yearofplenty

New USDA Farmers' Market Mapping Tool Illustrates Growth of Local Food Movement

The USDA has created a new tool to map all the 6200 farmers' markets in the U.S. The snapshot below shows a map of the country with a red dot for every farmers' market.

Here's one for Washington State.

It's an interesting way to look at the country. Go to the Food and Tech blog for more info.

Korean Kimchi Crisis Serves as a Reminder of Lost Food Culture in U.S.

picture: the Walrus blog

The story of how the rising price of Napa cabbage is creating a crisis of constraints on the Korean supply of kimchi is a fascinating story in its own right. (I wasn't aiming for alliteration in that sentence but, hey, sometimes it just happens) What has really got me thinking, though, is how the Korean way of life is so connected to food and food processes, in contrast to the American way of life that is so disconnected.

Kimchi is so much a part of Korean life that the kimchi crisis warranted a response  from the government as if they were talking about the supply of gasoline or fresh water;

“There is no reason for regular folks to have to buy items integral to daily life at higher prices than international prices,” Mr. Lee said at a cabinet meeting on Tuesday, while instructing his economists to more closely monitor commodity prices that have sent the South Korean consumer price index to a 17-month high.

Notice that the essential nature of the food item is not it's nutritional content, but something deeper, more cultural, more anchored in identity and frameworks of meaning.

The article describes the Autumn family ritual of making kimchi;

The price increases have caused many middle- and lower-income homemakers to cancel the making of kimchi at home this year, a traditional rite of autumn that typically brings together mothers, daughters, aunts, grannies and neighbors. Some families can go through a couple of hundred heads of cabbage, and it’s not unusual for all the bathtubs and sinks in a house to be filled with bobbing cabbages as they are washed, soaked and brined.

The question that arises for me is; What would be the American equivalent to Korean Kimchi? What food items and rituals are so central to our way of life that they would warrant a statement from the governor? What food rituals bring together the generations in our households?

Maybe Thanksgiving turkey comes the closest, but my basic observation is that there is no equivalent. American food culture has been plowed under like a chemically enhanced, genetically modified field of corn. There is not much of an identifiable food culture. By contrast, when we went to Thailand two years ago one of the most memorable, tasty meals was the Korean food on the Korean Airlines flight. Most cultures in the world are integrally connected to food and food processes. A big part of the movement toward local food in the U.S. is an effort to recover our food culture. That's something that economists will never get.

But Korea's food culture may be facing greater challenges than a cabbage shortage;

Mrs. Roh has two daughters, both in their 30s, and she said they learned to make kimchi “by looking over my shoulder, by tasting and doing, like all Korean girls are supposed to.”

One daughter works at an Outback steakhouse, the other at an upscale department store, and they have little time to make kimchi on their own, Mrs. Roh said, lamenting the loss of another tradition to the “ppali ppali” or “hurry hurry” lifestyle of modern South Korea.

Outback steakhouse? I wonder if they serve kimchi with the steak.

Millwood Farmers' Market Moves Indoors Today

The Millwood Farmers' Market will move indoors to the Crossing Youth Center today with a scaled back slate of vendors and will be open from 2-6 pm. The Youth Center is next to the parking lot where the market is normally held.

TED Talk of the Week: How Food Shapes Our Cities

TED talks are such a great resource. I'm going to post a series of worthwhile talks on food, etc. over the next couple of weeks. I enjoyed the history lesson in this talk on the evolving relationship between food and the city.

Christian Conference to Explore Intersections of Local Church, Land and Agriculture

Today is the last day of the outdoor Millwood Farmers' Market. This will be the conclusion of four years of hosting and running the market at Millwood Presbyterian Church. Being a Farmers' Market manager and a pastor has stretched the normal bounds of pastoral and church work, and has led many I'm sure to wonder what we're up to. In my upcoming book I have a whole chapter titled The Kingdom of God is Like a Farmers' Market, where I lay out the theological and cultural premise for the farmers' market as a ministry.

Far from being an isolated experiment, our church farmers' market is part of a larger exploration going on in North American churches, making connections between food, land and faith. One of the pioneering ministries, plowing new ground, (or if you prefer a more sustainable metaphor, direct-seeding new crops) is the Englewood Christian Church in urban Indianapolis, and more specifically their online ministry called, The Englewood Review of Books (ERB) by Chris Smith, which is part of their community development work. You can follow ERB on Twitter and Facebook. They offer some of the best comprehensive review of books and leaders making vital connections between faith and the environment, especially agriculture.

