THE FORK IN THE ROAD

Can eating local food change your world?

BY WENDY UNDERHILL

“The sky is falling, the sky is falling!” said Chicken Little. “I must go tell the king.”

Chicken Little seems to have a lot of friends right now. With gas prices up $1.25 from a year ago, food prices six percent over last year's, global climate change threatening to wreak havoc, and wars destroying environments across the world, it doesn't take a pessimist to believe something cataclysmic is heading our way. At least, so say some weighty thinkers. Here is just one such prediction: “You. Will. Not. Be. Able. To. Get. Food. Need this be spelled out any more plainly? It is time to consider that the stage has been set for petroleum-induced famine.”

This opinion, complete with the dramatic periods between each word, comes from Jan Lundberg and is part of the June 20, 2008 electronic newsletter, “Culture Change,” produced by the Sustainable Energy Institute of Arkadia, California.

Fort Collins' local advocate, Gailmarie Kimmel (www.belocalnc.org) says “the jury is in. Every living system on the planet is in decline. We are at the point where we need to redesign how we go about life on the planet.” Getting food locally (and in a less-processed state) is a good start since “the vast majority of energy used in the U.S. food system (around 80 percent) goes to processing, packaging, transporting, storing, and preparing food,” according to the National Sustainable Agriculture Information Service.

Perhaps our food and energy future is not so dire, as many other learned minds assert. Either way, eating local food is appealing for numerous reasons, and if it will change the world too, even better!

This might mean taking a page from The Little Red Hen's book. Remember how she asked who would help her plant the wheat? And tend it, and harvest, and prepare it? “Not I!” said the dog, the cat, and the duck. When it came time to eat the bread, the other animals also changed to “I will!” But no, the Little Red Hen ate the bread all by herself.

Clearly we can’t all become Little Red Hens. It takes time, money, skill, devotion, land and water to turn wheat seed into bread. If you don't have the prerequisites, the next best thing is to support local food producers.

Away from Simple Solutions
One way to measure this problem of fuel-heavy foods is in “food miles,” or the number of miles food traveled from its source to the dinner table. Presumably, the less it traveled, the better. But there are all kinds of details to factor in. Was it traveling by ship (very efficient), train (quite efficient), truck (not so efficient), or—yikes—by plane?

“Food miles” are now being replaced with the concept of a “foodprint” or “life cycle analysis,” which take into account water use (in Colorado, water may be the scarcest agricultural resource), harvesting techniques, fertilizer outlays, means of transportation, carbon dioxide absorption during photosynthesis, disposal of packaging, storage procedures and dozens of other cultivation inputs. Buyers can't go to the grocery store and calculate this yet, but we can guess that generally locally grown foods have a lower foodprint.

But what if there's a choice between “locally grown” foods and “organic” foods? “It's a false question,” says Bob Scowcroft, executive director of the Organic Farming Research Foundation. “It presumes that they're not connected, or that those are the only two choices possible.” In a perfect world we'd buy organic and locally grown foods. But in reality, sometimes we've got to choose. Environmentally speaking, is it better to buy tomatoes from across town, even if they were treated with pesticides, or from Chile, where they were grown organically. It may come down to what's important to you: preserving small farms, or just saying no to all chemical farm practices. Many local growers use sustainable practices, even if they aren't certified as organic. Get to know your farmers and ask directly about herbicides, pesticides, weed control, hormones, antibiotics and genetically modified organisms.

Why Buy Local?
Besides the fear of catastrophe, there are many other reasons to move into the world of “locavores,” those who strive to get their food from the nearby region. Some reasons, offered by the Colorado Department of Agriculture, include learning more about foods native to your area and their seasonal diversity, supporting your local economy, enjoying the freshness of locally grown produce that hasn’t traveled thousands of miles, and investing in the future of your region. This list doesn't mention fuel, and governments and economists are not likely to subscribe to predictions of “petroleum-induced famine.”

