Blessing the Hands that Feed Us

by Vicki Robin

  Terra Anderson also has a goal of growing all her family’s food on their ten acres, but as one dedicated gardener (plus husband with tractor).

  Britt Conn joined the circle too; she and Eric, you will remember, have a farm where they grow for CSA customers and the farmers’ market. She was at the time the coordinator of the Sustainable Whidbey Coalition.

  Rhiannon Fisher committed to cooking all the food! When asked why she was so committed to sustainability she said, “I’m a mom.” One of her many dreams is to do that asset map of the island, so Food 2020 was right up her alley.

  Later I reflected on the composition of that group meeting in the back room of the South Whidbey Commons, a teen-run coffeehouse and bookstore. All of us were growers, some for ourselves, some for families, some for market. We were all tenders of community—educators, writers, facilitators, executive directors, moms. And we were all systems thinkers, people able to see how things link together, how everything is part of the whole.

  We called our event Food 2020 and we posited the outrageous: that 50 percent of the food eaten on the island would be grown on the island by 2020.

  Given how outlandish that goal was, it’s a miracle that sixty busy, practical people involved in food and farming showed up. On a sunny day in May no less!

  Jean and Karen designed the day, using several tools from their facilitation bag of tricks—moving people among small groups for conversations and gathering the whole group for discussion.

  They asked me to seed the visioning part of the day with a brief meditation.

  “It’s 2020. Good morning. Open your eyes. Fifty percent of the food we eat here on Whidbey grows here. Look around. Where is food grown? What is grown? Who grows it? How does it get to market? What do we eat? How is the soil tended? Water? Waste? Kitchens? Restaurants? Processing? What do you see, smell, hear, taste, feel? Don’t worry how we got here, just cruise around (bike, foot, car, golf cart—anything works) and marvel.”

  After ten minutes of silence, we huddled in small groups and talked about what we’d imagined. We each scribbled specific visions on Post-its. We then gathered at a wall covered with butcher paper, put up our Post-its, arranged the ideas in patterns, and stepped back to marvel at our shared vision of the future.

  Here’s a snapshot.

  The grocery stores up and down the island are all hybrids, plenty of industrial food but so much locally grown food you’d think they were co-ops: meats, vegetables, and fruits, plus staples like grains, beans, and flour, plus foraged foods like chanterelles and nettles, plus canned and bottled foods like sauces, wines, jellies, soups, honey. Given the rise in the prices of oil and gas, prices for local foods are finally competitive. You can swing by any farm to buy fresh veggies at their self-serve stand—but backyard gardeners also set out their excess for purchase. Micro food networks have formed among neighbors who together plan what each will grow—and share. Restaurants focus their menus on what’s fresh—or what is stored over winter. Whidbey is a culinary tourism destination, with solar-powered tour buses meeting the ferries for a series of gastronomic and educational adventures.

  In addition to home delivery systems, we have two food hubs, north and south. Trucks fan out every day, picking up produce from farms, bringing it to the hub, putting together orders to stock the restaurants and grocers, as well as filling orders from the hospital, schools, and the naval air station. Each hub has a retail section where people can buy fresh food and enjoy a soup and bread lunch (the bread made from fresh-milled local flour leavened by sourdough starter from our free-range wild yeast spores and lactic-acid bacteria).

  The big box stores all carry local food too—Walmart, Safeway. In fact, in 2020 Walmart sponsors three young farmers a year at the Greenbank Farm New Farmer Training Center and has partnered with WILC—Whidbey Island Local Compost—giving them all their discarded produce.

  All the schools have their own gardens, run by students and forming the basis of school lunches. The hospital actually has its own farm and farmer to provide healthy greens daily.

