NEAC

You Are What You Eat

Eat Local: It’s Good for Your Health and the Environment

When the average U.S. food product travels 1,500 to 2,500 miles before reaching our dinner tables, (1) it’s easy to lose touch with the origins of our food. Fortunately, people everywhere are embracing the local food movement. They are gaining access to healthful, tasty foods, doing their part to cut down on greenhouse gas emissions, and helping their communities to prosper.

The Fallacies of Industrial Agriculture

The conventional wisdom about the U.S. food supply is that industrial agriculture has given us a wide variety of food at a low cost. Unfortunately, the variety tends to come more from artificial flavoring and packaging than diversity of ingredients. (2) As for the price, when you take all the hidden costs of agribusiness into account, it is not so cheap after all.

Industrial agriculture is not as efficient as it seems. To go from farmer to consumer, food travels over many miles and through many hands. With each step of manufacturing, packaging, marketing, and distribution, more of the money consumers pay for food is diverted away from the farmers who grew the food.

Meanwhile, in developing countries, free trade agreements are forcing farmers to adapt to an industrial model of agriculture so that they can produce food for export to the United States and Europe. This model disrupts local food markets, makes countries that used to be self-sufficient dependent on imported food, and displaces countless people from farming for themselves. (3)

So, who actually benefits from industrial agriculture? The only true financial beneficiaries are the massive conglomerates that act as middlemen between farmers and consumers. (4)

A Sustainable Agricultural Solution: Food Sovereignty

The term “food sovereignty” was coined by a global network of family farmers called Via Campesina at the 1996 World Food Summit. In short, it means that consumers should have the right to healthy and desirable food items, producers should have the right to grow what they want to grow, and local food systems should be valued over international trade dominated by multinational corporations.

A great way to promote food sovereignty is to support local and regional farmers.

Locally Produced Food is Good For Local Economies and Farmers

“Buying local” reinvigorates local economies by keeping money re-circulating through the community, creating new jobs, and boosting farmers’ incomes. Within the system of industrial agriculture, chain supermarkets are people’s primary access to healthful foods. In many urban areas, supermarkets first pushed out independently run markets and then abandoned the community for more lucrative suburban markets, leaving residents with no other option than convenience stores and fast food chains. (5)

Even in neighborhoods where well-stocked supermarkets abound, the market is characterized by outside corporations that sell food from around the globe. Instead of re-circulating throughout the community and bolstering the local economy, the majority of the food dollar ends up in distant hands. In 1910, locally owned markets helped to keep 40 percent of the money consumers spent on food within the farmer’s own community. In 1997 only about 7 percent of the food dollar remained in the community. (6)

In communities across America and around the world, these trends have forced farmers out of business. There were 6.8 million farms operating in the United States in 1935. By 1964 there were fewer than half that many and in 1997 there were fewer than 1.9 million. (7) Those remaining have been pressured to grow single crops that can be sold outside of the community to a major manufacturer.

Today farmers receive an average of less than 10 cents of every consumer dollar spent on food. The rest of the money goes to processing, packing, and distribution. At farmers markets, on the other hand, 90 percent of the profits go straight to the farmers. (8)

Buying local cuts out the need for middleman, and eliminates the costs of food associated with packaging and distribution. One survey showed that local food sold through a delivery scheme cost an average of 30 to 40 percent less than similar foods purchased in supermarkets. (9)

Locally Produced Food Is Better for the Environment

The environment pays a heavy price for industrial agriculture. After factoring in the air pollution released during food transport and the environmental degradation resulting from large scale farms relying on chemically intensive methods to grow a limited number of commodity crops, such as soybeans, corn, or wheat, the purported benefits of our industrial, factory farming system quickly fade away. (10)

Because the lack of biodiversity on industrial farms makes them susceptible to a variety of blights, they require large amounts of fertilizers, pesticides, and other chemical inputs. (11) These inputs require fossil fuels to be used in their production, leading to greater greenhouse gas emissions. Since 1990, the United States has released more than 5 billion tons of greenhouse gasses through the burning of fossil fuels directly related to agriculture. (12) Under the industrial agriculture system, around 10 calories of fossil fuel are used to produce only one calorie of food energy, releasing damaging greenhouse gasses in the process. (13) And to make matters worse, industrial agriculture generally takes place far away from the consumers’ kitchens, so the food miles rack up between farm and plate. With each mile, environmentally damaging greenhouse gases are released.

Locally produced food offers an opportunity to reduce the carbon footprint of the foods you eat. Local foods are more likely to be grown on diversified smaller farms, reducing the need for widespread chemical use, which reduces the use of fossil fuels used to make these inputs. By definition, local food doesn’t need to travel far and reduces the amount of greenhouse gasses emitted during shipping.

Locally Produced Food is Better for Consumers

Buying local foods also gives consumers more say in what types of foods are available to them. Instead of having products mandated by multinational corporations, communities can choose to produce foods that are regionally and culturally desirable.