Instead, agricultural economist Jennifer Bond, from Colorado State University, says the key reason to go local is that it helps make rural areas more financially secure. Her research suggests that the best approach for small producers is to focus on high-value specialty crops (think basil, salad greens, and fruit), and value-added products such as cheeses, salsas, and other less-perishable commodities, and to market them directly to end users. That will give an economic boost to beleaguered rural areas.

That's the idea, anyway. In reality, “going local” so far has had a negligible economic impact. In spite of all the attention given to local foods and seasonal eating, farmers' markets (around 90 in Colorado) and Community Supported Agriculture farms (50 in the state), we're moving in the opposite direction quickly. Four times as much food is shipped around the globe now as compared to 45 years ago, according to the Worldwatch Institute.

There's a reason for this. People like variety all year round, and they like low prices. Until hidden costs of traditional food purchasing are made apparent—that is, until the environmental costs of multinational agriculture are uncovered and added to sticker prices--“going local” will be facing an uphill battle.

Small producers generally can't compete on price. Some consumers are willing to pay a premium for local produce. “They’re pretty aware that oil is an input to the produce they buy, so they see price increases and understand why,” says Bond. “People might like to use extremes as a scare tactic,” but in reality food costs involve tradeoffs. In the face of increasing fuel costs, producers have the option of looking for energy savings, controlling other costs or raising prices.

As for buyers, “their willingness to continue to pay a premium may have an upper boundary; and it's possible that that boundary may not meet the needs of the local producer,” says Bond. In other words, paying full fare is economically painful. Not everyone can or is willing to pay more, and time will tell how this works out for producers and for consumers.

Small Guys
One very small producer who’s going local in a deep way is Kipp Nash of Boulder (communityroots
boulder.com), by micro-farming in his neighbors’ yards. It's essentially a sharecropping arrangement. He uses their backyards and pays them back with a portion of the produce; the rest he sells at a market.

It's small, it's fresh, and it's fun. But Nash and all the other small growers from the state don't much matter, economically speaking. All cash farm receipts in Colorado for 2006 were $5.6 billion—a big business. Of that, livestock products accounted for 72 percent. Of the remaining, “field crops” predominate: hay, wheat, dry land corn, other grains. That leaves just a small fraction for fruits and vegetables: around six percent, including potatoes.

Statewide, the small guys are small potatoes in income as well. In Larimer County, for instance, in 2002 (the most recent published statistics) there were 1564 farms in the county. Of those, 1338 had sales of under $25,000. Is that a viable business? Ernie Marx, an agricultural extension agent serving the county says, “I guess it depends what the goals of the business are. Certainly most of these farms aren't supporting a family.”

Of those Larimer County farms, only 93 had gross sales of over $100,000. And, Marx says that “the truth of the matter is that most of those are conventional farms” growing field crops.

And what about those direct-to-consumer farmers who sell their specialty produce at markets or through internet sales or CSAs? Marx had numbers for the Saturday morning downtown Fort Collins market. A total of 92 vendors sold there last season, and all but 12 of them were from Larimer (the others were primarily fruit growers from the western slope). For the 80 local growers, median sales at the market last year were $582. Only four had sales of over $5000.

These growers may easily sell at several markets every week, but let's face it; local, small-scale agriculture isn't a big money maker. Says Marx, “if we're talking about terms like “food security,” this is a very small piece of the food that's needed for a community. There is nothing wrong with it, but it's not changing the world.”

For the record, Marx used to own and operate an organic farm in California, and still grows an extensive garden of his own, and says that “when it comes to freshness, you can't beat your own.”

Hunger—The Real Food Insecurity
Based on these numbers, buying local seems to be a lifestyle choice for foodies. It's fun to say “The beer came from the local brewery, the potatoes were grown in the San Luis Valley and the eggs came from my neighbor's backyard!” Foods with a pedigree are worth paying for, at least for the farmer's-market-going customer.