  Indeed, food is everywhere. We bring potluck dishes to most events—performances, lectures, church, fund-raisers, and dances. Everyone eats and no one goes hungry (a goal we were already reaching in 2011 through our web of caring organizations). We are food-prosperous (which actually means hopeful!), with jobs in agriculture, food service, farm and garden supplies, and related industries supporting island families. Banks, investment groups, and small-time lenders have all opened the faucet of financial support for many dozens of food and farming businesses.

  Not only is there no hunger but people appreciate every bite—and take fewer of them. Food is more precious because it’s overall more expensive—and the local food is grown by people we know. As happened in Cuba after Russia withdrew its oil shipments, we are all thinner and more able. In fact, we are sick less and treat most illnesses with patience, rest, and locally formulated tonics, infusions, roots, and leaves—though we also still rely on surgery and antibiotics as needed. Some farms grow medicinal plants exclusively.

  With oil now tripled in price, we produce more energy locally from the sun, winds, tides, and biomass (including poop), but it’s pricey too, so some have returned to animal power—oxen and horses—to run their farms. With demand for locally grown food soaring, more five- to ten-acre farms are actively using permaculture, biodynamic, organic, and agro-ecological strategies to grow food intensively. Farming itself is no longer a marginal profession since the economics of the global food system have shifted due to declining fertility, changing weather patterns, and rising energy costs. It’s just more cost-effective to source food regionally.

  Some hobby farmers have given up their city homes and moved here lock, stock, and (rain) barrel. Tax breaks for putting at least 50 percent of their property in agriculture encouraged some of them to even give five-year leases to young farmers who grow food for them and the community. All this means the average age of farmers on Whidbey is now under fifty, and the longtime farmers find themselves in demand as educators and mentors to flocks of people in their twenties eager to learn farming and grow food. The Greenbank Farm New Farmer Training Center now graduates fifty farmers a year and Skagit Valley College has a certificate program in organic farming as well. Most farms have a seed-saving program, cultivating seeds that flourish in our microclimates. Besides Walmart waste, WILC converts all island organic waste into good soil. In fact, composting toilets are now legal as third bathrooms.

  Bottom line: In 2020 we now have the capacity to provide one thousand calories a day of nutritious, delicious, seasonal food for all our people—who, by the way, have learned to design their daily menus around what we can produce.

  The next step after visioning was “back casting”—standing in that 2020 vision and telling the story, year by year, of how we got here from 2011. That was harder. Our doubting, discouraged minds spoke up then: Impossible! They won’t let us! We don’t have the money! Who will do it?

  I gave folks three “. . . and then a miracle happened” cards so they could think in terms of possibility rather than drudgery. Even so, when we put our ideas on a time line and contemplated the work before us, many felt anticipatory exhaustion—and slowly filtered out of the building, saying their gardens were calling.

  By three P.M., when it was time to form working groups, 60 percent of the participants were gone. Still, three groups formed: farmer cooperatives, finance mechanisms for farming, and establishing a multistakeholder food policy council.

  And then . . . nothing happened. Apparently. But that is from the point of view of the industrial food system.

  Now, two years after this meeting when “nothing really happened,” I can see many new shoots and swelling buds of projects—a grain cooperative, a composting business, and more. W.I.L.L. is up and running with more than $200,000 in individual loans made so far. A grant has come through for a commercial kitchen at
the county fairground. Several more restaurants now serve local menus. Two new farmers’ markets opened, a new sheep-milk dairy is licensed, a farmer bought dry-pack equipment to package her lavender, a conference on thriving communities focused on food drew people from across the region. An alliance between Good Cheer Food Bank and several other organizations, called Fresh Food for the Table, has begun paying a young farming couple to grow vegetables for the food bank all year long. CSAs are multiplying.

  I believe that the Food 2020 exercise fed our imaginations, gave us hope, seeded alliances and friendships, and created a mental map we each carry about how the people who live here can live from here. We are moving not like an organization but like an ecosystem. That speaks of wisdom. We are cultivating, not manufacturing, a local food future.

