Blessing the Hands that Feed Us

by Vicki Robin

  Many locals get around complying with costly regulations by trading in a person-to-person food system. Hundreds of people on this island raise animals for home consumption. They can sell a quarter or half of an animal to me legally, but not cuts of meat. To get a USDA certification on an island that has no abattoir means animals are either slaughtered in a very expensive USDA-approved mobile slaughter unit or loaded onto a truck to go to the closest USDA-approved slaughterhouse on the mainland. Several farmers, including the Long family and 3 Sisters on the north end of the island, do go this route, complying with USDA regulations as part of the “Whidbey Island Grown” brand that is slowly entering the marketplace. But a lot of hyperlocal meat here is traded in the relational web. In August, as I looked for 10-mile meat and milk, I actually dived beneath the surface of the food system into this web of relationships. I now know that hundreds of other people are like me: they know who grows their meat, milk, eggs, and veggies. By name. And know their kids’ names. And show up to help when times are hard.

  Can My Exotics Be Relational?

  What about food from afar? Is that relational food? In the sense that we are all part of the web of life on this planet, every mouthful is a relational act. We are ingesting the hard work of every hand that touched the food from field to store, the migrant workers, the truckers, the two A.M. shelf stockers, the checker. It is harder to feel these relationships, though. They aren’t our literal neighbors; they don’t sit in church with us, or attend our performances, or send their kids to our schools. Accountability is more abstract with anywhere eating, but with local or regional eating your integrity is visible to everyone.

  In fact, relational eating can lead us to a food ethic that governs every mouthful. Our food choices support healthy soils, family farms, thriving communities, fair labor practices, good agricultural practices, fresh air, and conservation—or not. Local is where you are accountable. All food is local somewhere. What’s life like for my lemon grower? Do the pickers in the olive groves for my olive oil have enough to eat? Where does my coffee come from and what natural systems were mowed down for those beans to grow?

  Relational eating, then, is exiting the revolving doors of the anonymous food courts of the world and entering a web of nourishing relationships where your eating is both receiving (great food!)—and giving (caring for the life and lot of your farmers). It is personal—eating for flavor, freshness, purity, health. And it is political—understanding that where you spend your food dollars is a vote for the health of the earth.

  What If I Just Want to Buy the Food, Not Befriend the Farmer?

  You can buy local food without being a relational eater—and still do a bushel of good. You can—and many do—keep an industrial food mind-set while buying local food. You can treat your CSA like a grocery delivery service rather than a chance to invest in a farmer, sharing the risks and rewards of the season. You can treat the farmers’ market like a produce department, not realizing as you squeeze the fruit that the farmer in front of you nurtured that tomato from seed, picked it at peak ripeness, and offers it to you with love. You can comparison shop too, cruising the stalls for the best buys. It’s an understandable way to behave in an industrial food world, but odd in a relational world. You can pick up your eggs or flowers from the farm stand, drop in your money, and never see the hands that picked them for you. These transactions are not transformational—but they are still likely good for you, good for the local economy, and good for the environment.

  So yes, you can buy local food without any intention of making new friends or being such a stick in the mud that you start to grow roots, branches, and leaves.

  Why Buy Local?

  The following is my list of very good reasons—in addition to relational eating—for buying local food. I’ve tested them all in my own experience, but they are not “the gospel truth.” Chew on them for yourself, swallowing only what makes real sense to you.

  This list can be a starting point for making local food part of your diet of beliefs and practices as well as what you eat. Is local food really fresher, tastier, more nourishing, more just, more expensive but worth it, and beneficial for local economies? The important thing is to develop your own relationship with food and the hands that feed you—and my observations might be a motivation to do that.

  Seven Very Good Personal Reasons to Eat Local Food

  Fresh!

  The fresher the food, the more nutritious and delicious it is. No one who has eaten a sun-warmed tomato would argue with that. But let’s take a deeper look. While “local” is a distance measure, “fresh” is a time measure. If you—or your farmer—harvest food in the morning and eat it by bedtime, it’s really fresh! If you don’t eat the fresh-picked food right away, though, it doesn’t compete with anywhere produce, picked and packed at peak halfway around the world and, through an amazing feat of logistics, stocked in your grocery store by dinnertime the next day. Nor does it compete with flash-frozen-in-the-fields fruits and veggies. So local increases the likelihood of fresh—but you have to eat fresh, not just buy fresh.

  Ripe!

  Much of the produce in your market looks fresh-picked, but it might have been picked green and ripened later with ethylene gas. Peak ripeness is when the nutrients are in the highest concentration. Think about it from the fruit’s point of view. It’s that final burst of energy to make the best seed possible before the season ends. It’s the pinnacle, you might say, of the plant’s creative energies, giving its all before dying. Because local fruits are more likely vine- or tree-ripened, they may be imbued with that extra burst of energy, extra sweetness, juiciness, and nutritional richness. As such, they may be a day away from rotting, which is why square, flavorless tomatoes gained favor—no taste but boy do they last!

  Tasty!

