Newsletter May 22, 2008

Don’t look for One Big Answer to fix the way America farms, or eats, or fails to make food available across income levels. We didn’t get to our supposed “success” in providing what used to be thought of as cheap food overnight. It took decades to convince most food shoppers that they could have convenience in packaging and food prep, aesthetic beauty and virtually limitless selection unhindered by seasonality or distance from a growing area—all for so cheap we could eat all we wanted and still spend less of our income for food than virtually anyone else on earth.

Working out of this delusion as things fall apart food-system-wise will happen in piecemeal efforts even at the national level. This is true because agri-business capacity, distorted market forces, farming infrastructure, farmer production skills and popular food expectations are so tightly knotted. They form an interdependent system that now seems clearly dysfunctional in providing broadly available human nutrition in an ecologically sound manner without social injury and animal suffering.

But maybe that’s the good news. With so many parts breaking at one time, more people will take food seriously. The most observant who are also the most creative within the most resilient networks will lead us, inevitably by their best intentioned trial and error, to what comes next. These will be innovations that are more decentralized, more locally adapted, less greenhouse-gas producing, less fossil-fuel dependent and more able to feed more people more nutritiously than what we have now.

It will be a messy, and painful, and necessary process in creating an economy based, somehow, more on honoring natural limits and in meeting human need than what we have now. And there will be celebrations as the curious and the desperate find new ways to reach “enough” in food that we never thought about until we had to.

Some will compete for what already is, but here’s calling for more people to cooperate to what is yet to be. We need:

More and more-resilient relationships between farmers and those who buy their food. Pioneering this challenge are CSAs that survive supply disruptions, a challenge that will be showing up more often in food venues, probably near you. Learn more... More sharing of farming knowledge through field days and farm walks this growing season across the U.S.A., like those sponsored in Washington state by grateful farmers giving back for the help they received. Read more...
More professional agricultural women mentoring new entries into food and agriculture, one of the focal points for the Pennsylvania Women in Agriculture Network during their meeting at Rodale Institute this week. See more... Eat well, and think creatively. Greg Bowman and the Rodale Institute editorial team