  You could say, “Oh, it was just a few Post-its. Most people left, having better things to do on a sunny afternoon in May.” Or you can understand that we could now see our food system working, and see seeds in action.

  HOW TO DO A FOOD 2020 EVENT

  Food 2020 is what we called our food system visioning and community mobilizing event. There are many approaches to community organizing and participatory planning, so rather than a recipe I’ll give you key ingredients.

  Develop a core team, making sure each member has a real interest in the prosperity of your farms, farmers, ranchers, and all the systems that bring food to the table. Be sure to invite some key players already working “in the field,” so to speak: agency and NGO representatives. Agree on a motivating purpose for your event.

  Make a guest list of everyone involved in the food system in your locale. Include in your brainstorming produce and grain farmers (from CSA growers to field crop farmers), livestock farmers, dairy(wo)men, grocers, farmers’ markets, institutional purchasers (hospitals, schools, churches, feeding programs), advocacy groups, elected officials, distributors, educators (farmer training, teachers), grant makers, lenders . . . oh, yes, and eaters who care!

  Engage one or two really good facilitators (volunteer or paid) who have familiarity with the techniques you’ll use. I use, as needed, open space, World Café, Conversation Café, dynamic facilitation, TOP (technology of participation) processes, and comedy improv. Whatever keeps the group creative, focused, moving forward. A graphic facilitator helps keep the group focused and produces a beautiful picture of the essence of what is said. This picture is a record and can be unfurled at future meetings for inspiration.

  Pick a date and a big room with movable chairs.

  Craft an invitation. Here’s the one we sent for our May 2011 event:

  We hope you can join us for a special daylong event on May 23, 2011, called Food 2020. We’ll meet at 9:30 at the Unitarian Church north of Freeland and spend the day visioning and planning for a more vital and prosperous food system on Whidbey.

  In the last three years there has been an explosion of activity supporting local food on Whidbey Island. Today, we have a real opportunity to rehabilitate our whole local food system for the people who live and work on Whidbey Island.

  What would a thriving local food system look like in 2020? One that could produce, process, and deliver half of the food we eat each year. Once Whidbey had a bountiful food system, sufficient for the basic needs of those who lived here. With “local food” now as popular as “organic food”—and with our assets of climate, seashore, soils, and farmers—it can benefit every one of us to work together toward reclaiming this bounty.

  Many cities and counties across the United States—and world—are reorienting their food systems to provide a greater percentage of daily needs locally. It’s called “food sovereignty and security.” Local not only means fresh food for citizens and economic prosperity for farmers. It also means greater autonomy and sustainability.

  Whidbey Island is certainly one of those special places that can achieve what so many want: healthy, fresh food grown and sold closer to home.

  The first step is to bring together the local capital that abounds on Whidbey Island. That’s you and other local citizens. The power of the community and the chance for achievable final goals resides in people like you—involved in the activities, in the thinking, in the work.

  We recognize that a full day in the spring is a very valuable resource, and we promise you an excellent day on every level: informative, useful, and enjoyable—with a delicious lunch, great networking, and the promise of clarity about actions that will help all of us prosper. Your perspective is important, as invitees represent a balance of players in our food system. We value the wisdom and experience you bring.

  We also know that rehabilitating our local food system is a considerable challenge. That is why we need a day to step back and look at the big picture and develop a vision of prosperity and vitality to inspire us to do the work to get there.

  Our event included a short guided meditation inviting participants to wake up in 2020 to 50 percent of our food sourced locally—and smell the herbal tea, the breakfast cooking, to walk around, observe food growing and being sold and eaten. Then we did a World Café, where people fleshed out this vision in three successive groups of four. We then did a brainstorm where we harvested the features people saw of our 2020 system. After a yummy local lunch we did a “back casting” process in which we imagined standing in our 2020 vision and talked about the sequence of events that happened to get us there. Finally, we had an open space to form action groups.

  At the end of your event, celebrate your guests and the day . . . and go home and see what happens.

