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Dietary Guidelines for Sustainability: Twelve Years Later
Dietary Guidelines for Sustainability: Twelve Years Later JOAN
DYE G U S S O W
Nutrition and Education, Teachers College, Columbia University, New York, New York 10027
This article is based on a speech presented in July 1998 at the SNE Annual Meeting in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
I N T R O D U C T I O N A N D HISTORY Almost 2 decades ago, a group of SNE members tried to broaden the concerns of nutrition educators by raising in this Society some of the issues that this paper will address. In 1981, for example, resolutions were offered to the membership encouraging increased production and use of local fruits and vegetables, establishment of policy guidelines to stem farmland loss, and the development by nutrition educators of model local diets that would minimize dependence on highly traveled foods. Over 900 members voted for the first two resolutions, more than 600 voted for the third. All three resolutions passed overwhelmingly. In light of that history, I want to begin by addressing a concern implied by the program's description of this session, namely, that for some people the term "sustainable diets" is "confusing and sometimes threateningVThatis not surprising. Over a decade ago, the newsletter of the University of California-Davis Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program published an abstract of Kate Clancy's and myJNE paper "Dietary Guidelines for Sustainability." Shortly afterward, the director received a letter that included the following comment: I f . . . your goal [is] to provide a soapbox to activists and protagonists, you have succeeded. . . Perhaps the authors are excellent nutritionists, but this article indicates that they are willing to subvert their professionality in order to promote their social cause. Such phrases as 'Consumers today need to make food choices . . . which contribute to the protection of our natural resources'. . . negate the objectivity that should be the hallmark of University publications. Others have attempted to decide what to allow the population to do, with tragic results.
This criticism raises several important issues. First, it assumes that those who question the status quo plan to dic-
Address for correspondence: Joan Dye Gussow, B.A., M.Ed., Ed.D., 563 Plermont Ave., Piermont, NY 10968. 01999 SOCIETY F O R N U T R I T I O N EDUCATION
tate what the population may eat."Others have attempted to decide what to allow the population to do," the letter writer says, "with tragic results." O n e wonders which attempts he's referring to, other than prohibition. Those of us promoting sustainable diets have no plans to take over.We simply believe we have an obligation, as scholars and activists, to speak the truth as we understand it. As nutrition educators, we urge people to make food choices that contribute to their health. Much of the time, they do not do what we suggest, but we go on urging anyway; yet, no sensible person accuses us of dictating what people can eat. Our Dietary Guidelines article suggested that "consumers need to make food choices that contribute to the protection of our natural resources." Consumers probably will not do that either, at least not right away. But some of us intend to go on urging it. What is the alternative: asking people to make food choices that do not contribute to the protection of our natural resources? Another alternative, to ignore the whole issue and hope it will go away, no longer seems rational. Focusing solely on human health, nutritionists have been urging people to eat more fish even as global fisheries are collapsing. Such professional indifference to impending food system catastrophes seems, at a minimum, shortsighted. Here is another sentence from that critical letter. The writer abbreviates our comment, "locally grown commodities . . . more favorable energy cost," and responds with indignation, "Come back with me to my childhood home, and produce these fruits and vegetables at a n y energy cost!" Then he huffs,"Objectivity? Professionalism?" O u r comment about energy and locally grown commodities was meant to imply, of course, that if the true cost of fossil energy used to cool and transport foods thousands of miles was taken into account, then we would be sensible to urge people to eat foods produced closer to home.The example we used in "Dietary Guidelines for Sustainability" was the five-calorie California strawberry flown to NewYork at a cost of 435 calories. It is not being suggested that we pass a law barring California strawberries from NewYork, although local strawber-
