk. What I wanted to say was, “You try doing this in September and then get back to me.” But I didn’t. I just started to calculate how I would do it in January. I could tinker with the “it” a bit, expanding the radius and including more exotics. I could also do “it” in February so “it” didn’t feel like New Year’s penance for the wanton gluttony of the holidays. Plus February has three fewer days than January.
What if local meant a circle that includes Whidbey and Bellingham, includes Island, Skagit, Whatcom, Snohomish, King, and Jefferson counties—which together might be a viable, diverse, resilient food system for all who live in their bosom.
For today, it was enough to expand the definition of 10-mile eating to include eating locally wherever I found myself. But from February, what might I learn?
As I dozed in the car on the way home from Bellingham, tummy full, friends packed around me like sardines, the phrase “50 percent within 50 miles in February” floated to the surface. That had a ring to it. I’ll do it, I said to myself. I was back in my sustainability-as-an-extreme-sport mind. But I was also nervous, as I often am when I say yes to what seems impossible but worthy. Visions of hours at the stove turning withered potatoes into paltry gruel pecked at my mind like a chicken. Indeed, I did feel chicken. But I knew I would do it.
How Much Is That Chicken in the Freezer—Tra-La?
Speaking of poultry . . . my next challenge was the five-dollars-a-pound chicken. Before this experiment began I was a chicken-a-week gal, expecting to pay no more that five to eight dollars for a bird. Now, making every effort to fulfill my promise to eat the majority of my food from Tricia’s bounty, I was faced with paying for a pound what I might pay for an entire bird.
When Tricia said her neighbor Tobey raised chickens and would possibly sell a few from his freezer, I did not calculate cost. I didn’t even think I had to. How much could a chicken cost, anyway?
I went over to Tobey’s in a fine mood, sort of expecting that same moving experience of neighborliness I had had with Sandra. But that was not to be. Not that Tobey was anything but generous and cheerful. After all, he had a limited supply and was willing to share. It was the sticker shock when the bill came that turned that feeling of neighborliness into the reality of commerce.
Twenty-five dollars for a chicken??!! I’d never even paid that for a Thanksgiving turkey. My brain went into overdrive. I considered putting on my Shirley Temple adorable persona and cajoling that chicken out of his hands—just because I am so cute. On the other hand, Frugal Girl wanted to bargain. My starving inner Tiny Tim wanted to steal it for dinner. My omnivore just wanted that chicken—whatever the price! The inner debate raged on, but I knew that none of these characters really understood what it took Tobey to raise that chicken.
When we want to say something costs a significant amount we say, “And that’s not chicken feed,” as if feeding chickens were cheap. As I learned, it is not cheap at all. Let’s do the math.
I checked my local friend’s calculations against the chatter on the chicken forums on the Web. There seemed a consensus that factoring in . . .
• the cost of chicks,
• the cost (and quality) of feed,
• and the cost of your local electricity,
. . . the producer puts out $2 a pound in expenses to raise a chicken. Was Tobey ripping me off, then, by charging $5? No, because you have to also factor in the cost of labor.
Let’s say you raise 25 chickens—how many hours a day are you tending and feeding them? One farmer in my region estimated about 20 hours of labor total for 75 chickens. Man, how does she feed, water, slaughter, pluck, gut, and pack a chicken in 16 minutes? Reading further, I saw how—she doesn’t factor in the labor of her daughter and girlfriends on slaughter day. Dollars to doughnuts, as they say, she sent her daughter out to feed and water the chicks as well. And what about the time driving to the feed store and back for chicks and feed? And what about her time in the chicken chatrooms on the Internet?
I’m going to say that an honest assessment would be an hour of labor per chicken. Let’s pay everyone a low wage, about $10 per hour.
For 25 chicks, the labor cost would be $250, or another $10 per five-pound chicken. Now we’re up to $4 a pound.
Shall we include the cost of building and fencing a chicken house, the cost of water, or the cost of losing a chicken or two to animals or disease? Add in even a homemade chicken plucker, plus a small fraction of the taxes and insurance on your home (unless you also live in the coop), and you could say $5 a pound is easily the real cost of raising one five-pound bird.