When food does not have to travel far from farm to plate, it can be harvested at the peak of ripeness, unlike produce that has a long journey ahead of it that gets picked before it is fully matured. Commercial tomatoes, for instance, often are harvested when they are still green and then ripened through controlled exposure to ethylene gas. (14)

Eating local is fun, too. According to Homegrown, a report on local eating by Brian Halweil, sociologists say that people have 10 times more conversations in farmers markets than at grocery stores. (15) The opportunity to interact with farmers builds community and gives consumers the chance to learn about where food is coming from and how the farmers grew it.

What You Can Do

To support agriculture in your area, visit the nearest farmers market or join a CSA. Community Supported Agriculture takes place on farms that offer seasonal shares in their harvests. You pay up front, and then receive a weekly box of freshly picked produce. Click here to locate a CSA in your region (link: http://www.nal.usda.gov/afsic/pubs/csa/csa.shtml ) To search for farmers markets, click here (link: http://www.ams.usda.gov/AMSv1.0/ams.fetchTemplateData.do?template=TemplateC&navID=FarmersMarkets&rightNav1=FarmersMarkets&topNav=&leftNav=WholesaleandFarmersMarkets&page=WFMFarmersMarketsHome&description=Farmers%20Markets&acct=frmrdirmkt )

You can also ask local grocery stores and restaurants if they carry any local foods. If they do not, tell them they should. The Eat Well Guide (link: http://www.eatwellguide.org ) can help you find places in your area who are carrying local and sustainable foods.

In Nebraska, the Nebraska Food Co-op (Link: http://www.nebraskafood.org/index.php) has an innovative online purchasing program and an excellent delivery system around the Lincoln and Omaha region. It offers the choices of Farmer’s markets to areas where alternatives to industrial agriculture weren’t previously available.

An important part of eating locally is tailoring your diet to eating foods that are seasonally available. Visit Sustainable Table’s website (link: http://www.sustainabletable.org/ ) to find out what foods are in season in your area.

Case Study: Buying Local in the Agribusiness Heartland

Factory farm-packed Iowa may be abounding with industrial agriculture, but Woodbury County has taken several innovative steps to encourage local food. In June 2005, the county instituted an Organics Conversion Policy that rewards farmers with a $50,000 tax rebate for converting to organic methods. The policy was introduced by Robert Marqusee, an official who persuaded the county to create the position he now holds: Director of Rural Economic Development.

“There is an inherent discrimination against the small farm,” Marqusee says. “It isn’t seen as a business.” To persuade farmers to use organic methods, he came up with the Local Food Purchase Policy, instituted in January 2006, which requires all county departments to purchase organic food from within a 100-mile radius. “Farmers were saying ‘where am I going to sell it?’ I had to create an immediate market.”

Since the policy went into effect, Woodbury County has seen the establishment of a certified organic farming program at the local community college, the creation of an organic exchange board that connects farmers and landowners, and the opening of the Woodbury food market to local goods. In addition, farmers’ incomes have increased, new non-traditional jobs have been created, and more farm acres have converted to organic methods. A new $40 million organic soybean processing plant will give farmers who together grow soybeans on 272,000 acres in the region an incentive to switch to organic practices. (16)

Woodbury County also boasts the Floyd Boulevard Local Foods Market in Sioux City, which sells and serves foods from within a 100-mile radius at a natural foods market, farmers market, and restaurant.

Endnotes

1 Halweil, Brian. “Home Grown: The Case for Local Food in a Global

Market.” Worldwatch, Washington, DC, November 2002, p. 6.

2 Ibid, p. 15.

3 Ibid, p. 12-14.

4 Ibid, p. 7, 10,15.

5 Halweil, op.cit., p. 36.

6 Halweil, op.cit., p. 23-24.

7 Ibid, p. 7.

8 Spector, Rebecca. “Fully integrated food systems: regaining connections between farmers and consumers.” In The Fatal Harvest Reader: The Tragedy of Industrial Agriculture, Andrew Kimbrell (Ed). pp. 288-294. (Washington: Island Press, 2002).

9 Halweil, op. cit., p. 64.

10 Halweil, op. cit., p. 10.

11 Norberg-Hodge, Helena et. al. Bringing the Food Economy Home.

(Bloomfield, CT: Kumerian Press, ISEC, 2002), p. 37-38.

12 Calculations conducted by Food & Water Watch based on data drawn

from the cited studies. For more information, please email foodandwater@fwwatch.org. “Inventory of U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Sinks: 1990-2005 Fast Facts.” EPA, April 2007. Available at: http://epa.gov/climatechange/emissions/usinventory

report.html

13 Wilkins, Jennifer. “Food Citizen: Fossil Fuels Consume Big Portion of

Food Costs.” Time Union (Albany), May 7, 2006. Available at:

www.timesunion.com/AspStories/story.asp?storyID=479022

14 Brown, Reggie. Personal Interview. Manager of the Florida Tomato

Growers Committee. July 30, 2007.

15 Ibid, pp. 12-13.

16 Marqusee, Robert. Personal Interview. Director of Rural Economic

Development, Woodbury County, Iowa. August 6, 2007.

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