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ries taste better, and it would be rational not to waste all of that energy. But Kate Clancy and I were simply describing what dietary counselors might want to talk about if-$-we wanted to help people live within their planetary budget. The most fundamental question the letter raises, however, is at the heart of disagreements that have in the past driven people out of the Society for Nutrition Education: namely, how is it that we tend to accept as "objective" assertions that the status quo is just fine and denounce as "subjective" or "biased" statements that question the way things are? It is true that to talk about moving toward sustainable diets implies that our present diets are unsustainable. I believe the evidence is clear that they are, and are growing more so. Some people disagree. However dificult it may be, this means we need dialogue about such issues, not mutual disparagement. Let me now review briefly what Kate and I wrote 12 years ago as an introduction to explaining where recent events have led me. "Dietary Guidelines for Sustainability" noted that nutritionists' recommendations about diets had been based almost entirely on accepted relationships between food and human health. Kate and I suggested that our recommendations should also take account of the health of the planet. Groups and individuals outside the nutrition community, who had been talking for several years about the impact of personal food choices on the long-term stability of the food system, were using adjectives such as "just" or "responsible" to describe the food patterns they recommended. We attempted to avoid the implied moral superiority of those terms, using instead the term "sustainable" for the diets we were recommending.This seemed a way of linking what we were proposing with the term "sustainable" that was being used in many other settings. We suggested some obvious first steps toward sustainability: choosing foods that were minimally processed and minimally packaged, and when possible buying foods that were locally produced. Then, to translate this general advice into a familiar format, we showed how each of the Dietary Guidelines could be linked to ideas for making more sustainable dietary choices. I will not review that list today; you know the Guidelines and our sustainability suggestions are in print. Both of us are proud of the article, but in our own ways, each of us has gone beyond the ideas it presented.
G O I N G BEYOND T H E GUIDELINES I myself have become deeply committed to the importance of relocalizing diets, urging that people everywhere in the world depend more on foods produced in the regions where they live. O u r article did not put much emphasis on the idea of eating locally because at that time it seemed implausible to most people, and it seemed to go against "progress" as it was then understood, that is, year-round availability of almost any food one could imagine. It is encouraging to note that in the intervening years, the desirability of getting at least part of our diets from local farms has moved from being an odd
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idea pursued by a few eccentrics to an attractive alternative that many people are adopting. It took me some time to begin talking seriously about local diets. However, because I started with no clear idea of what people in northerly climates like my own might actually eat if they had to live on such a diet year round. O u r nation's founders did well mostly on what they grew, and hunted where they landed. But like others of my generation, I was raised on stories of famished pioneers at the end of a snowy winter, gagging down what remained at the bottom of the salt barrel and the root cellar. Since then, of course, we have developed food preservation methods beyond their imagining; yet, it was hard at first to imagine a northeast winter diet that anyone would agree to eat. For most eaters, it is still hard to imagine. Encouraging as it may be to see wider acceptance of the idea of eating locally, implementation of that idea is still as unlikely for most people as it was for me 20 years ago, and, at best, it is seasonal. Many shoppers happily go to farmers' markets for fresh local produce in the seasons when it is abundant and familiar. But anything beyond that-for example, trying to base one's yearround diet on what the farmers of one's region grow-still seems impossible, unlikely, and even unhealthy. Although it is none of these, the idea remains sufficiently surprising that I feel the need to spend some time emphasizing its importance. Only then can we begin the pleasant task of imagining what local diets might really look like.