They will be hosting an upcoming conference titled A Rooted People: Church, Place and Agriculture in an Urban World. Claudio Oliver, one of their speakers, is a regular commenter on this blog from Brasil. I wish I could be there.

Spokane Area Farm to Offer Winter CSA Meat and Vegetable Subscription

Living in a northern climate means short growing seasons and extra challenges finding local sources of food during the winter. This year Rocky Ridge Ranch, a farm small sustainable farm in Reardan, WA, is going where no other Spokane area farm has gone in helping consumers with this dilemma. They are offering a winter CSA program.

CSA's are a wonderful innovation in local food but it's likely you have no idea what a CSA is. They are basically subscriptions for a weekly supply of fresh local fruits, veggies and meats. Go here for previous posts that will help bring you up to speed and go here for a first hand account of someone's experience with a CSA. CSA's are a win-win for farmers who need steady reliable cash flow and consumers who are often too busy to hunt down local sources for food.

Rocky Ridge Ranch produces some of the areas best meat, eggs and produce so this is a great opportunity.

Here's the description they give of a typical weekly delivery;

Meat
Chicken or Roast (beef or pork or lamb.)
Beef Steak, or Pork or Lamb Chops, or Beef, or Pork Cutlets
Sausage, Bacon or Links
Ground Beef or Beef Stew Meat or Ground Pork or Ribs
Soup Bones, etc. as available
(Substitutes of comparable value may have to be made from time to time.)

Produce
Salad Mix or Spring Mix or Spinach
Salad onions or radishes
Lettuce, or Winter Greens
Beets,or Carrots or Potatoes (Stored or fresh)
Squash or Cabbage ( Brassicas we succeed with.)
Herbs (dried or Fresh.)

Go here for the full run-down.

Undercover Investigation Reveals "Localwashing" and Lies at LA Farmers' Markets

I posted earlier about the battle over the "farmers' market" brand. A recent investigative report by NBC in Los Angeles shows that the rapid growth in popularity of farmers' markets has led to other problems that are more substantial than marketing semantics.

NBCLA's investigation began this summer, when we bought produce at farmers markets across the LA area, and then made surprise visits to farms where we were told the produce was being grown.

We found farms full of weeds, or dry dirt, instead of rows of the vegetables that were being sold at the markets. In fact, farmers markets are closely regulated by state law. Farmers who sell at these markets are supposed to sell produce they've grown themselves, and they can't make false claims about their produce.

We did find plenty of vendors doing just that, like Underwood Farms, which sells produce at 14 markets, all grown on a family farm in Moorpark.

But our investigation also uncovered vendors who are selling stuff they didn't grow

They followed one vendor who made the rounds to wholesalers loading up on produce from as far away as Mexico that he then turned around and sold as locally grown at the farmers' market.

In my experience with markets in Spokane, I don't think we have nearly the problems described in the video but it does point to a problem, which is that the demand has grown so rapidly for locally grown, farmer direct food, that some people are breaking to rules to meet the demand. Hopefully the rise in demand will be met with a rise in honest local farmers marketing their goods directly to consumers.

Battle Brewing Over the "Farmers' Market" Brand In Washington State

photo: Nick Wingfield/The Wall Street Journal

I first got wind of a brewing controversy from Jack, a commenter on the blog, who heard a radio ad to the effect of - No need to go to the Farmers' Market when you can come to the Albertson's produce market. Apparently Safeway has been taking a similar approach, promoting their in-store produce experience as a farmers' market.

Yesterday I received notice from the Washington State Farmers' Market Association that they are forming a task force "to review the use of the term "farmers' market" by non-WSFMA-member groups." I didn't immediately make the connections between the Albertson's ad and the formation of the task force but then I came across this WSJ article explaining the controversey;

Farmers and their supporters have spent several decades building "farmers' market" into a brand that signifies something specific to consumers, namely, locally grown produce fresh off the farm. Now, to the dismay of farmers' market representatives, two large grocery chains in the Northwest recently began posting store banners advertising displays of tomatoes, corn and other items as farmers' markets.

In June, several Safeway Inc. stores in the Seattle area posted signs with the term "Farmers Market" above produce displays in front of their stores. When local farmers' market groups complained—the offerings included mangos, which aren't suited to Washington's climate—Safeway changed the signs to say "Outdoor Market." A Safeway spokeswoman said the chain has no plans to call its outdoor events "farmers' markets" in the future.

