Blessing the Hands that Feed Us

by Vicki Robin

  1. Scale-appropriate regulations, which would liberate neighbor-to-neighbor trade from the regulations and fees imposed to protect the national food supply. People who raise animals for their milk and eggs and people who raise, slaughter, and butcher animals for home consumption and sell livestock would be able to sell to people they know. This is community-based food security, with performance-based measures (is the food healthy?) rather than production-based regulations (is the milking parlor painted correctly?). People growing food for their neighbors need to be seen as Good Samaritans, not as outlaws.

  There is already a “cottage laws” movement to legalize selling “non-potentially-hazardous foods”—like baked goods, jams, candies, fruit pies, herb blends, dried fruits, granola, etc.—made in home kitchens. Such laws exist, to one degree or another, in thirty-one states. They liberate entry-level food entrepreneurs to market-test their OMG-is-that-delicious! recipes—some just at farmers’ markets and neighbor to neighbor, some in retail outlets if all labeling and licensing requirements are met. It reduces red tape and excessive fees while still assuring a product as safe as commercial-kitchen-made.

  What about milk? Aah, now you have a food fight, because arguments rage about the safety of raw milk. It’s useful to compare countries rather than states in the United States, because that reveals different culinary sensibilities and rights around the world. The European Union, for example, deems all raw milk products safe for human consumption. The same goes for Asia, Africa, England, Wales and Northern Ireland, and New Zealand. In France it goes further: raw milk is de rigueur for cheese.

  And meat? According to the Washington State University Extension, the USDA exempts from federal oversight farmers who butcher for resale up to one thousand birds (chickens and turkeys) a year, whether on the farm or at what are called “custom cut” slaughterhouses.6 How this exemption is interpreted varies from state to state, but where I live the state is lenient, meaning the home-butchered chickens I bought were legal. But the custom cuts of beef from Long’s had to be butchered in a USDA-approved facility—on the mainland—to be legal.

  Progress is slow in liberating niche-market meats—pasture-raised, organic, local beef, lamb, goat, and pig—from Draconian regulations designed for large slaughterhouses that process thousands of animals daily. Only the four largest meat processors—which butcher more than 80 percent of our meat—can afford the costs of licensing, and of constructing and managing facilities, and of paying USDA inspectors, and of testing each animal to the letter of the law. The little guys can’t. Fortunately, we have farmers like the Longs and 3 Sisters who jump through the hoops, but it seems that the kind of laws that apply to chickens can eventually apply to other meats, making neighbor-to-neighbor sale legal—and bringing down the cost.

  Independent farmers and ranchers by and large dislike regulations. They believe they know more about their business, and do it to a higher standard, than the regulators do. They resent the costs, which make it harder to compete in the marketplace. There’s a natural libertarian streak here—and I have it too. That’s why I’m keeping an eye out for how to free neighbor-to-neighbor trade from the cloak of illegality while still upholding the need for uniform, enforced standards when we purchase from industrial producers. Having lived here a long time, I can avail myself of those rivers of sustenance that flow through the community, but eventually such relational trade should be available to anyone willing to hold their neighbors harmless, and see the food more like loaves and fishes and less like plastic-wrapped packages stamped with bar codes.

  2. In addition to liberating local trade, we need to liberate the thousands of young people who want to farm from the systemic shackles that render them instantly impoverished and often doomed if they choose farming over, say, joining the ranks of corporate employees. So many factors—from corporate money to our habituation to cheap food—devalue small-scale farming and thus farmers. Earlier I cited a statistic that should frighten any eater: less than 2 percent of Americans now farm, and their average age is nearly sixty. Who will farm your food in ten years—especially if you favor sustainably produced fare? Who will produce the food in your four-hundred-mile circle from home?

  My proposal mirrors two massive post–World War II programs designed to get the Western world on its feet and humming again: the Marshall Plan in Europe and the GI Bill in the United States. In Europe, the task was to rebuild infrastructure—and morale—after the devastation and decimation of war. In the United States, the task was to employ returning GIs, giving them a leg up so they could root their military victory in the healthy soil of a shared prosperity.

  Among the benefits of the GI Bill were low-cost mortgages, loans to start a business or farm, financial support to attend high school, college, or vocational education, plus unemployment compensation for a year.

  Translate that to young farmers and you get low-cost mortgages to buy farms, loans for start-up costs for a market garden or CSA, financial support for vocational training in sustainable farming, plus a year of living expenses posttraining to tide them over until the farm is closer to operating in the black. In fact, returning vets are also interested in farming, so this would literally be a GI Bill all over again.

  The effect would be like a Marshall Plan for young farmers: correct the devastation our policies have had on community-scale farms and the livelihoods of farmers—decimating the growing profession—and build the capacity of our regional food systems to nourish us at the 50 percent level at least. That’s twelve hundred calories a day. That’s survival.

