Blessing the Hands that Feed Us

by Vicki Robin

  I’m not talking about my conscience here. I’m talking about my deep desire to be unconscious, to listen only to whim, frugality, habit, preference, my body’s cravings, and my mouth’s unending demand for taste, volume, salt, grease, sweet. Unless you are already a food saint, I’m also talking about you.

  Here are all the things I like about the food system as it is:

  • For me, at my income, food is always there when I am hungry. I almost never have to think about whether I will eat, just what and where and when.

  Case in point: deep into week three I woke after a late afternoon nap hungry and cold. When you live alone no one has been cooking and baking while you sleep. You have to deal. The sun had gone down while I was sleeping, so the day’s heat had dissipated. I needed something fast and filling and zippy to eat. In the good old days—just three weeks earlier—I would have started with chocolate—cranking the brain over with some high-octane sugar and choco-caffeine. Then I would have headed for carbs—comfort food. Now there was nothing I could nuke. No Chinese takeout. No day-old burrito. No bread for toast. I did manage, of course. I actually whipped up a hot soup by boiling potatoes and carrots, sautéing leeks, herbs, and garlic, and throwing it all in a blender; it took twenty minutes from feet hitting floor to spoon entering mouth. It hit the spot—but some good industrial system cookies would have been a bull’s-eye.

  • I don’t have to think much about food at all—my mind is free to roam in higher planes of thought. I don’t have to spend half my day getting it, either.

  • Food is someone else’s problem. What it takes to get it to the supermarket, nicely packaged, never has to be any of my business, and Lord knows I have a lot of business that is mine. We’d never have gotten a man on the moon or personal computers if everyone had to grow their own.

  • The global marketplace means that I can get my bananas from India if crops fail in Thailand, and I don’t have to think for a second about that switch. The anonymity of my supplier allows me to ignore the plights of farmers far away. I don’t subscribe to this—I just notice how easy the system makes it for me to ignore it.

  • I have choices galore. Exotic and everyday cheese. Wholesome and Yaya bread. Several dozen cuts of meat packaged and sometimes even spiced. Store-brand to high-end brands of teas and coffees. Condiments. Soups. Oils. Nut butters. Spices. Canned and boxed foods with pretty labels. Juices. Cereals. Crackers. Cookies. I really—like, really—don’t want to give any of this up.

  • I have fruit and vegetables no matter what the season. Those bins are never bare.

  • Deli counters are laden with creamy, savory, attractive, tart, sweet, pungent, complex prepared salads and quiches and Yuppie burritos with olives, feta, avocado, and such. Aah, and those wonderful roast chickens with three different flavoring mixes.

  • I can indulge in every kind of flavor and texture I want any day of the week. There are eight restaurants in Langley alone. Go twenty miles north or east and I can have Thai, Indian, Ethiopian, Vietnamese, Japanese, and more.

  • By and large, I can afford to buy what I want. Especially if I stock up during sales.

  • With rare exceptions I don’t have to wonder if the food will kill me. I may worry if the accumulation of one of those thirty ingredients in prepared foods will kill me in the long run, but rarely do I have to worry if the can in my hand is full of botulism, which would kill me right away.

  • Finally (and you’ll notice it’s last), there is the moral issue. Doesn’t industrial food do some good? Doesn’t it feed the world? Doesn’t it fill food banks? Isn’t having my cake (chips, crackers, nuts, etc.) balanced by the poor and hungry having at the very least their rice too? If we disconnect from this global food system, don’t we doom millions of people to death by starvation, by a kind of hunger beyond anything I’ve experienced, the kind that kills more than ten thousand people a year?