But there are others who are more concerned with getting food of any sort than with labels such as “organic,” “locally grown,” or “biodynamic,” and those are hungry people. Forty percent of the households asking for help at state food assistance organizations have children at home; the rest are seniors, people with long term health issues, and the working poor.

Assistance organizations have seen a 20 percent increase in requests for food aid in the last six months. And now, in Fall 2008, the stocks at food banks are lower than ever. “In Colorado, a lot of people don't realize that hunger is so close to home,” says Andrew Coonan of Grand Junction's Western Slope Food Bank of the Rockies. “It may be as close as your neighbors.”
Colorado food banks are happy to have locally produced food to offer when they can. They seek out leftovers from farmers markets; ask farmers to “grow a row” for the hungry; organize gleaners to follow up after traditional harvests are complete; and promote community-wide canning efforts to preserve those foods. This year, for instance, an expected bumper crop of apples will be preserved as applesauce.

The clients, though, just want to be able to buy food, and when a 12-pack of Little Debbie snack cakes sells for $1.59, they're not asking questions.

Harvest time is a good time to think about food security; September will be the first ever Hunger Action Month (secondharvest.org), and October 26 is set for Boulder's Crop Walk (bouldercropwalk.org), where walkers raise money to help reduce hunger in Colorado and abroad. Other Colorado cities have dates earlier in the year.

For those of us who aren't facing hunger, it's great to be aware of how food and global warming are connected. The Center for Food Safety based in Washington, D.C., is promoting a “Cool Foods Campaign” asking participants to “Take a bite out of global warming by changing the way you eat.” Its top five recommendations:

• Eat organic
• Reduce meat and dairy consumption
• Avoid processed foods
• Buy locally grown foods
• Say no to packaging

Similar encouragement to do better at eating for the environment may be the take-home message from The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan (Penguin, 2007). In it, Pollan examines three food supply chains from his naturalist's perspective: industrial, organic, and hunter-gatherer. According to Pollan, “Industrial agriculture has supplanted a complete reliance on the sun for our calories with something new under the sun: a food chain that draws much of its energy from fossil fuels instead.” But that doesn't make him an all-or-nothing kind of guy. Instead, his rule of thumb is to “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”

Then there's Barbara Kingsolver's acclaimed book, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life (HarperPerennial, 2008), which describes her family's effort to eat locally in Virginia. Her husband and co-author, Steven L. Hopp, makes the fuel-to-food connection very clear when he says “Americans put almost as much fossil fuel into our refrigerators as our cars.” One other detail to remember: when Kingsolver's children begged for fruit in March, she brought home rhubarb. Hmmm. Maybe not quite what they had in mind.

Could Coloradoans follow Kingsolver's lead and eat locally? Or even eat a “Colorado Diet” for a year? One Boulder woman is trying it now, and recounting her experiences on a blog: ecoyear.net. She lists tough-to-replace items such as exotic fruits, sugar, chocolate, tea, lemons, seafood, rice, nuts, and olive oil—all of which she's trying to work around.

Let's just say she's more committed than most people to going local. It's doable, but it takes work: food has to be procured and preserved when it's available, and that means many hot and sweaty weekends around harvest time. (Said the extension agent, Marx, “I'm really curious what people are going to be eating in January.”) And such a diet probably would not be vegetarian.

The real sticking point, though, says economist Jennifer Bond, is this: “frankly, consumers demand avocados” and they don't grow here. Nor do citrus fruit, bananas, salmon, almonds, kelp, or a zillion other things.

So what would a Colorado diet include? Lots of grass-fed beef, lambs, and a few other meat animals, including cage-free chickens. Potatoes, corn, dry beans, barley and wheat. Rocky Ford melons, Palisade peaches, Paonia apples, and all manner of vegetables in season. Herbs of many kinds, honey, mushrooms, sunflowers, a few fish. Beers and wines (although the hops for the beer and some of the grapes from the wine come from out of state). So, with enough time, effort, and willingness to “just say no” to our food outside our region, a Colorado Diet can be followed.