  Yes, delicious can be a very good reason to go local. Besides taste from freshness, local gardeners and farmers are able to grow more flavorful varieties that don’t stand up to the rigors of monocropping and shipping, that go from ripe to perfect to rotten in a few short days, that are super sweet or thin-skinned or oddly shaped. They can grow varieties bred over time, not in laboratories, to the precise combination of sun, rainfall, and soils of your valley, not the valley a few hundred miles south. As you eat a wider variety of apples or potatoes or greens, you really do start to distinguish between the flavors and textures. Eating the limited varieties of each fruit or vegetable grown by an industrial food system has dulled our “sniffer.” We no longer need taste to determine if something is good for us—the USDA assures us that we can eat whatever is sold in the store. Yes, 99 percent of the time they are right but we’ve outsourced a natural instinct to computer tracing systems. Encountering novel fresh foods grown around you may awaken your taste buds—and the flavors may be richer as well.

  Wholesome!

  Unless you live near a junk-food factory, local food (whether 10- or 100-mile) would tend to come to you in its unadulterated, unprocessed form. To paraphrase Popeye, “A yam is a yam.” And squash is squash and tomatoes are tomatoes and wheat is ground fresh and baked into a hearty loaf. You are less likely to consume toxins, additives, food coloring, stabilizers, and a host of other extras that you get in highly processed foods.

  My friend Suzanne decided to make whole, unprocessed, and unpackaged foods the focus of her Lenten practice. It didn’t have to be local so she had a wide variety of whole foods to pick from, but getting even whole foods home without putting them in plastic was a challenge. Like me, she discovered that fidelity to that values-imposed food constraint required a lot of attention in the beginning and then, by Easter, had simply become the way she ate. Along the way she saw, as I had, how complex and adulterated our food system has become. She brought used containers for food from the bulk bins, bought plenty of produce, and got her chicken right from the butcher’s big delivery box before it was plastic-wrapped in the store. She got behind the Wizard of Oz screen and ente
red relational eating—at the very least with the butcher and bulk food buyers at the grocery store.

  Frugal!

  You heard that right. After all of my belly-aching about the cost of a chicken, how can I say local food saves you money? Cary Peterson of the Good Cheer Garden teaches classes on effective, productive backyard gardening, called Growing Groceries, so that the people who use the food bank (and anyone else) can supplement their income with this other kind of green stuff. In one Internet article I saw, the author claimed seven hundred dollars’ worth of food on a ten-by-ten-foot plot. Such stories are all over the Web. Gardeners love to tell how they did it. When the going gets expensive, the frugal get growing.

  Rebellion!

  Occupy your food system! If you want to protest the creep of corporate control over what we hold dear—our food supply, democracy, justice, dignity—then eat local food. Withdraw your agreement with the industrial food system by withdrawing your participation to whatever degree you can consistent with your health and sanity. Integrity comes when your actions are aligned with your intentions and your values. Sometimes you just eat what’s available as you work for whatever cause “works” your soul, but local food can be a powerful tool for walking your talk. Or I should say, eating your talk. As I discovered in February, you could substitute local foods for 50 percent of your anywhere foods and still eat like a queen. Some go to extremes on this—growing all their own food and shunning anything from the industrial system. The rest of us will stir up small rebellions in our purchasing and cooking and dining.

  Freedom!

  Rebellion—protesting a system you abhor—is political. But freedom—liberating yourself from the shackles of whatever you let control you—is spiritual. Seed, soil, sunlight, and water offer you freedom from dependency and freedom to participate in feeding yourself. If you cannot grow your own food, if you don’t know any farmers whose food you can buy, if you are utterly dependent on supermarkets and takeout, then you are a prisoner of the industrial food system. Eating local food puts your money into nourishing local production for local consumption. It frees you and your community from unnecessary dependencies.

  Seven Reasons Why We as a Society Should Eat Local Food

  Fertility

  Once embarked on my local food quest, I wanted to expand my own gardening knowledge. I attended a class on biodynamic farming, expecting a lecture on techniques but getting an hour lecture on “fertility,” which is, the lecturer said, a byproduct of the natural vitality of the life of the soil. We don’t put fertility into soil; soil has it and we just have to encourage it. We cooperate with fertility by making a hospitable home for soil critters and water flow and sun, by treating the soil well. Most industrial farming diminishes fertility . . . and then uses fossil fuel to manufacture “fertilizer.” But the earth is naturally fertile. As life cycles through it, the fertility even increases! I realized I no longer thought about land as fertile. I thought about fertilizing land, either through chemicals or compost. I thought of fertility as an additive, not as a characteristic of life. I presumed fertility gets used up, and needs to be topped off by human intervention. But this biodynamic teacher turned everything on its head. Fertility is not scarce; it is everywhere.

  Biodynamic farmers work with the fertility of the land through love and attention—as well as cow manure and special kinds of biodynamic preparations. Small-scale farmers who serve their communities, family farmers who grow for their regions, build the fertility of their soils through tending, through relationship. It may not be certified organic soil—as I said earlier, the little guy often deems certification too costly and their loyal customers know their practices are organic—but it is “relational soil,” teeming with life. These soil organisms are the ultimate “farm animals.” When you buy local food you are supporting farmers who support the fertility of their land. If people in community everywhere did the same, we would, from the bottom up, green the earth.