  This last point seals the deal for me, but not without misgivings. The industrial system stays, not just because it suits me but because we still need it to feed the world. Despite how it depletes and poisons the land. Despite how much fossil fuel it requires. Despite how egregious it seems to patent and modify the genetic code of the very seeds of life. Despite the way Big Farm is muscling out small farmers around the world. Despite it all, this system generally still supplies ample, available, cheap, and safe food. And we don’t yet have an alternative that can do the same. Even shoppers at the upscale organic Whole Foods (which food activists call Whole Paycheck) have to face that little is from small local farmers; more than eight thousand acres of greenhouses in Mexico produce much of our winter supply, along with the Florida tomatoes that famously exploit cheap labor.

  I was giving myself a lecture that was part preference, part realism, and part parroting what I’d been told. Yet I didn’t like it.

  My blog posts during the third week were mostly cheerful and inventive, even when I’d report on something disturbing, like the food riots in Mozambique because the Russian wheat crop had failed. Still, I was groping. I was haunted by the question I’d posed to Pam Mitchell that got me on this crazy track: Can we, the people of Whidbey, feed ourselves from Whidbey? In essence, she had scoffed at the idea. Even our best efforts are a pittance, she said, and require the global system to persist.

  Let me give you an example of the need for industrial agriculture. We have a food bank, Good Cheer, that is supported by the sales from their two thrift stores where I regularly look for bargains to stock my kitchen and clothes closets for pennies. In the process I am also feeding the coffers that feed the tummies and soul of the community. We are enormously proud of the respectful and effective programs of Good Cheer, but . . . only a small percentage of the food distributed is local. Last year five thousand pounds of vegetables came out of the food bank’s organic garden or from donations from gleaners, farmers’ market vendors, home gardeners, and such, but far more comes from

  1. Food Lifeline, the regional food pantry supplier. Through their own independent efforts, fierce deals are struck with large suppliers. Industrial food. At a fraction of what we pay at the grocery store.

  2. food drives by businesses, churches, and organizations. These yield thousands of pounds of canned and boxed goods a year—all of it industrial.

  3. donations of nearly outdated but still good produce, baked goods, dairy products, and other goods from local grocers, which are still primarily industrial food.

  How could we feed our community’s hungry without industrial food? That question bothered me. A lot. Later I saw that it was not the right question, but for the nonce it flew in the face of local as a way of eating.

  My Neighbor the Local Berry Farmer Turned Global Food Expert

  In the meanwhile, I needed to find someone who could help me figure out whether Whidbey really could someday be self-sufficient in food. That’s when I recalled a meeting several years ago where a group of farmers, chefs, and entrepreneurs got together to understand one another and how we are connected.

  Gene Kahn was one of the local speakers. He lives on the island now—in Coupeville—but he used to be an organic berry farmer in Skagit Valley until he scaled up his operation, developed the Cascadian brand, and sold it to General Mills. He then went on to work in numerous capacities on international sustainability initiatives, including as senior adviser for Agricultural Development at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. While he looks like the rest of us—fleece and jeans—he’s a world-class expert who brings a much larger lens to the local food question.

  Gene stirred up a hornet’s nest at that meeting by goading the small-scale CSA and market gardeners to graduate from dirt farming or die. Turn your produce into jams, chutneys, chips, pies, canned, dried and frozen fruits and vegetables, he said, because that is where the money is. You don’t want to be a supplier. You want to be a producer. And then you want to scale up. Vertically integrate. Develop markets beyond the i
sland.

  Fur and feathers flew. He was challenging our commitment to local food and local economies. People didn’t like it, and Gene didn’t like being the brunt of their aversion to big.

  Even though I am habitually on the side of the little guy, I never forgot Gene’s challenge. As I sought a middle-ground food ethic between purist and pragmatist, I decided to visit him to get his take on this question that was growing in my mind: Without the industrial food system, could we on Whidbey Island eat?

  I drove twenty-five miles north to Coupeville, turned up his long drive, and parked by his small house. He’d instructed me to come around to the barn, which looked like . . . well, a barn. Once inside, it was a different story. In a side room he had several impeccably refinished vintage cars in an immaculate tile-floored “garage.” Even my food-sensitive friends would have eaten off that floor. Gene led me through the unfinished part of the barn, up a flight of stairs, and into his office.