W H Y LOCAL? Why do we need to encourage more local eating? Propaganda to the contrary notwithstanding, none of the environmental concerns that led us to write sustainability guidelines 12 years ago have been resolved; things have mostly gotten worse, which means that thinking seriously about the future of our food supply is an increasingly urgent task. Let me explain by describing only three of the destructive forces that threaten our long-term food security. First, the industrial agriculture that provides most of our food is not sustainable over the long term. Its vast expanses of single crops depend on successive generations of toxic chemicals to control weeds, insects, and diseases and on heavy use of soluble fertilizers that drain into our waters. Decades of regulation have not reduced our exposure or the environment's to these questionable agricultural chemicals. Pesticide use is greater today than it was 36 years ago when Rachel Carson alerted us to the dangers of these chemicals.' And the assertion that by 2000, 100% of U.S. soybeans will be genetically engineered to tolerate herbicides gives the lie to the claim that biotechnology will lead us to a nonchemical agriculture.' More recently, the need to find a "sink" for our "civilization's" waste products has led to the use of agriculture as a dump. Municipal sewage sludge-an uncharacterized mix of human and factory wastes with household chemicals,
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drainage from nuclear dumps, potentially dangerous organisms, and other unsavory materials-is regularly applied to f a r ~ n l a n dand , ~ it has recently been revealed that many of the so-called "inerts," the largest components of conventional fertilizers, are "recycled" toxic waste^.^.^ As for retaining our soil resources, we have no federal policy aimed at preserving our best farmland, and there is little government support for research that would help farmers adopt sustainable practices.A recent study found that less than one-tenth of 1%of 4500 agricultural research studies paid for by the U.S. Department ofAgriculture (USDA) were directly focused on sustainable organic systems or methods." The sustainability of the food system is also threatened by the "normal" working of "free trade." O f the foods that fill the produce sections of U.S. supermarkets, a large proportion is grown outside the nation's borders, often by citizens of nations whose populations suffer widespread hunger. Producing food from the soil takes land, labor, and capital. O f these, only capital is free to move anywhere in the world; so it keeps moving, to where land and labor are cheapest.There, poor farmers are minimally paid to grow foods that we rich folk can afford to eat, even if their producers cannot. N o concessions are made to environmentally sound farming practices that might add to product cost.These crops are exported to undersell the product of our own farmers, who then must extract the maximum production from their own soils just to survive. The system functions almost automatically as a farmer/environment destruction machine. The eating public represents a third threat to agricultural sustainability. For while poor people go hungry around the world (and in our own nation), comfortable U.S. consumers are directed to focus on fat or its substitutes and on free choice. Most of the foods consumers bring home or eat out have been severely modified by processing, often to reduce or eliminate calories that people elsewhere lack. As a consequence, most residents of the U.S. are completely delinked from food growing, often even from food itself. When I asked myself 20 years ago how these thoughtless eaters could be made more conscious of how their food was produced, I hit upon the idea of urging at least a partial relocalization of the food supply. Learning to pay attention to the sources of their food seemed the only way the eating public might come to recognize its own dependence on farms, farmers, and nature. The underlying imperative for eating locally is still to create awareness and thereby promote sustainability, not only of our food supply but of food supplies around the world. As some Asian and Latin American economies melt down, people in those nations have confronted the implications of growing crops for export and counting on importing our food to eat. When Indonesia, for example, could no longer afford to import American grain, it discovered it was running out of chickens, eggs, and bread.' Yet, with our immense economic power, as I indicated earlier, we can induce countries that are not feeding their own populations to grow luxury foods for our tables. But it -
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is morally questionable and politically risky to do so.As they should, consumers elsewhere are beginning to talk about eating locally. If we care about social justice, we should help them do that while we learn to feed ourselves, right here where we live.