But then, over the Labor Day weekend, about 200 Albertsons stores in Washington, Oregon and Idaho put up their own "Farmers Market" signs next to their produce stands. The same groups complained to local Albertsons managers about the promotions, but a spokesman for the chain's owner, Supervalu Inc., said the Albertson stores may repeat them in the future if the chain deems them effective. These "farmers' supermarkets" have popped up from time to time in other regions as well.

In Washington State the rules for state association member markets are very clearly defined and enforced, so it does create a dilemma when you have a highly regulated use of the term "farmers' market" alongside a fast-and-loose use of the term, strictly for marketing purposes. I'll be interested to see how this shakes out. I think a good argument could be made that the state association, through its work, has established and nurtured the term "farmers' market" as a valuable brand in the state of Washington, and therefore they should have some authority to regulate the use of the brand.

This is yet one more example of how the rapidly growing interest in local food has large retailers scrambling to get on board. I'm not sure if they are seeing a decline in sales or if their marketing departments simply see an opportunity.

I did an interview yesterday for an upcoming show on NPR about the growing backlash against the local food movement, and I was asked about the critique by some that farmers' market and the like are nothing more than elaborate marketing schemes. My response is that there is actually something very real and substantial going on in our culture around food, and there are some that are responding by turning that into a marketing scheme. But as the flimsy marketing banners go up around town, let's not forget the substantial shifts that are taking place in the relationship between consumers, food, farmers and land. The marketplace is responding to consumer interest, but let's not then equate the marketplace's response to the thing itself.

Food Fight, Ctd - In Praise of the 10,000 Mile Diet

A recent Chicago Tribune article had one of the more thorough treatments of the debates between industrial agriculture pragmatists vs. local food idealists.I was intrigued to hear about an upcoming book;

...economist Hiroko Shimizu and University of Toronto geographer Pierre Desrochers are finishing a 2011 book, tentatively called "In Praise of the 10,000 Mile Diet," that argues locavorism is a misleading marketing fad that, among other problems, ignores the threat it poses to the current affordability of food and to the economic health of developing countries.

Food security can suffer if "you put all your eggs in one local basket and something goes wrong," Desrochers said from his Toronto office. "I also have a problem when local food activists want to promote food that is either not economical or cannot compete with foreign food in that area."

Go here for a brief article of the same name by Shimizu.

The whole Tribune article is worth a read but I should clarify one point regarding the use of food stamps at farmers' markets. The article offers that as a counterpoint to farmers market elitism but early reports are that while many markets take food stamps, few consumers are taking advantage of it. Unfortunately, this has been true at the Millwood Farmers' Market where we haven't had a lot of food stamp transactions this summer.

Go here for my response to these debates.

Food Fight: Washington Post Foodie Ezra Klein Defends Industrial Agriculture

Earlier in the week influential blogger Ezra Klein of the Washington Post wrote a short post dismissing the influence of the local food movement and heralding that "Industrial farms are the future." He wrote;

Despite the dreams of many foodies, I can't think of a major industry that went from small, decentralized production methods to large, scaled industrial production -- and then back again. Are there any examples I'm missing? Maybe so. But for now, I think of the preference for farmers markets and small producers as being mainly important in sending certain signals about production methods and branding preferences to Big Ag than in actually creating some sort of viable alternative.

In the article he references an article from the Guardian in the UK where Jay Rayner argues;

Words such as local, seasonal and organic have become a holy trinity. But these are merely lifestyle choices for the affluent middle-classes, a matter of aesthetics, and nothing to do with the real issues.

If we are to survive the coming food security storm, we will have to embrace unashamedly industrial methods of farming. We need to abandon the mythologies around agriculture...and recognise that farming really is an industry, much like car manufacturing or steel forging, one which always works better on a mass scale, but which can still be managed sustainably.

Ezra Klein is a farmers'-market-shopping, meatless-monday-eating, full-on-foodie so his little post created quite a stir. Tom Philpot at Grist offered up the highest profile retort. He mainly takes down Rayner's editorial and tisk-tisks Klein for passing it off as meaningful commentary. He writes;

Rayner's argument goes like this: a) because the U.K. relies increasingly on food imports, and b) U.K. supermarkets demand flawless, uniform fruits and vegetables, forcing farmers to "grade out" much high-quality produce, and c) U.K. consumers have come to expect dirt-cheap food, then the nation "will have to embrace unashamedly industrial methods of farming" to avoid looming famine.

Really? The same line of reasoning could more logically have led Rayner in the opposite direction: that Britain's food problems stem from a globalized industrial food system consolidated into the hands of a few powerful companies.

