An excerpt from Bill McKibben's Deep Economy, "The Year of Eating Locally"
Part 9
But they could add up a lot faster, if they didn't have to depend on the students in the environmental studies class pestering the dining hall manager. Imagine, instead, that the federal government shifts some small percentage of America's vast farm subsidy budget away from corporate farming. At the moment, subsidies essentially underwrite consolidation: al-most a third of all federal farm payments go to the largest 2 per-cent of farms, and almost three-quarters of the payments go to farms that are among the top 10 percent in size.78 It's all politics-the farm program subsidizes those crops that are geo-graphically concentrated in a few states, and hence, in essence, have their own senators: wheat, corn, cotton, soybean, and rice growers get virtually all the federal subsidy payments.79 There is no butternut squash subsidy, no apple subsidy.
And since big farmers quickly figured out that there was more money to be made "farming the program," the nation's croplands soon reflected the politics of subsidies just as much as the reverse: Elizabeth Becker, for instance, describes in the New York Times the town of Denison, Iowa, where "crops that do not qualify for a subsidy are as rare as buffalo herds. ...Or-chards have been plowed under for corn. Truck gardens are a thing of the past." Where once there grew potatoes and cherries, peaches and pears, "commercial crops are down to four: feed corn, soybeans, hay, and oats. Denison has a hard time filling a farmers' market one afternoon a week."80 The real beneficiaries, of course, are less the giant farmers than the gargantuan food processors that they deliver the ingredients to. Ever wonder why soybean products can be found in two-thirds of all processed food? It may have something to do with the fact that "about seventy percent of the value of the American soy bean comes straight from the U.S. government."81 Ditto for high-fructose corn syrup. Essentially, we are subsidizing Cheetos.
Imagine eliminating those subsidies altogether, so you weren't tilting the playing field. Or imagine tilting it toward small, local producers, rewarding those whose farms didn't use much energy, that grew food for their neighbors. (That's one reason why people take vacations in France and Italy that consist essentially of looking at small farming villages and eating the bounty they produce.) In a few districts of England, town planners have subsidized local schools and hotels so that they'll purchase more local food; after several years, the aver-age age of a farmer in those townships had dropped to thirty-two-the average British farmer is almost fifty-five-"and the farms are among the most profitable in the nation."82
Imagine, too, what might happen if the agriculture departments of the land-grant colleges, which function now as extensions of the big agrochemical companies that provide much of their funding, instead worked on local marketing schemes and low-input farming. Our scientists are as bright as the Cubans'; were their energies similarly directed, this transition would become much easier.
Easier, not easy. It will take tremendous work, and many setbacks, to remake American agriculture. One of my favorite local food projects was a café in the gritty Vermont town of Barre that bought all its ingredients locally. The Farmers Diner served ham and eggs, French fries, milkshakes, and hamburgers-and it closed its doors after a few years of trying to serve them at pretty much the same price as the guy down the road who just called up Sysco when he needed more food. Now the owner, Tod Murphy, is trying again, with a new location thirty miles to the south, in a town with more tourists. Making a go of the diner would have been a lot easier if the state still had an agricultural infrastructure, but the governor slashed $200,000 from the budget that would have helped start a new in-state slaughterhouse. He was too busy subsidizing what's left of the state's commodity dairy trade.
Sometimes the enemy is too much success. Small farmers spent twenty years spreading the idea of "organic" food. They were persuasive: by the turn of the century, sales were growing 20 percent a year. Which was enough to attract the attention of the big growers, who quickly took over the business: as of 2006, the biggest organic growers are companies like General Mills and Heinz and ConAgra.83 It's true, one assumes, that they don't spray their "organic" lettuce with pesticides, though it's also true that they keep lobbying the government to "relax" organic standards to allow more "flexibility." But in every other respect they resemble every other agribusiness grower. Stony-field Farm buys organic milk powder for its yogurt in New Zealand. "Once you're in organic you have to source globally," says Gary Hirshberg, the company's founder.84 Burkhard Bilger of the New Yorker recently traveled to California's Central Val-ley to watch the organic tycoon Todd Koons grow mâche lettuce. Having leveled his vast fields with GPS and laser equipment, Koons has modified special harvesters to cut his crop. "It's a brave new world over here," he says. "The machines are bigger, we drive 'em faster, and we drive 'em larger." The mâche is packed in individual bags, designed with ten layers of plastic. "As the lettuce sits on the shelf, the gases in the bag are constantly consumed, released, and replaced. Oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon dioxide molecules bond with the polymers on one side of the plastic and are released on the other. Every type of salad re-quires a different type of bag, tailored to its respiration by gas chromatography and computer analysis."85 But hey, it's organic.