Could I really look Tobey in the eye and say that he, a family man, should earn $10 an hour and never be able to take his brood—so to speak—out to dinner and a movie?
At the same time, Frugal Girl whined, why should I pay $25 a chicken when I can get them on sale at the Star Store for $1.49 a pound, or $7.50 a chicken? Is it my job to subsidize my local growers just because the U.S. government doesn’t?
Now let’s look at how the industrial producers can sell their chickens for so much less. Economies of scale (many more chickens in much less space per bird) and mechanization are key factors. For instance, the time the grower must spend on an individual bird from hatched to processed and ready for shipping is probably minutes, not hours. The big producers use biotechnology to grow bigger, meatier birds, even as confined as they are. They hatch their own chicks, saving more money. And there is labor; their workers might be getting only minimum wage, which is often quite low in Big Chicken states.
Research at Tufts University reveals one more factor—and a big one. Feed for industrial-scale chicken production is sold to the producers at below cost—thanks to government price supports and subsidies. Because my tax dollars are subsidizing the big guys but not the little guys, consider the price disparity to be due, in part, to how my government tilts the playing field toward the factories rather than the farms.
Weighing all this—the data, not the chickens—I asked myself this question: What other assumptions, habits, entitlements, misinformation, and unconsciousness made me gasp at the cost of Tobey’s chicken?
Mark Bittman’s Itty-Bitty Bits of Meat Diet
One big assumption to go on the chopping block—so to speak—was the amount of meat I needed per day.
During my 10-mile month I entertained myself while prepping food by watching TED talks. These are twelve- to twenty-minute presentations at TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) hip-to-the-max conferences. The best, most interesting minds of our generation are given tight parameters about how to do a TED talk and then given a big live audience, a big PowerPoint screen, and big Internet exposure to present—briefly—their big ideas. There I found Mark Bittman, celebrity chef, cookbook writer, and columnist for the New York Times. He’s big on a diet of vegetables, grains, fruits, and itty-bitty bits of meat. In fact, he recommends we eat only half a pound of meat a week! Folks, that’s what I eat a day. This was not a welcome opinion, but I chose to keep my trap shut and mind open.<
br />
To Meat or Not to Meat?
As with so many other diet recommendations, the experts don’t agree about meat.
• Vegans eat no animals or animal products.
• Vegetarians eat no animals, though they eat dairy and eggs.
• Fisho-chicko vegetarians eat Bittman-bitty amounts of animal protein.
• Omnivores eat what they like—which could range from organic grass-fed beef to a McDonald’s burger.
• Paleo dieters believe in meat.
• Weston Price advocates are practically religious in their belief that animal flesh and fat has not only been given a bad rep, it’s an essential part of a healthy diet. They eat butter and well-marbled (grass-fed) steak. They boil bones (especially bovine knuckles) to make nourishing broths. They believe organ meats from wild animals are especially healthy food.
I’ve wavered in my choices, wanting to be “good” but also wanting to eat “good”—as in yummy—meat.
As I mentioned, John Robbins’s first book, Diet for a New America, got me off eating beef, unable to stomach the facts about animal cruelty.
When I read Eat Right for Your Type by Peter J. D’Adamo, I went back to beef as an essential part of a type O diet. In fact, this cured a tropical affliction I’d picked up in the jungles of Thailand.
By the time I watched Colin Campbell’s Forks Over Knives, about the health benefits of a vegan diet, I’d already yo-yoed enough. I didn’t want to do anything about it—even if it was right.
When I read the environmental argument: that ten pounds of grain are needed to raise one pound of meat—and we can eat grain—my habit and heritage fought back. Meat for protein for me wasn’t just a choice. It was an article of faith.
I grew up with a food pyramid that had meat at the broad base. My mother served meat with every meal. As I learned to cook, I was told a plate must be balanced: starch, vegetable, meat. By the time I was an adult I firmly believed that animal protein was both the basis of a good diet and the pinnacle of good eating.
