Building the Future

The growing momentum of local food is a compelling thing. I continue to be awestruck by innovations in every aspect of the local food movement from education to empowerment to entrepreneurship. I’m also totally thankful for the way in which supporting local food production has put people back in touch with their families, their communities, their health and the land. I have seen the amazing impact that buying a locally-grown tomato for the first time from a farmer’s market can have on a person’s outlook. It sounds cliché, but it really begins from an act as simple as that.

Too often we’re encouraged to ignore the state of the world because the onslaught of negative news overwhelms us to the point of apathy or we feel like we don’t have the capacity to have an impact. Plus, people are often so busy with their own lives that, if they already feel powerless, then they are less likely to want to invest the time needed to affect a change. In this way, apathy leads to an inaction that in turn rationalizes continued apathy. But luckily, that is where the transformative power of local food comes in.

Once people begin to buy locally-grown food or start to grow their own food, those simple decisions tend to snap people out of any apathetic consumer habits. In particular, since the local food movement offers tangible action steps that people can take to safeguard their health and the health of their communities, any feelings of powerlessness are rapidly replaced by feelings of empowerment once people begin to eat locally-raised food. Just imagine the moment when an individual first tastes a fresh vegetable out of his or her own garden. That initial moment of accomplishment is powerful – and it usually encourages people to get progressively more involved in local food production, whether by growing more of it themselves or buying it from local growers and producers whenever possible.

In this way, local food facilitates the adoption of a different type of thinking than the one guiding consumption decisions based on lowest prices. Let us remember that the massive, seemingly ubiquitous retailers who are “known” for their low prices are often also the ones with poor track records in terms of working conditions, business practices and environmental pollution (as we have seen before here at Adventures in Local Food). And, when it comes to food access, these same megastores tend to offer low-quality, old and sometimes even rotten produce (an ugly truth behind “low prices”).

In this sense, then, local food teaches us that you get what you pay for. If you only care about your personal, short-term consumer decisions and don’t care whether the global economic situation becomes more tenable, local food is probably not for you. You may even be better off high-fiving since you saved so much money on your full cart purchase of Gatorade, soda and Velveeta shells and cheese (how is this a good deal?). It’s true that some people will always believe those purchases are legitimized, and that is going to have to be fine. After all, we are steadily building the future one garden, one purchase and one person at a time.

In this way, local food is a simple act that has incredible influence on the state of our economies, on our environment and on how we interact with each other. Often times people identify local food with affluence, but this does not capture the full story since organic food is cheaper at the farmer’s market than at the grocery store and since organic growers are traditionally people who could not afford herbicides, pesticides and fertilizers. What really drives the discussion then is the low “sticker prices”  that mask the environmental, economic and social costs of the commodity chain production processes that deliver food to our grocery stores. Locally-grown food seems expensive compared to that, but the difference is that there are no hidden costs of purchase.

So, if you are a stakeholder in the local food system and want to join the conversation, I urge you to participate in the Fourth Annual Local Food Summit coming up on April 2 at Washtenaw Community College. This year’s theme is “Remembering Our Roots: Local Food Victories Past, Present and Future.” So come talk with your neighbors, meet local growers and celebrate exciting initiatives going on throughout Washtenaw County as we carry local food into the future. For more info on the Local Food Summit or to register, check out: http://localfoodsummit2012.blogspot.com.