Local bakers were making a comeback, too, until supermarkets figured out how to make vast quantities of dough in some central plant, freeze it for months, and then "bake" it fresh at their branches. They created, in the words of one food writer, "artisanal bread without the artisan," driving bakeries out of business in many towns.86
"Local" will be harder to co-opt, because Del Monte and its ilk simply can't grow different food in every market; if they tried, their economies of scale would disappear. "Local" steps far enough outside current conventional economics to represent a real challenge.
The deepest problem that local-food efforts face, however, is that we've gotten used to paying so little for food. It may be expensive in terms of how much oil it requires, and how much greenhouse gas it pours into the atmosphere, and how much tax subsidy it receives, and how much damage it does to local communities, and how many migrant workers it maims, and how much sewage it piles up, and how many miles of highway it requires-but boy, when you pull your cart up to the register, it's pretty cheap. In the 1930s a family might have spent a third of its income on food; middle-class Americans now spend more like a tenth. Even in Italy, one recent study found residents spending more on cell-phone service than on food shopping.87 And food is cheap not just in terms of money, but time. Mostly we eat processed food; cooking is something that happens on the Food Network. In fact, fresh-food sales fall every year; per capita consumption of eggs, milk, fresh vegetables, and wheat flour was far higher in 1950 than a generation later.88 Our food is cheap, and fast, and easy.
The problem is what that cheap, fast, easy food doesn't de-liver. We get all the calories we need (and more that we don't), but our money doesn't bring us much in the way of satisfaction, precisely the commodity high-powered ever-growing modern economies have done so little to provide. Where food is concerned, one way to think about satisfaction is in terms of taste. Consider how you feel after a cross-country trip-a little tired and limp and wan. Well, that's how the lettuce feels. Eighty percent of our tomatoes are harvested and shipped green, and then artificially ripened upon arrival at their retail outpost. Yum!89 A chicken that has never stood up in its entire short life won't taste like much, nor will a salmon reared in a cramped pen and fed food coloring to turn it pink. The supermarket crammed with its thousands of brightly packaged offerings is a mirage: if you could wave a wand and break everything down into its constituent ingredients, a pool of high-fructose corn syrup would fill half the store. Real food really does taste bet-ter; that's why, say, the Slow Food movement, which started in Italy and spread around the world, has grown so rapidly.
The idea that better-tasting food is a yuppie indulgence, however, is simply wrong. A recent survey of organic food buyers found Asians, Native Americans, Hispanics, and African Americans to be more likely than Caucasians to seek out organic food.90 When the Los Angeles Times set out to survey farmers' markets across the city, they found that some of the busiest served ethnic communities and that at some markets payment was accepted in food stamps as well as in cash. If strong local food networks developed further, then prices would keep coming down as middlemen were eliminated. When I buy my neighbor Ben Gleason's grain to make a loaf of bread, I pay barely more than I do for the regular flour in the next bin, but he gets almost all of the money. If you buy a loaf of supermarket bread instead, the farmer gets 6 cents of each $1 you spend.91 If you pay $1.57 for a head of red-leaf lettuce in the store, chances are the farmer got about 19 cents of that-a 726 percent markup.92 CSAs deliver vegetables at something like half the price supermarkets charge. There's lots of margin that should make it possible for local food to work for everyone.
But there will always be a cost in terms of time, of effort. No food system will ever require less participation than our present one, not unless Jetsons-style food pills actually hit the shelves. If you belong to a CSA, you have to go to the farm and pick up the box of vegetables-and then you have to do some-thing with twenty pounds of produce, some of it unfamiliar. When I spent the winter buying locally, dinner took more time. I had to get to the farmers' market, or sometimes to the farm; I had to cook soup and make bread-neither of which is very hard, but both of which are now skills that many people either don't possess or don't use. And sometimes we got a little tired of eating the same things. By February, our eleven-year-old daughter was using the words "icky" and "disgusting" fairly regularly, always in connection with root vegetables. Not potatoes, not carrots, but turnips, parsnips, rutabaga. It is a little hard to imagine how people got through winter on the contents of their root cellars alone.
Which is why I was glad for the Ziplocs full of raspberries and blueberries my wife had frozen in the summer, and even gladder for the high-tech apple warehouse just down the road in Shoreham. Here's the thing about apples: the best ones rot pretty fast. The great apples of the Northeast, your Cortlands, your Empires, your Northern Spy, above all, your Macintosh, are soft, ephemeral. That crisp bite that sprays your tonsils with juice soon turns to mealy mush. For generations, people solved that problem by converting them into cider-hard cider, for freezerless storage. (That's what most of the myriad apple orchards around New England were planted for.) But there's another solution if, like my neighbor Barney Hodges, you have a storage shed where you can pump in nitrogen. "We push the oxygen level down from its normal 20 percent to just under 3 percent. The apple's respiration is slowed down to the point where the ripening process is nearly halted," he ex-plains. Every few weeks he cracks open another room in the warehouse, and it's as if you're back in September-the apples in his Sunrise Orchard bags head out to local supermarkets, where he frets that they won't be kept cool. Here's the take-home message: local farming can be as technologically inventive as industrial agriculture. Maybe more so, since it relies less on the brute force of petroleum. And also this: if you get your hands on nice apples, don't leave them in a pretty ceramic bowl on the counter. Put them in the refrigerator!