F O O D SAFETY ISSUES Since I first hit upon local eating as a way of attracting people's attention to global food system problems, other, less abstract reasons for eating from close to home have emerged. The most dramatic and immediate of these is health.The protection of food from deadly microorganisms, a problem this technologically advanced nation was supposed to have resolved, has turned out to be harder than was thought in a system where poultry and livestock live and die in crowded and filthy conditions and perishable foods are kept on sale for weeks. There have been literally hundreds of disasters-many of them unpublicized-that involve serious illness and death: Salmonella-contaminated raspberries, E. coli-tainted strawberries, poisoned melons, toxic mesclun, and other inevitable contaminations, as perishable foods are shipped from south to north, from east to west, from poverty to wealth. Americans have sickened and sometimes died from Peruvian carrots, Mexican scallions,Thai coconut milk, Chinese canned mushrooms. Shortening the distance your food must travel may turn out to be the best way of ensuring that what you eat is not laden with the often deadly organisms that ride our perishable foods to see the world. But food that never leaves our shores can also be dangerous. In 1997,25 million pounds of ground beef prepared from cattle whose farmyard origins could not be traced beyond seven slaughterhouses and whose yecall the USDA would not have had the authority to order had to be voluntarily withdrawn from the marketplace for probable contamination with the E. coli that produces a deadly shigella toxin. The facts about the overall hazards of our modern food supply have been devastatingly laid out by Nicole Fox in a . ~ own solution to the dilemmas she book called S p ~ i l e dHer uncovers is to relocalize the food system-break it up into smaller, more local units.The reporter who called my attention to the book told me she thought Fox's solutions were unrealistic. Relocalization probably is unrealistic; it may also turn out to be the only real solution. The government's approach to the food safety crisis seems to include a good deal of victim blaming: householders are not careful enough in handling their food. So the federal government, in an attempt to "humanize" Salmonella and E. coli, has partnered with the meat industry to create BAC, a cute green character representing the bacteria that cause foodborne illness."The BAC character puts a face on foodborne bacteria which we believe will help Americans remember that they have the power to control bacteria in their home kitchens," commented the Department of Health and
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Human Services secretary Donna Shalala, introducing the "fight BAC" campaign.' But most of the deadly outbreaks have not occurred in home kitchens: 80% of food poisoning incidents take place outside the home. Meanwhile, efforts to improve meat inspection appear to be making slow progress. Implementation of the pesticide reform bill that passed last year is being strangled by industry lobbyists,"' and pesticide manufacturers are so desperate to avoid the implications of the law that they are testing pesticides on humans." A mere 700 FDA inspectors are responsible for guaranteeing the safety of all of the products manufactured in 53,000 domestic food processing plants as well as the hundreds of tons of produce carried across the Mexican border by more than 150,000 trucks every year.I2at3 Surely, one reason USDA got more than 275,000 comments on the proposed Organic regulation is becausewhen stories about hazards in the food supply began to scare folks-they saw organic as a safer alternative. It may not be possible to continue eating as heedlessly as we are and expect the government to keep us safe. Even if more foods are irradiated, some organisms (including the mysterious fragment that causes mad cow disease) are resistant to irradiation and more will become so if it is widely used; even if the FDA does, as promised, double the number of its inspectors (to 1500!), nature evolves, biology will win. Eating a raspberry from a country whose water you would not feel safe drinking really ought to seem risky, because it is.
HELPING LOCAL FARMERS SURVIVE The second trend that has made relocalization seem more urgent in the last decade is the catastrophic loss of farms, and farmers. We have been losing farms for years, especially the small and medium-sized farms that are the hearts of our rural communities.The government has given lip service, at best, to small farmers and their policies have helped the largest ones. "Get big or get out" has been the general message. In the 1970s and 1980s, it looked as if small farmers might save themselves by moving into organic production. Selling their products through Community Supported Agriculture (CSA), farmers' markets, restaurant-supported agriculture, and other innovative arrangements, they could avoid being forced to sell cheap into the wholesale market. Together with the "organic premium" farmers could get for their products, these marketing innovations enabled them to continue producing food even on land that was under severe development pressure. As interest in "organic" foods increased among the buying public, however, the organic "industry" began to grow rapidly enough to attract big money. The controversy that erupted over the USDA's disastrous proposed rule for regulating "organic" has tended to obscure the fact that even a well-crafted national standard would help very little in the struggle to save local farms. It is likely, instead, to draw even bigger players into organic production. California organic