  Gene collected original editions of books about farming, agriculture, and gardening even more passionately than he did his restored vintage cars. He had what looked like miles of floor-to-ceiling shelves, every shelf dusted, every book lined up, with frailer ones in plastic pouches. His desk was clear. He had two bottles of Perrier on the coffee table in front of a leather couch and chair. He had clearly moved far from his roots as a hippie in the seventies—but had not left his altruism and compassion behind.

  When I asked Gene whether people on Whidbey could feed themselves, he looked at me as if I were a freshman who’d asked the ultimate dumb question. Which, quite honestly, I deserved. I know I was and still am a novice on this subject of feeding even myself, much less the island or the world. But the answer from the hardheaded businessman gave me hope. According to Gene, feeding Whidbey wasn’t hard at all. But, he told me, I hadn’t really asked the right question.

  He went on to point out that the prairie that runs across the center of our island—and is now protected from development as a historical and farming reserve—covers nearly eighteen thousand acres. Put that all in vegetables and we can do it. The problem is that farmers don’t want to. They’re independent, and they’ve been farming for years. They aren’t going to be told what to grow. Furthermore, people won’t put up with a diet of only what can grow here—potatoes, squash, beans, greens, and brassicas. Throw in some fish, chicken, and beef—but less than we’re used to—and you still have a pretty boring diet. We are all diehard individualists in a free country. We want to do, have, and eat what we want.

  Gene Kahn isn’t even interested in this question, though. His job with the Gates Foundation requires him to think about the people in Africa who are starving to death, who have been largely robbed of their subsistence way of life, who live in poverty in cities or in desperation in drought-devastated rural villages. He thinks about the poor here as well, who need cheap food in order to manage. To think local, to him, is to forget these people. To consign them to starvation while we, the well heeled, feed ourselves.

  The problem with the local or organic idealists, he seemed to say, is that they aren’t thinking about the road from where we are (99 percent industrial) to where we want to be (a variety of food sources). Yes, ideally, all food would be local, organic, plentiful, and affordable (likely setting us back more than the 8 percent of budget we now spend on food, but less than the 31 percent of budget we spent in the 1950s). But how do we get there?

  Kahn isn’t rejecting small-scale agriculture. He’s rejecting it as a scalable alternative to a science-based, politically achievable, and adequate food and fiber system . . . at least for the foreseeable future. Eventually it would be ideal if all food was organic, ethical, and supportive of local economies, but to get there you have to effectively solve for every variable in the whole food-supply chain: seeds, inputs, pest management, weeding, harvesting, processing, packaging, shipping, distributing, and educating the eater to want this alternative. I gleaned some important insights from his bigger food system view.

  Fertility

  In an interview published in Fast Company2 when Kahn was still at General Mills, the company that owned his Cascadian brand, he said, “We’d need to find organic sources for a whole host of nutrients. The best, the most practical way would be to build a whole new composting infrastructure across the United States. That would require tremendous coordination across municipalities, and much more thorough composting of all human refuse.”

  Could he possibly be talking about poop? Gene pulled from a bottom shelf, in a plastic protective sleeve, a copy of the book that had become a provocative reference for me in my back-to-the-land days: F. H. (Franklin Hiram) King, Farmers of Forty Centuries. The key to their long survival? “Night soil.” Composted poop.

  That poop (or humanure, as it is called now) might save us inspired me to add to my food system to-do list. Item 7: Get organic matter out of the waste stream and landfills and put it back in the soil.

  Scalability

  When the Fast Company interviewer posed the question of whether local organic can scale up, Gene’s view was that “it’s going to happen incrementally . . . to imagine that we were going to change U.S. agriculture and keep it all in the hands of market gardeners, instead of production scale farmers, is not only a fatuous dream, it’s an undesirable perspective from my view. . . . I think [change is] happening. But . . . we’ll make sure this gets done right and done in a way that is really sustainable. . . . The conversation . . . should be about how we change the world for the better, how we deal with the world as we currently see it. Not about creating some impossible dream.

