Conscious Choice: Think Globally, Eat Locally

September 2000

Think Globally, Eat Locally

by Claudia M. Lenart

One spring I decided to grow my own sweet corn. A novice at vegetable growing, I put in a couple of rows in my raised bed. By August, I had a meager crop of dwarfed cobs. I pulled away the husks from one of the larger specimens and took a bite. It was the juiciest, sweetest, most tender corn I had ever tasted. I was forever sold on freshly picked produce.

There’s an incomparable joy in starting a seed in a bed of dirt, nourishing it and finally harvesting vegetables and bringing them to the table. That connection to the food that sustains us is good for our health and good for our spirit. Everyone should grow at least part of their own food, even if it’s just some potted herbs or cherry tomatoes — it’s one way of being a little more self-reliant. Most of us don’t have the space or the energy to grow a great diversity of food, but we can grow a little bit — and partake in the harvest of local farmers.

Taste alone is a good enough reason for buying locally grown, just-picked vegetables and fruit. But it’s not the only reason. Buying locally grown, organic produce is healthier. It sustains the Earth, preserves our agricultural heritage, and supports the local economy.

Internationally respected Chef Rick Bayless, of Frontera Grill and Topolobampo in Chicago, is at the forefront of a movement to support local farmers and sustainable agriculture as the head of Chef’s Collaborative 2000.

"I think it’s very important to think about how I’m going to leave the world for the next generation. As a restaurant, how can I tread most lightly on the environment? Organic is not primarily about what you don’t put on the crop, it’s about what you do to the land to keep it healthy," says Bayless.

Bayless’ goal is to buy as much locally grown produce as possible for his two restaurants. He buys not only vegetables, but also meat and eggs from a large farmers’ cooperative in Wisconsin.

"People who take good care of the land, take good care of the produce, they grow interesting varieties, they pack it well, and they pick it when it’s perfectly ripe," said Bayless.

There is evidence that taking good care of the land also produces healthier food. The absence of carcinogenic chemicals is one obvious health benefit. But there’s also growing evidence that fruits and vegetables grown organically are more nutritious. Studies have shown that American produce is becoming deficient in trace minerals. Gene Logsdon, author of The Contrary Farmer’s Invitation to Gardening, surmises that chemical fertilizers used on commercial farms draw out the soil’s micronutrients. Therefore, food grown in heavily mulched, organic soil is more nutritious.

Wendell Berry, poet and author, eloquently describes the importance of the soil in The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture: "The soil is the great connector of lives, the source and destination of all. It is the healer and restorer and resurrector by which disease passes into health, age into youth, death into life. Without care for it we can have no community, because without proper care for it we can have no life."

Writer Juli Brussell, a contributor to this issue, remembers rolling up the car windows of her parents’ car during crop spraying with DDT. That early, unpleasant memory of pesticide use contrasted with her later childhood memory of fresh produce at farmers’ markets in Europe — and probably led to her current role as a consultant on sustainable and organic food systems. (Brussell and her husband also run a small, organic farm from their home in Casey, Illinois.) Brussell points out that the average piece of produce in America travels 1,500 miles, requiring an investment that many small farmers can’t make.

"You can’t maintain the family farm if that farm can’t access the marketing system," she says. Brussell coordinates the marketing project for the Illinois Stewardship Alliance, a project to bring farmers and consumers together more directly. She has written From Field to Table: An Illinois Resource Guide for Farmers and People Looking for Great Fresh Food. "So much of farming is dealing in commodities. It’s faceless; farmers get no feedback, and it’s very depressing," says Brussell. "People who can sell directly to the customer have more pride. It makes farming into a craft."

The best ways to support small, local organic farms is to buy at farmers markets or through CSAs (CSA stands for Community Supported Agriculture). Your local farmers’ markets is likely to boast one or more organic farms, and even the conventional produce is likely to have escaped a final application of chemicals meant to get the veggies through an extended trip.

If you are truly committed to buying organic, however, your best bet is still a CSA. Through CSAs, customers buy a subscription at the beginning of the season and get a bushel of fresh produce every week throughout the growing season. It usually costs about $200 to $450 per season.

With about 800 subscriptions this year, Angelic Organics in Caledonia, Illinois (near Rockford), is probably the biggest CSA in the country. While it’s big for a CSA, manager John Peterson points out that it’s still small for a farm. Peterson knows; he grew up on this piece of land and has farmed it most of his life. He converted the farm to organic produce in 1990 and started a CSA in 1992. He recalls the final impetus for starting a CSA, when a grocer backed out on buying his squash crop. "I was sitting on 400 cases of squash that I couldn’t move. That’s scary," says Peterson.

Angelic Organics distributes its produce at drop-off points. The farm also sponsors outings and educational events for its subscribers. As it has grown, it has also developed a learning center with livestock, giving it the feel of a more traditional farm.

"The way it used to be, a lot of people had uncles or grandparents on a farm," says Peterson. "They visited and cherished that relationship with a farm. There aren’t a lot of farms left, and if you did visit one, you wouldn’t have that positive relationship." Most commercial farms are generally monoculture and lacking in the diversity of crops and livestock.

Angelic Organics has surveyed its customers and finds there are many reasons why they belong to a CSA. "For some it’s price; they feel the organic produce is cheaper than at the store. Some like the relationship to a farm. Our biodynamic practices are important to some. Others just like supporting a small farm — they have a feeling for small farmers," says Peterson.

Buff Rock Farm, an organic CSA run by Jeff Uhlig and his family in Steward, Illinois, near DeKalb, is a much smaller farm. Uhlig has eighty subscriptions this year and expects to reach his ultimate goal of one hundred next year. He left his job as a communications engineer and transported his family from Carol Stream to Steward in 1997.