  On a neighboring island, Orcas, a group has hosted a Food Charrette. Rhea Miller, the spark plug for the event, sent me her description of it in an e-mail:

  Set a format to inspire, inform, and incite action for increasing access to healthy, local food. Form a small group of interested stakeholders ahead of time, to determine what windows of opportunity are presenting themselves. These opportunities are translated into work groups for the charrette. A winter day, often in February when folks are beginning to think about gardens again, is chosen for the charrette to ensure that farmers can be present. The day begins with inspiring video shorts, online food quizzes, and our community’s story of food so far, always mindful that there may be people present who are new to the topic. Then the whole group self-selects into smaller work groups, at times using the Conversation Café protocol. The first year the work groups focused on growing grain, supporting the school’s Farm and Garden program, and assessing our local food shed. The second year there were groups focused on a community food processing center or commercial kitchen and addressing hunger in the community. The latest charrette addressed the need for a GMO-free county and the formation of a seed library/bank. A healthy lunch is provided for a small fee. The day closes with feedback to the larger group. One charrette additionally closed with a plant and seed exchange, as well as desserts. Each charrette keeps in mind the needs of the local community.

  Write a story or report based on the day. This becomes the property of each member of the group so new ideas and initiatives can be born of what is present.

  Remember the unwelcome wisdom that “everything takes longer than you think it will” and trust that under the surface much is growing and bubbling.

  Naturalist Paul Krapfel, in his small, self-published book, Shifting, describes an experience of sitting out a rainstorm in a cave. Trapped for quite a while, he had time to observe the drops aggregate into rivulets that formed little channels for the water to flow. Then he noticed that if he moved just a few grains of sand, the whole flood plain of rivulets shifted. He learned that while you can’t stop the rain, you can redirect the flow. He wondered if such microshifts could actually heal a damaged landscape—like a parched, denuded vacant lot in Los Angeles deeply rutted by runoff. Rather than come in with bulldozers and seeds to make the lot green again, Krapfel observed the flow of water across this patch of land and, moving handfuls of sand here and the
re, fanned the water out, filling ruts, making hospitable nooks for passing seeds to root. Eventually the gullies were gone, the grass returned, and the lot had become a meadow, a living system.

  This is how our change feels to me: that slowly, grain by grain, gain by gain, we are restoring our food system by working with our wealth of fertility in a spirit of natural hope.

  Can we restore our regional food systems the way Krapfel restored that field? One practical visionary doing just that is my old friend Richard Conlin.

  Seattle’s Quiet Food Evolution

  Richard is a longtime member of the Seattle City Council. Phyllis Shulman, also an old friend, is his right-hand person. It was easy to pick up the phone and make an appointment with them to find out how Seattle was moving intentionally toward a local food future. It turns out they are doing cutting-edge work in classic low-key Seattle style.

  Richard and I met in 1990 at a Seattle multistakeholder sustainability dialogue—not much different from Food 2020—convened to explore the newly minted value of sustainable development. He arrived on a bicycle and was wearing bicycle shorts, a sweaty T-shirt, and a helmet. His curly hair, whipped sideways by the wind, made him look a bit like Clarabell the Clown, but his comments were so cogent, informed, and radical without being aggressive that it is no surprise that within a decade he was on the city council. His hair is now cropped and gray, and he’s become an insider, but he’s still radical and so congenial and well liked, he’s been able to get a lot done.

  In 2008 he and Phyllis established the Local Food Action Initiative to create goals and a policy framework, and to identify specific actions to strengthen Seattle and the region’s food system in a sustainable and secure way.

  Slowly, quietly, and incrementally, policies shifted. A goat ordinance let people own up to three miniature goats—as pets, lawnmowers, and dairy animals for milk and cheese. The P-Patch program expanded. Owning pot-bellied pigs became legal. Homeowners could legally use their parking strips (city property) to grow vegetables. Seattle wrote its own set of Farm Bill Principles.