  “And that’s what’s critical: the improvement. Whether we get to 100% organic is not the issue. It’s whether we become a sustainable society.”

  Gene was not saying that what is best for people and planet is impossible. He just said it will take time, and needs to be well thought through and “sold” to people at every link of the food chain. It won’t be a case of either/or, or purist versus industrialist, but rather a process to change from the world as it presents itself to us now to the world we want.

  I left with a lot to chew on, so to speak. As I drove back home I started to put together a framework I could swallow. I see now that the task of change is far more complex than a one-size-fits-all solution. Despite my own experiment I don’t expect everyone on Whidbey to go 100 percent local. We’d scrape this place clean of food in short order.

  As Gene points out, the pathways need to be evolutionary, not revolutionary. I can personally run radical experiments and propose radical shifts, but society and even nature don’t work that way. They evolve over time. Our visionaries—prophets and revolutionaries—jolt us awake. But our innovators, engineers, architects, and educators actually build the future incrementally over time.

  From the conversation with Gene and my own struggle to understand the bigger picture, a goal I could believe in started to coalesce.

  I don’t want to promote an end product; I want to map a path. That path would go all the way from our food psychology, culture, and preferences to growing some of our own to eating what our market gardeners grow to regional eating to a healthier global food system.

  The map would make sense, be clear, feel empowering, and get people laughing as well as motivated.

  Eventually I’d understand how truly complex this is, weaving sovereignty and security and affordability and availability and safety and sustainability and delight all into one fabric. But for now, I was just excited about the prospect of looking more closely at the entire world of food.

  Clearly I needed to finish my 10-mile diet with integrity, start planning for my 50/50 February caper, and then see whatever lies beyond that next big mountain.

  Now It’s Your Turn

  As you can tell, it took some considerable effort to reconcile myself to the limitations of local. Here are some tips and practices for your own adaptations in terms of cost, quantity
, and kind of food.

  Conscious Eating

  Globally, the food-industrial complex pumps out more than twenty-seven hundred calories a day for every man, woman, and child3—in the United States it’s closer to four thousand4—and yet, despite areas of malnutrition, 30 to 50 percent of the world’s food goes to waste. It is way too easy to take food for granted, load up plates, and go from famished to bloated without even noticing “full.” Here are some tips that help prevent overeating:

  80 Percent

  Eat until you are 80 percent full. Okinawans are among the longest-lived people on the earth, and one of their secrets is hara hachi bu, the rule of eating until you are 80 percent full. If you are out of touch with full, you might need to slow down your eating until you actually feel that one more bite would be too much. Knowing full, you can feel 80 percent; for me that means I have to pause between bites to check in with my stomach.

  One trick I use: I commit to leaving one bite on my plate. Aware of that last bite, I am mindful through the first dozen bites, the mind checking for whether I’m close to the end. Otherwise, I could find myself done before consciousness begins.

  Shrink Your Plate Size

  A recent study found that plate size affects how much we eat. In 1900 the average dinner plate was nine inches wide. By 1950 plates had grown to ten inches. Now they are closer to twelve inches. It’s hard to judge proper portion size when the plate’s so big. Our brains understand portion in terms of proportion—how much of the plate is filled, how big a serving spoon is used.

  Learning this got me wondering . . . is the size of our girth related to the size of our dishes? In 1950, 9.7 percent of the U.S. population was obese and now it’s 34 percent.

  Does the lower relative cost of industrial food trick us into eating more? In 1950, we spent a third of our income on food. Now, according to the USDA,5 overall Americans spend less than 10 percent of their income on food (though if you make less than twenty thousand dollars a year you join the global middle class, spending about 25 percent).