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carrots regularly undersell local organic carrots in the northeast. And in California, Mexican organic produce may soon be underselling California organic. And so it goes. Last year, the NewYork Times ran a story about three farmers who were making it in New Jersey, the most urbanized state in the nation.The largest of these farmers commented that he thought there would be a shift away from farming in his state into wholesaling and retailing. H e plans to keep the things that attract tourists, his farmstand, his petting zoo, and his sheep shearing, but for the future, he said,"You've got to adapt. The retail end-what we call 'entertainment farming'-that's where all the growth will be."14 Entertainment farming: the foundation of society, the base of culture, the source of our food, the sine qua non of survival, the activity without which we will end up like King Midas, with nothing to eat but gold! Farming as entertainment! Neil Postman once wrote a book called Amusing Ourselves to Death. We are well on the way to doing so.This farmer plans to sell produce.Who is going to grow it for him? H e is one of the reasons why I urge people to buy local. If we want to keep open our option to buy food grown near where we live, we must buy from local farmerswhether or not they are organic. We have to save them first and reform them later. NewYork State dairy farmers are desperately trying to stay afloat and are drowning in a sea of low prices. Northwestern farmers cannot sell their crops because the Asian market has collapsed."The situation among northern plains wheat farmers is desperate enough to have made and desperate growthe front page of the Wall StreetJo~rnal,'~ ers blockaded the Canadian border to keep imported wheat out.I7 North Dakota farmers spent $110 an acre to produce wheat last year. When disease hit, quality and yield dropped off and the farmers got a return of $60 an acre, losing $50 on every acre of wheat they planted. Not surprisingly, there was a net loss of farmers that year. But farmers in North Dakota and elsewhere do not abandon farming because of a bad year. They are used to bad years. They quit farming before their equity is gone, before they have to leave the farm to the bank. O f course, we can always get our food from California or Florida, except that Florida was burning up from drought and fire in the summer of 1998, and California's agricultural heartland is losing to development one acre of farmland an hour.The nation as a whole loses 1 million acres of farmland a year.IRSince cropland per capita is being lost on the rest of the planet as well," poor countries are becoming increasingly dependent on importing basic foodstuffs.Yet food must be produced somewhere. There is no magic food machine just over the horizon; everyone cannot import food. Keeping local agriculture alive is an urgent reason for eating locally. ~
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EATING LOCALLY Which brings us to the good part.Assurning I have convinced you that foods from your neighborhood producers may be both safer and more sustainable, I want to begin looking seri-
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ously at what eating locally means, starting with the question people seem always to ask: what is local? It is pointless to get bogged down in such questions. Whether we talk about bioregions or neighborhoods or foodsheds, there is no theoretical answer to the question "what's local?"The pragmatic answer is to eat close to home, trying to get a significant proportion of your daily food from farms you could visit in a day if you wanted to. Does eating local mean eating nothing that is not locally grown? As a northeasterner, I personally eat oranges and use sustainably grown and fair-traded coffee and chocolate from sources that pay the growers a premium price. There is no reason to think that northerners cannot sometimes have a banana or a mango without destroying our planetary home. Unquestionably, we need to begin reasoning together about what "local" ought to mean in a given region. Because unless we are prepared to provide a year-around market for what local farmers can produce, most parts of the country will lose their farms and all of the benefits those farms bring: open space, summer farmstands with local produce, and, most important, really fresh food. And we cannot create a yearround market for local produce until we are willing to rethink our own diets and the diets we recommend to others. Is a local diet really more sustainable? We do not have research comparing the ecological impact of one diet over another, so we cannot prove that one dietary pattern is more environmentally advantageous than another in a given region. But generalities are possible. In any region, a plantcentered diet is more sustainable. Some argue that earth can support even its projected population on high meat diets, but the numbers of animals that would fit into sustainable food systems (and some animals are probably essential) are well below those we currently ask the earth to support. We also know that nonrenewable resources-especially energy-are best conserved when fruits and vegetables are consumed in the regions where they are grown.This clearly implies that the plants we choose to eat would need to be produced close to home in order to be most ecologically responsible. And that is where the educational problem arises, since consumers have become accustomed to tropical products throughout the year. In summer and fall, local fruits and vegetables, including tropical ones like peppers and tomatoes, are familiar, abundant, and varied enough to make living locally seem easy. But when the local summer/fall produce disappears, everything changes.Those times of year we have been taught to call "out of season" are seasons, of course; they are late winter and early spring, the time when supermarkets in my part of the country fill with imported summer produce. Now what do we do? Some people try to meet at least a part of the demand with biological creativity. For Christmas last year, a farmer friend of mine sent me a Federal Express package filled with the amazingly - . delicious mesclun and sweet slender carrots he grows commercially in an uheated greenhouse on the coast of Maine where the ground freezes 2 feet deep in winter. H e