Uhlig delivers his produce to customers’ doors throughout the Chicago area. "I love the look on a customer’s face when I bring them a pile of tomatoes," says Uhlig. "This is the hardest work I’ve ever done, but I wouldn’t trade it for anything."

Uhlig also offers his customers certified organic beef, pork from pasture-raised hogs, poultry and eggs from free-range chickens. He got the idea to offer customers meat and eggs when some local farmers showed an interest in his operation. "It allows local farmers, who usually deal with large corporations, to get more money. It’s turned out to be a win-win situation for everybody," says Uhlig.

In factory farms, large numbers of hogs and chickens are kept disease-free through megadoses of antibiotics. As a result, the animals become more resistant to antibiotics, and there is a concern that this resistance will be transferred to the humans who consume them. Some animals also are fed growth hormones, which have been linked with developmental impairments, low fertility in men, and breast cancer.

Organic and pasture-raised animals are free of these problems, and many of Uhlig’s subscribers say the taste is also superior. One of them actually held a taste test, in which she barbecued both store-bought and CSA-sponsored ground beef. At the end of the barbecue, there was a lot of leftover supermarket ground beef.

People who opt to eat locally grown food also begin to cook more often and more creatively. CSAs often grow more unusual varieties of vegetables, including Swiss chard, mustard greens, and kale. To support their customers, they often provide recipes on how to incorporate those veggies into meals. Thus, eating locally, especially in the Midwest with its shorter growing season, translates into eating seasonally.

"It’s very satisfying," says Brussell. "There’s a special delight in eating food that is only available at a certain time of the year — like the first strawberries in June. When they’re available year round they’re not as special anymore." Brussell — and many nutritionists — contend that it’s healthier to eat seasonally. They note that root vegetables, onion, and garlic, so easily available in winter, have antiviral properties to help fight winter colds.

Chef Bayless proves that it is possible to eat seasonally and still eat locally year round. He offers locally grown food on his menu twelve months of the year. He serves parsnips, turnips, and beets in winter as well as frozen treats with the fruits of summer. There’s also the possibility of extending seasons with hydroponic, greenhouse lettuce, and hoop houses that allow vegetables to go in the ground earlier. Bayless was thrilled to serve vine ripe tomatoes as early as June, thanks to hoop houses.

Vast potential for extending the season exists with solar greenhouses. Roald Gunderson, an architect who worked on Biosphere II, has designed a sustainable solar greenhouse for cold climates. He grows vegetables year round in LaCrosse, Wisconsin. And he believes solar greenhouses are the answer to providing locally grown organic food year round.

"Sustainable, solar greenhouses have the potential to take us back to the human ecology we lost when we entered the industrial age," said Gunderson.

For now, Midwesterners still have to rely on Florida and California for their oranges, lemons, and limes. But now that it’s harvest time, other foods are plentiful, whether you live in the heart of Chicago or its fringe suburbs. Visit the markets — and consider joining a CSA next year; you’ll enjoy healthier, tastier food while helping to keep small farms alive. If you can’t or won’t do it for your conscience or your health, then do it for the sake of your tastebuds. "For great cooking to be possible," says Bayless, "it has to be supported by great local food."

Resources

Angelic Organics, 815-389-2746

Buff Rock Farm, 630-653-4351

Prairie Crossing Farm, 847-548-4030

For complete listings of CSAs, www.biodynamics.com

For complete listings of farmers markets, www.ams.usda.gov

Stuff: The Secret Lives of Everyday Things, by John C. Ryan is a book with a warning. Ryan warns readers that consuming too much of the book at one time can leave you feeling depressed and overwhelmed.

Even if we are devoted recyclers and make a conscious effort to reduce consumption, our daily existence is likely depleting more resources than we realize. It’s a real eye opener to learn how our consumption affects the environment and people in other parts of the world.

Ryan traces the route of common items, from coffee to newspapers to cotton. Following is a summary of Ryan’s account of French fries.

French fries, American’s most popular fast food item, are made almost exclusively from russet Burbank potatoes, grown in the Snake River valley of Idaho. They are watered repeatedly over the 150-day growing season with water from the Snake River.

The potato is treated with chemical fertilizers and pesticides. Some of those chemicals wash into the streams and some of those pesticides are toxic to fish and mammals. Nitrogen from the fertilizer leaches into the groundwater. In processing the potato, water is removed and this water contains more nitrogen. The wastewater is sprayed on a field outside the plant. Finally, the fries are frozen; frozen food requires ten times more energy to produce than fresh food.

Downriver, the Snake is bone dry most of the year. It has lost 80 percent of its original habitat; most of it replaced by reservoirs and irrigation canals. The sturgeon of the Snake, which can live for a hundred years and weigh up to 1,000 pounds, can no longer migrate to the sea and the dams have stopped 99 percent of the salmon from running up the river.

In the Tri-Cities area, where the Snake River meets the Columbia, nitrates in nearly half of the wells have been found to exceed standards of the Safe Drinking Water Act. At one point, several infants in the area developed methemoglobinemia, "blue baby syndrome," a deadly illness caused by nitrates in drinking water.

Other facts from Stuff:

• It takes twelve coffee trees a year to support the habit of a two-cup-a-day drinker. Native forest habitat in Colombia has been destroyed to increase production, by growing the trees in full sun.

• Ten percent of the world’s pesticides are used on conventional cotton.

• It takes about 700 gallons of water to produce a quarter-pound hamburger.

Ryan suggests that the reason we consume so much is that we are desperately trying to make up for what is lacking in our lives. And what is lacking is community. "Concentrating on friendship and community may make us happier while, almost without our noticing, it trims our consumption. Is it only a coincidence that conversation and conservation are spelled with the same letters?" asks Ryan.

Well, yes, it is. But it’s a nice coincidence. — CML

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