February. By now, pleasant routine is setting in: eggs in the morning, soup and a cheese sandwich for lunch. And for dinner, some neighbor that until quite recently was clucking, mooing, baaing, or otherwise signaling its pleasure at the local grass and hay that it was turning into protein. Also potatoes. And something from the freezer-it's a chest-type, and in a dark corner, so you basically just stick a hand in and see what vegetable comes out.
And oh, did I mention beer? Otter Creek Brewing, a quarter mile down the road from my daughter's school, makes a stellar witbier, a Belgian style, naturally cloudy, with raw organic wheat from Ben Gleason's farm. It's normally sold in the summer, but I've hoarded some for my winter drinking. "We'd love to use local barley for the rest of our beers," says Morgan Wolaver, the brewery's owner. But someone would have to build a malting plant to serve not just Otter Creek but the state's seven other microbreweries. Perhaps right next to the oat mill ...
March. I can see spring in the distance. There's still feet of snow in the woods, but the sun is September strong, and it won't be long till down in the valley someone is planting lettuce. There's so much that I've eaten and not described: the venison burgers at the local bar, the Cryovac'ed Lake Cham-plain perch sold at Ned's Bait and Tackle (though you should eat it only once a month if you're of childbearing age).
But there's one place I must describe, both because it's pro-vided many of my calories and because it embodies the idea of a small-scale farmer making a decent living growing great food. Jack and Anne Lazor bought Butterworks Farm in Vermont's Northeast Kingdom in the midseventies, after a stint of working at Old Sturbridge Farm in Massachusetts. There they dressed in colonial costumes and milked cows by hand and talked to the tourists. But, as they eventually figured out, they weren't actors; they were real farmers. Slowly they've developed one of the state's premier dairies: their organic yogurt is nearly a million-dollar business, expanding steadily year after year after year; I've been living off their dried beans, too, and their cornmeal. It's great fun to sit in their kitchen eating bacon and eggs while Anne mixes up some salve for the teats of her cows and the Lazors describe their life. The talk's a mix of technical detail (they milk Jerseys, not the more common Holsteins, which means less milk but higher protein, so their yogurt needs no pectin to stay firm) and rural philosophy. "We have such a 'take' mentality," Jack says. "It's part of our psyche, because we came to this verdant land as Europeans and were able to exploit it for so long."
But here the exploitation feels more like collaboration. We stroll over to his solar barn, where the forty cows in the herd loiter patiently, mulling over the events of the day. "That's Morel, that's Phooey, that's Vetch, that's Clover, that's Jewel..." The vet wanders in, to report that he's figured out what's wrong with Emily: milk fever, easily treated. ("Since this place is organic, everything in my truck is pretty useless," he says. "All my antibiotics, I just leave them behind. The weird thing is, though, with the bigger industrial dairies, where I can use all my medicines, I'm visiting them three times a week. Here it's once a month.") It's very calm in here, no sound but cud being chewed, and it's warm out of the late-winter wind. Jack, who's a talker, is explaining how Vermont could market itself as "the natural state," and how he's hoping to market masa harina for making tortillas next year, and so forth. I'm sort of listening, and mostly just absorbing the sheer pleasure of the scene-that this place works, that I've been connected to it all winter long, that it will be here, with any luck, for the rest of my life.
Eating this way has come at a cost. Not in health or in money (if anything, I've spent less than usual, since I haven't bought a speck of processed food) but in time. I've had to think about every meal, instead of wandering through the world on autopilot, ingesting random calories. I've had to pay attention. But the payoff for that cost has been immense, a web of connections I'd never known about. I've gotten to eat with my brain as well as my tongue: every meal comes with a story. The geography of the valley now means something much more real to me; I've met dozens of people I wouldn't other-wise have known. Yes, in the wake of my experiment I'm back to oranges and Alaska salmon and the odd pint of Guinness Stout. But the winter permanently altered the way I eat. In more ways than one, it left a good taste in my mouth.
That good taste was satisfaction. The time I spent getting the food and preparing it was not, in the end, a cost at all. In the end it was a benefit, the benefit. In my role as eater, I was part of something larger than myself that made sense to me- a community. I felt grounded, connected.
It is to such questions of identity that we must now turn.
From the book
DEEP ECONOMY: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future by Bill McKibben.
Reprinted by arrangement with Times Books, an imprint of Henry Holt and Company, LLC.
Copyright © 2007 by Bill McKibben. All rights reserved.