  Here’s the wish list I put together. Some of them are already under way, and perhaps by publication will be even more robust. Some of them seem nigh on to impossible, but it’s a wish list, not (yet) a to-do list.

  • Secure tenure on land young farmers can farm—be it leasing or buying or gifting

  • Apprenticeships with experienced farmers

  • Scholarships for college and training programs

  • Debt forgiveness from undergraduate student loans for people entering farming as a profession

  • Low-interest loans and grants for seeds and equipment to get started

  • Some clever strategies to help their hand-raised food compete in the mechanically-raised food marketplace

  • Health insurance

  • Crop insurance, just like the big guys

  • To know—through honors and awards—that we value their efforts

  • All of us working toward regulations that support family and midsize farms

  The “how” of this list showed up when I met Severine von Tscharner Fleming. She is a farmer in upstate New York and the sassy, confident, funny, and informed cofounder of the Greenhorns, a network of young farmers who provide mutual support while developing kick-ass policies that they take to Washington. She was on a panel at a conference. She seemed distracted. Her mat of curly light brown hair looked a bit like a wren’s nest. When she spoke, though, she was at once rat-a-tat ruthless in her political analysis and endearing in her offhand humor. Even the Greenhorns’ literature feels young-farmer funky: line drawings (and not that good) and not an ounce of slick. I’d found my primo informant on my quest to support my young island farmers—and attract more.

  The Greenhorns intend to shift the systemic conditions that make farming tough—including dating! How are you going to meet someone who wants to live down on the farm between milking, tilling, weeding, doing the books, and on and on. The Greenhorns have weed dating—working while flirting. They surveyed young farmers and found out what irked, bugged, and stumped them. They were the same needs I’d seen in the lives of my farmers: access to capital and credit, access to affordable land, education and training, business expertise, and health-care coverage.

  Not only that, the Greenhorns have a policy agenda that is no wimpy wish list. Severine rattled off how international trade and anemic national support for sustainable food and fa
rming and overproduction of commodity crops all link. Awareness, she said, is not enough—though it’s a starting point. Individual action is necessary—but not sufficient. We need an analysis of these systemic relationships and we need concerted action toward policies that integrate agriculture with the earth’s living systems.

  Sounds like relational agriculture to me. And agriculture in context.

  When I asked her how I and people like me—not young, not farmers—can help, she at first gave the standard line about farmers’ markets and CSAs, but when I pressed and she got that I was determined, she rattled off what young farmers need from boomer eaters. Here’s the list—my list and, if you choose, your list:

  • Providing funding in the form of loans, gifts, and investments

  • Helping out with the ancillary tasks of farming, such as marketing, Web site, and business planning

  • Activating our established networks of influence to help open doors they can’t

  • Passing on the institutional knowledge on how to navigate the system learned during our own long careers

  • Listening, coaching, celebrating, admiring, and other forms of social support

  • Offering land with long tenure or generous terms

  • Helping to campaign and lobby and sticking with the long slog of change

  • Using our own capital, business skills, and clout to build the intermediate infrastructure for distribution and processing

  • Acting in a spirit of collaboration rather than “helping”—be in it together

  Hearing this was actually energizing. She confirmed my gut sense. The Greenhorns’ agenda, if it was adopted whole hog, so to speak, would turn the tide on Whidbey and probably on every region of the country. I now had a road map for contribution that could last me a lifetime and leave a legacy for the new eaters currently growing up.

  It can be your game too. We are all eaters. We’ve all bent our elbows millions of times to put tons of food into our mouths. Eating unites us as a species among species on a living earth. Relational eating can unite us in making safe, affordable, abundant, healthy, and fair food in a way we care with and for one another—and the future.

  This now, for me, is the great adventure: revitalizing our regional food systems, thriving together. It is, as one of my spiritual teachers put it years ago, a game worth playing. It has all the elements: risk, challenge, uncertainty, and celebration of the daily wins with no idea what’s coming next.

  Your Food Map

  In the beginning of the book I introduced the food map. You traveled with me as I mapped mine. Now it’s your turn to stand in the middle of your food world and discover the hands and lands that feed you.

  Recall that insight that food isn’t “out there,” it’s all around us. Our food sources ripple out in every direction from where we stand—from our yards to our communities to our regions to our nations to our world.

  Let’s investigate your relationship with each widening circle of your food map, and with the hands and lands that feed you.

  The center of your food map is within you in your heart—your inner relationship with food. That includes your history, culture, assumptions, beliefs, preferences, and motivations to change. If transformation is going to happen, it starts here.

  The first ring is your household food system. This is what’s on your shelves and in your fridge, the tools you have, and the way you cook and shop. It also includes you the farmer—the sprouts on the windowsill, the tomatoes on your patio, or the garden plot in your yard. It’s easy to make changes here—cook more, grow more, shop wiser.

  Around your intimate one-to-one relationship with growing and gathering food is your community food system—the fields and forests, markets, stores, and farm stands. It includes your farmers, ranchers, butchers, processors, packagers, and merchants within an hour of home. These are the hands and lands you can touch, feel, wander, and smell.