sells the majority of his produce within driving distance of his home, and he insists that others can do the same if they are assured of consumer support. That is one way of dealing with the "limitations" of trying to eat locally in the northeast winter. Some of us, however, believe that really successful seasonal eating will require not just creative growing technologies but new thinking on many levels. First, there is the question of winter vegetables. If you have forgotten what is in season at any particular time of year, begin patronizing farmers' markets where local farmers come in to sell what they grow. Ask them what is available in the different seasons, learn how to cook those foods, and teach others to do the same. The Northeast Regional Food Guide20 developed by Jennifer Wilkins and Jennifer Bokaer-Smith at Cornell is a wonderful model to use in your own area as you begin the educational task of letting people know what their regions can provide. Many people's thinking about what winter meals might actually look like is currently narrowed by a variety of conventional assumptions. Recently,Jennifer Wilkins and I organized a workshop to look at some of these.21I worked on the iceberg lettuce and tomato salad problem because Jennifer had found that consumers who were asked how important it was for them to have certain fruits and vegetables fresh year round ranked lettuce and tomatoes among the most important. People needed reminding, I concluded, that they pay fancy restaurants good money for salads made of grains, beans, raw and cooked winter vegetables, and the like. Wilkins and I have also examined the nutritional adequacy of northeast diets using vegetarian and vegan diets for fall, winter, and spring (the hardest diets in the hardest months).These "restricted" diets were completely a d e q ~ a t e . ~ ' So, local diets are agriculturally feasible-if we in the northeast can do it, almost anyone can-and nutritionally adequate. But are they practical, and how can nutrition educators help?The simplest, most powerful idea I have encountered began with the Director of the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association and has now spread widely. It is this: urge people to spend just $10 a week on local food. That might mean going to real farmers' markets, the ones that do not sell bananas. O r it may mean becoming part of the community-supported agriculture movement by joining a CSA, and urging those you counsel to do the same. Maybe you will spend part of your $10 on plants; many farmers come to market now with seedlings, and maybe you will, like me, spend part of it on local bread or tofu. Having to spend $10 locally, year round, will help the local economy as well as local farmers. And it will educate consumers who will encounter unfamiliar produce as the seasons change.
T H E C O O K I N G CRISIS I have ignored until now what is perhaps the most difficult problem in thinking about dietary relocalization. How is all this wonderful local food going to get prepared? I need not
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tell you that we are faced with an epidemic of culinary ineptness and a universal sense of being time starved that is not entirely illusory. Let me address the time issue first.The data are very confusing. O n the one hand, researcher John Robinson uses time diaries to tell us that we have more free time now than we had 20 years ago.'Wn the other hand, economist Juliet Schor uses Bureau of Labor Statistics data to show that each of us works 163 more hours a year than we did in 1969.24Whatever the truth-and the issue remains unresolved-the perception of being rushed is almost universal.And marketers capitalize on that perception by telling women how rushed they are and urging them to use more prepared foods. In class last December, a single working mom, raising two young sons and going to school, effectively told me I was insane when I mentioned food preparation. But time diaries show that lots of people out there have substituted several extra hours ofTV (orweb surfing) for time they might once have spent making meals. I hold nutrition educators at least partially responsible for the abandonment of food preparation; we have sought to avoid being associated with "home economics," bought into the convenience food trend, and have not accepted it as our responsibility to teach the joys of quick and easy food preparation from scratch, using produce that is in season at various times of the year. To do that, however, we would have to believe that meal planning and food preparation were not life-denying chores but both empowering and better for the health of people and the planet. Cooperative neighborhood food preparation and the revival of small-scale local food processing can ease the transition of those who really do not have time to cook or do not know how. Nevertheless, I acknowledge that finding local foods in the "out of season" seasons is probably much easier than making local eating popular in defiance of the global food supply and feasible, given the disappearance of home cooking. If we want to take on this task (and obviously I think we should), we need now to begin the dialogues and do the research that Kate Clancy and I hoped our article would stimulate 12 years ago.
