Looking around it’s come to my attention that the whole eat local, eat fresh mantra of the foodie is a fad. Grass fed beef from a local farm is a quaint idea in today’s world, and an expensive one. I’ve discovered first hand the difficulty of trying to make such a change work. And it often reminds me of the times in the past when I vowed to exercise more, or just generally eat healthy. Now there’s this simple concept that it’s not how much you eat, or your caloric intake, but what you’re eating that matters. You can theoretically gorge on local produce and not be too worse off than when you started. Although you should try and stick with the: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants,” mantra of Michael Pollan.
The problem is that this trend remains in the fad bubble, where only those vocal foodies blog and tell their friends to try utilizing Community Supported Agriculture. To your average person the food revolution sounds like another South Beach Diet, and that has to stop. It’s difficult to have a conversation about this topic without someone comparing it to a diet or regime they’re engaged in following. Or an article they read in some health magazine about a similar subject. The only similarity between Atkins and eating local is that you’re being told what you should eat.
I wish I knew how to convey the message in a way that discourages such a comparison. It’s kind of similar to the idea that evolution as an event is a fact, while any ideas on how evolution occurs is a theory. The notion of eating local isn’t about losing weight, getting a beach body, or being a healthier person. Those are benefits born of such a diet. Great benefits to be sure; and exactly the things the public is looking for because that’s what they’ve been sold by marketing teams for decades.
It’s the presentation that is the problem, not the facts. The sad part is this fad spent most of its life within the human ken as the proper way to eat. It’s only in the last fifty or so years that we’ve transitioned to a global market of processed foods, over indulgence on meat, and diet fads that look to offset our bad decisions. Thus the local and fresh approach is mired in the same category as the lose fat fast mishmash of diets.
Almost every one of us has grown up in a world where our eating habits do not include a produce laden diet. The staple dinner in an American home is meat and potatoes, not potatoes and meat. It causes us to not be able to make such a drastic change. And now we’re being told by this minority voice that we can get the great taste we crave, and usually supply ourselves with by buying frozen dinners and prepackaged items, but that it requires a change of our fundamental desires.
It’s a change that requires a fair bit of conversation. Conversation that we’ve been avoiding for years, but now it seems like the first minor steps are being taken. Right now we are on the verge of changing this local, fresh, and organic movement from a fad to a full blown revolution. Those fighting previously were backing a rebellion, and now that the Obama administration is getting on board it’s time to switch gears. Stop fighting the same battles, and put an end to the diet crazy notions of the movement.
Sales of organic products have dropped in the last year, but that doesn’t stop those who champion the cause. Now that the new secretary of agriculture Tom Vilsack and his top deputy, Kathleen Merrigan, are ready to champion the sustainable agriculture movement the forces are ready to move on Washington. The place where lobbyists reign supreme and the agribusiness model dominates as farm subsidies pay out billions of dollars for farms to grow corn and soybeans. Meanwhile the organic and local foods farmers receive a mere fraction of that amount. So little in fact that they can barely survive, and tend to scrape by on the goodness of the people who join Community Supported Agriculture groups.
So how do we move from fad to revolution? The problem is that everyone has to do a little work. Listening to celebrities like Oprah Winfrey spout off on sustainable agriculture is not enough, because these advocates are not truly educated on the nuances. Taking the time to read Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemna is a great first step to understanding the issues at hand. But we have to remember that the people who can make the changes in this world are the same ones who cannot afford to buy all organic food due to the increased costs.
The axis upon which a lot of hardcore advocates place their argument is in the unseen costs of industrial food. Pollan himself spends a great deal of time in his book discussing the cost in oil and other unseen items that it takes to run our current food economy. We spend an inordinate amount on oil to transport, grow, and process the corn that drives our food industry. But you and I don’t directly pay those costs. And that argument falls to the wayside when the average consumer is confronted with it simply for the fact that it’s easy to see a bunch of organic grapes cost a certain percent more than the normal grapes at the grocery store.
You can’t ask people to incur greater direct cost in favor of a larger goal of reducing spending as a nation. It just won’t work. That world is an ideal, and to push for such a change on those grounds will turn people off. The current economic problems make this a far tougher task than before, but even in times of prosperity such a notion does not go well with our personal sensibilities.
The changes have to take place on all levels, and the move has to be gradual. Congress is almost surely going to oppose any major revisions to the farm bill, because the people don’t want to move to an all – or even mostly – organic and sustainable agricultural model. But small provisions for local farmers, increasing the spending for sustainable agriculture by inches instead of miles, and reducing our reliance on corn and processed foods by the same degree can begin to bring things to a balance.
Frozen, canned, and prepackaged foods are not necessarily bad for you. In fact they can be quite healthy, and a slightly cheaper alternative to all fresh produce. At every step of the way from fad to revolution we must allow every person to live within in their means. If that equates to only a 4% per year increase overall then so be it. But I believe you’ll find that if you gradually change the agribusiness climate you’ll soon reach a boiling point where sustainable agriculture takes a leadership role. Right now advocates are pushing too hard and the people they are trying to convince are jumping out of the pot, rather than sticking around to see what kind of changes could be made.