Yesterday, Klein offered a little bit of an apology for citing the Guardian editorial, which he admits is weak, but he sticks to his guns when it comes to the future of food being industrial;

...I'm increasingly less convinced that small and big are, in the overall scheme of things, terribly useful dividing lines for the future of agriculture. Whether one could hypothetically imagine feeding the world using decentralized production methods, I don't see much reason to believe it will happen. At the same time, small farms can be run wastefully and large farms can be run sustainably.

When I say that the food movement is sending important signals to America's agribusiness giants, I mean it -- forcing them to innovate in organics and compete with Stonyfield and think about the success of farmers markets are types of pressure that could lead to really important transformations in how they do their business. And those are transformations that might then be copied by large producers in other countries. That's why I think the most important role of the food movement is potentially changing the behavior of players like Nestle and ConAgra, and creating some large companies that demonstrate how a different ethos of food production can be brought to industrial scale.

Andrew Sullivan just pinged this dialogue so I suspect it will get a lot of play on blogs and editorial pages in the coming weeks.

This little food fight touches on so many different aspects of what I blog about here that it's a little hard for me to decide where to enter in, but let me pick one aspect of the debate and see where it leads.

Klein mentions the hypothetical question as to whether it's possible to feed the world through decentralized production methods. It's typical in these debates for defenders of industrial ag to assert that it's not possible to feed the world using organic or local methods and others reply that, actually, you can. Klein dismisses this line of argument as irrelevant. He says it's not going to happen. He asserts that we have never seen "a major industry that went from small, decentralized production methods to large, scaled industrial production -- and then back again," which is what would need to happen in the case of food. The industrial cat is out of the bag and there is no turning back. All we can hope for is mega-corporations that are responsible and responsive to consumer demands for more sustainable and local food.

He takes the the pose of the realist and on one hand I agree with him. I often say (I just said it yesterday in fact), that real substantial change in food distribution will have to come through changes to big retailers like Walmart. For an example of how this is happening with potatoes go here.

But I disagree with Klein's and Rayner's foundational assumption - that the production of food is best viewed as an "industry, much like car manufacturing or steel forging, one which always works better on a mass scale..." For one, there is mounting evidence that food production does not work better on a mass scale. It's only over the last 75 years that food has been imagined as an industry and practiced as such. We fed the world for millennia with small, local and organic agriculture. Modern industrial food practices are a very recent innovation and the long term consequences are still unknown.

There is no doubt that modern technologies have been a boon to the task of feeding people around the world, but there is something different about food than making cars or forging steel. Manufacturing cars is a product of the industrial revolution. Eating food arises out of the very nature of the created order. For all of history food amounted to more than the shallow categories of industry. Food was culture, family, provision, and for the three major religions of the world, a sign of God's grace.

In the Genesis account of creation the first words out of God’s mouth to Adam and Eve are, “You are free to eat….” Not far behind is the warning, “You must not eat…” After their disobedience, God proclaims judgment, “Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life. It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return” (Genesis 3:17-19). Even in judgment there is a grace of provision.

It's funny to me how casually we throw around the phrase "saving the world" in debates about sustainability. Isn't it so obvious that "going green" is a veiled, modern-secular way of entering into the territory of apocalypse and salvation, the ancient categories of the human quest for life and meaning and God. Food goes deep into mysterious and hallowed places of human existence. Food cannot be reduced to the limited categories of industry and it does great damage to imagine it exclusively as such.

There is one thing I agree with in the Guardian column. Rayner says that the local, seasonal and organic food movements are a matter of aesthetics, and have nothing to do with the real issues of industrial practices and pragmatics of feeding the world. He's right in pointing out that what drives the local food/sustainable food movement is, something beyond the pragmatism of calories and food miles, something more intangible. Aesthetics is a rather dismissive way of putting it. I would say that it arises out the human search for meaning and hope.

One last comment. Rayner claims that it's only the well-off middle-class who have the luxury to dismiss the reality of food as industry. In my experience it's actually the impoverished 2/3 world that understand the reality that food is more than industry. To the majority world food is culture, family and life. Most of the world gets that those are "real issues" that are relevant to conversations about food. Wealthy westerners are actually the innovators of the exclusive view of food as industry and profit margin. It is our particular single-minded lens that is foreign in the world. 

The insurgent foodies in the western world are attempting to lift up other issues that are very real, issues that touch on aspects of human life that industry can never reduce and control, and issues that impact and change industrial practices.

As I see it, the task is not to de-industrialize food, the task is to re-enchant, re-annimate, and re-new our imaginations around food, which by necessity means to re-connect with the land that supplies us with food (and perhaps the Creator of the land), and along with that to re-connect with the farmers who farm the land.