  There are so many choices we can make to patronize, promote, and produce for our food neighborhood. You may still buy just three beets a week at the farmers’ market, but you now understand how it all fits together.

  Your regional food system is the next ring out. I call it USDA local—four hundred miles, give or take a few hundred. How much of what you can’t get in your neighborhood can you get in your region? This can be a treasure hunt. Can you get all the fruit you want? Salt, sweetener, spices, vinegars, and even oil? Can you get all your meat? All your vegetables? Even your flours and beans and grains?

  Transition Colorado—fired up by a visionary spark plug, Michael Brownlee—is systematically moving toward sourcing 25 percent of Boulder County’s food locally. Their Local Food Shift Campaign7 is “working to help shift our food and farming system—our foodshed—towards significantly increased production and consumption of locally-grown, locally-produced, and locally-sourced foods.” They commissioned Michael Shuman, Mr. Economic Relocalization himself, and found “that this 25% shift could create 1,899 new jobs, providing work for more than one in seven unemployed residents. It could increase annual wages in the county by $81 million, gross county product by $138 million, and state and local business taxes by $12 million.” They are taking a multiprong approach to this shift, increasing both production capacity and consumer demand as well as rebuilding the local food shed infrastructure. This gives food system activists both courage and a road map for success. And we need it.

  If you think in terms of bioregions or food sheds—defining your food circle by geography and ecology rather than miles—this ring may extend a thousand miles, as my Cascadia region does, from Northern California to British Columbia. It actually makes more sense to measure nature by nature, not by a human invention like miles—but as eaters whose food comes in via roads and rails, “food miles” feeds our civilized imaginations. To talk in bioregion or food shed is like learning a new language or entering a different culture.

  Beyond your regional food system are your state and national systems and the agencies and political landscape that govern big policies like subsidies, conservation, food safety, trade, favored agricultural practices, grants, and crops. These profoundly influence how difficult it is and will be to build the health, vitality, and fertility of our regional systems. Before my 10-mile diet, did I know anything about the U.S. Farm Bill, the USDA, the FDA, and other agencies and regulators affecting what shows up on my neatly ordered grocery store shelves? Nope. Did I know the link between agriculture and climate destabilization, peak oil, resource depletion, and erosion? Barely. It was of interest, but not of consequence—and very easy to ignore.

  GROWING COMMUNITIES IN THE UK

  Searching for answers to “Can we feed the world? Can the world feed itself? Does local matter?” I came upon a project in the UK that literally maps on this map I offer you. Growing Communities in Hackney has done the down-and-dirty work of creating a model of local to regional food systems that can indeed nourish people, lands, communities, and hearts. If you want to work on re-regionalizing your food system, theirs is a solid set of principles and actions.

  Growing Communities is a social enterprise committed to providing a safe, abundant, affordable alternative to the industrial food system for the people of Hackney, East London, through community-led trade. A small group there asked the question I had asked: “Can our island—theirs being the UK—feed ourselves?”

  They function like a food hub, collectively using the buying power of their community to purchase fresh produce from many area farms, as well as growing some of their own on city plots. Members pick up their “Veg Box” weekly, and also shop at a farmers’ market. The enterprise is run democratically—everyone, from farmers to employees, gets paid a fair wage—and they are in the black.

  As they grow and prosper they are refining a set of interconnected principles that are, they will readily admit, a work in progress and often involve trade-offs. These are the properties of a
sustainable and resilient food system (words in parentheses are mine):

  • Involve food farmed and produced “ecologically” (without chemicals, promoting natural fertility)

  • Involve mainly plant-based food (which is far more likely to provide food security for the community)

  • Involve fresh/minimally processed food (reducing the energy costs of processing and maximizing nutrition)

  • Involve trade between appropriately scaled operations (small plots for salad, larger plots for vegetables—scaling sideways between equal players)

  • Increase the consumption of food sourced as locally, seasonally and directly as practicable (leaning into a complementary food system)

  • Use resources in an environmentally friendly and low-carbon way (doing the least damage to the living systems)

  • Trade fairly (allowing everyone involved to have a fair shake and a living wage)

  • Be transparent and promote trust throughout the food chain (revealing sources and practices)

  • Promote knowledge (empowering customers to become informed and engaged)

  • Foster community (members meet their neighbors when they collect their Veg Boxes at a common pickup point—relational eating!)

  • Strive to be economically viable and independent (standing on its own feet as an enterprise)

  • Enshrine the principles in everything it does (acting with integrity at every step of the value chain)8

  These principles are expressed in a series of rings around one’s home, much like the one I suggest with the eater in the middle and concentric circles of household, neighborhood, community, region, and beyond. Their vision is food resilience for urban areas.

  They call the center zone Zero, which is your household. They imagine you can provide 2.5 percent of your food through your own garden.