Illustration by Noa Kasman '12
Fall is harvest time. Squash, beans, tomatoes, carrots, pumpkins, potatoes, corn and other delectable crops provide a bounty of seasonal savory straight from the garden to your plate. The recent Local Sustainable Gracious Dinner included ingredients that were harvested from Mount Holyoke’s own Student Garden.
Eating locally is starting to make its way into the mainstream. Farmers’ markets are popping up in small towns and crowded cities, community supported agriculture (CSA) programs are becoming more popular and small vegetable gardens are appearing in backyards and on college campuses. Yet most of the food we eat does not come from the local farmer down the road. It comes from an industrialized food system that has completely revolutionized the way food is produced in this country.
Modern agriculture is built on the principle of producing large quantities of food as cheaply as possible. Think rows upon rows of cornfields tilled by big fuel-guzzling tractors. Maybe half of this corn will be used to feed cows and pigs confined in factory farm operations, where most of our meat comes from. The rest of the corn will mostly be converted into high fructose corn syrup and corn starch, ingredients found in countless supermarket products, from Coca Cola to Cheetos.
Industrial food production may be efficient, giving you more calories per dollar, but it is also energy intensive. Fossil fuels are burned at every stage of the system, from feeding the machinery used to plow the fields to the trucks that transport food products hundreds, even thousands of miles to the supermarket. According to author and food expert Michael Pollan, most food has traveled an average of 1,500 miles before it even reaches your plate. Our globalized food networks enable us to consume nearly anything from anywhere at anytime of the year. A trip down the produce aisle at the supermarket puts us in reach of bananas from Ecuador or lettuce from California, even in midwinter. All this transport of food, not to mention the inputs that go into making it, adds up. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the food and agriculture sector is responsible for up to a third of worldwide greenhouse gas emissions.
Then there’s the problem of food waste. According to the FAO, industrialized countries waste 222 million tons of food annually. In this country, Americans throw away 40 percent of the food produced for consumption. When food rots away in landfills, it produces methane, which has more than 21 times the global warming potential of carbon dioxide.
If we stopped wasting food, would that solve the problem? Not entirely. The problem lies within the way our food is produced. Agriculture today, as described by Pollan, means big, factory-style farms controlled by a handful of large, profit-driven corporations. People who used to make a living tilling the soil were driven out of business by corporate farms.
But small farmers are making a comeback. There are now over 7,000 farmers’ markets nationwide, according to the USDA, more than double the amount there were a decade ago. Here in the Pioneer Valley, there are dozens of local farms, like Plainville Farm in Hadley and Red Fire Farm in Granby. These are the types of farms where the farmers care about the food they grow. Consumers who buy from these local providers are ensured to get the freshest food possible.
According to author, farmer and food activist Ben Hewitt, agriculture has the potential to restore our health, the soil and environment, local economies and communities. The latter two are exemplified by Hardwick, a small, rural Vermont town where “agripreneurs” built a local food system to restore the challenged economy. In the greater Hardwick region, Hewitt explains in his book The Town that Food Saved, approximately 100 jobs have been added within the localized agriculture sector over the past five years.
This is promising, especially in our current economic climate. The transition to localizing our food system is slowly getting underway, but it will take awhile before small farms are able to outcompete large industrial farms, if they ever will. The bottom line is that it is important to be aware of where your food is coming from. Any time that you include a locally-sourced food item in your meal you are supporting not only a healthier environment, but a healthier community and local economy.