  Security

  Your local food supply cannot easily be disrupted by terrorism. It wouldn’t even be on the enemy’s radar—it’s too small a target. It wouldn’t likely be curtailed by supply-chain failures or tainted by botulism (well, if you don’t take care with canning you can do this to yourself, but you’d know before you opened the jar). Unless your microclimate takes an irremediable turn for the worse, your food supply won’t be choked off due to climate events. Recall the story of food riots in Mozambique when Russia stopped exporting wheat after an unprecedented heat wave ignited fires, burning much of their crop.

  Rising oil prices might also impact your food security. The debate is not whether we’ll run through the easy and cheap oil and be left with the difficult to exploit and costly oil—it’s just when this will happen and what will replace it.

  We the eaters of the United States have little comprehension of what peak oil means for our daily bread. Oil is everywhere in the industrial food system. It runs our farm machinery—tractors, seeders, weeders, harvesters, combines, and even airplanes to spray the herbicides and pesticides. It is the raw material for fertilizer and many other agricultural chemicals. It is used as a fuel for picking, processing, packaging, shipping, and delivery to stores we get to in our cars. What a miracle. What a victory for human cleverness. Yet what a vulnerability.

  When Russia cut oil exports in half after the 1990 collapse of the Soviet Union, Cuba’s economy went into a tailspin. Their fossil-fuel-intensive food system nearly collapsed, and the nation mobilized to grow food in every square inch of the cities.

  The good news from Cuba is that necessity was the mother of a great deal of creativity and community. With the strength of government mandates and their own ingenuity, Cubans transitioned from a highly mechanized, industrial agricultural system to one using organic methods of farming and local, urban gardens. They didn’t go all the way back to the horse and plow—they used fuel precisely where it was needed and applied their ingenuity to finding elegant ways to produce ample food using traditional methods. They moderated their expectations too—becoming less enslaved to the “more is better” mind-set. And they worked. And they ate less. And they lost weight. And they were still plenty healthy, aided by establishing—in their times of constraint, even—universal health care. They became a people working together, and they survived.

  Relational eating, being an “eater-in-community,” can settle our fears about being fed on every level. When you have no relationship with food other than the megamart, you seem well supplied but are helpless without that store. When you stand in the middle of a living food system, growing some, trading some, buying some local and some from afar, you have more power to assure that you are fed—and fed well. Relational eating doesn’t necessarily mean local food; it means that you, the eater, understand your place in the world.

  Local Prosperity

  Buy Local campaigns ask people to spend their national currency locally, circulating dollars through their neighbors’ wallets rather than through the coffers of distant multinational corporations. Local farmers are businesses, so spending your dollars with them means those same dollars will probably pass through the tills of the feed store, the local restaurants, the local thrift store, and more. Some say money is like manure—it’s good only if you spread it around. Buying from local growers fertilizes the local economy. This is good.

  Farmland

  Preserving agricultural lands—keeping them from becoming shopping plazas or strip malls—requires more than individual eaters putting their mouths on the line. Your eating a local rutabaga doesn’t of itself do anything to protect farmland, but it is likely to increase your commitment to preserving farmland (through investing, donating, volunteering, advocating, activism, organizing) now that you recognize how crucial it is to your well-being. In the industrial mind-set, farmland is like everything else: invisible and someone else’s responsibility. We imagine rolling fields and red barns, and small blond children in pinafores
running in the meadow with dandelions held high like pinwheels. The closest we get to this bucolic image, though, is a Sunday drive in the country—or playing the Internet game FarmVille.

  In communities across North America, organizations are working to keep farmland out of development and in agricultural productivity. For example, the Ebey’s Landing National Historical Reserve on Whidbey Island resulted from a unique partnership to preserve prime farmland, working farms, and the history of farming on the island. Likewise, the Marin Agricultural Land Trust in California raises money to conserve farmland, protecting it from development. I found that making a commitment to local food soon leads to the “hard stuff”—finding mechanisms to protect farmland and support farmers. At this writing I have one loan out to a farmer; payback is scheduled for three years and I’m taking my interest in vegetables. My community has developed an innovative lending mechanism—relocalizing is becoming everyone’s business.

  Bringing this issue really close to home, I live on the edge of a few of the original local farms. The town has crept up the hill from the water’s edge, yet several pastures remain where sheep, horses, and cows graze and hay is cut in the summer. When the matriarch of one of the families finally passed away in 2005, and it was possible that their farm would also pass, into a subdivision, the family instead chose to make it a community asset. Dorothy Anderson, granddaughter of Anders and Bertine Anderson, who arrived in Langley in 1907, set aside a chunk of her family’s twenty acres to be used for the city’s first community garden. Dorothy is having the time of her life bringing life back to the farm. (There are now goats, steer, and a large field cultivated by Chris Korrow, a biodynamic farmer.) If she had her druthers, we’d all move up there and live together. Talk about relational farming! But mechanisms exist to help owners of farmland to harvest money from their property without selling to developers.