SUSTAINABLE F O R EVERYONE Finally, there is the issue of what really is sustainable. A colleague of mine runs a New York City-based organization called Just Food, a double entendre meaning both "It's only 'food"' and "food with justice." She works to link advocacy groups concerned with hunger and food access to groups in the city and state concerned with agriculture, urban gardens, teaching school children about food and the food system, and other long-term goals. The first thing she learned as she began to work with these groups was that they were very far apart. The foodgrowing folks were very concerned with overall reform of the agricultural system, with keeping peri-urban farms and farmers in business, with encouraging CSAs and local pro-
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cessing and distribution initiatives-in short, with creating an alternative food system.The hunger advocates were worried about feeding people now.They could not wait until the food system was reformed. In areas that were currently dependent on pricey and limited "mom and pop" stores, they wanted supermarkets carrying products of the existing food systemeven wasteful and unhealthy ones. They wanted more food throwaways from the excesses of our present system to use in feeding the poor.Yes, it would be good if food pantries and kitchens could have gardens next door to produce some of the food they used but, meanwhile, there are too many people to be fed and their numbers are going up, not down. At first, the hunger people did not even want to come to the coalition meetings. I cannot tell you that these issues have been resolved or that they will be any time soon, but the effort to create this coalition has made the reality clear. We will not have sustainable food systems merely by working to improve the environment or even by keeping local farmers in business with a two-tiered food system: healthy, fresh, local food for the well off and cheap industrialized food for the poor.Truly sustainable food systems will be those that provide good jobs for all of those working with food and good food for everyone who eats. N o more brutal, health-wrecking jobs gutting chicken or fish in dangerous plants in the south, no more dehumanizing, dangerous, speeded-up lines in slaughterhouses producing dirty meat that we are then urged to disinfect by irradiation, no more job-destroying consolidation in the food system, no more soup kitchens-you get the point. "My definition of sustainability has almost reversed," my colleague said recently. "I think a sustainable food system is one that provides good jobs, that is democratic, and that offers real choices."A really sustainable food system would be one that sustained communities and people, one based on democratic control. Saving the environment will occur, if it occurs at all, as a natural consequence of that. In short, if we want a democratic, sustainable food system, our bottom line has to be to keep small and medium-sized local farmers, processors, wholesalers, and retailers in business, providing good jobs for local people.And our reason cannot be simply because it is environmentally responsible-or because the quality is better. It is because these things sustain democracy and community and people. It is thrilling that we will be able to continue this dialogue at SNE's 1999 annual meeting about "Creating Healthy Communities." Some time ago, I read an interviewz5 with Susan Witt, director of the E.F. Schumacher Society in Massachusetts. Schumacher was the British economist who in 1973 wrote a book called Small is Beautijiul, which popularized the understanding that bigger was often not better. A local reporter asked Witt whether consumers have the power to make a difference in today's global environment. Her answer was that we do, and that we can begin by buying locally. She then goes on to say: "At the Schumacher Society, we say that our quality of life is dependent on the number of stories we know
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about the items we use in our daily life." She ends the interview by saying that "It will take imagination, courage, and a community ready to meet the initial inconveniences of a changing lifestyle if we are to build sustainable economies." We as nutrition educators can begin the task of building a sustainable economy by remembering always to ask the question about the food we eat: "Is this local?" And, if not, "can it be?"
12. Spake A. 0 is for outbreak. U.S. News and World Report 1997; November 24:70-80. 13. McGraw D. Maybe Jell-0 wasn't so bad. U.S. News &World Report 1997;November 24534. 14. Rohde D. Niche farming in NewJersey: is it diversity or gimmickry? NewYorkTimes May 17,1998,A6. 15. Verhovek SH. Northwest farms and industry pinched by Asia's fiscal criSIS.NewYork Times October 1, 1998,Al,A20. 16. Kilman S. O n the Northern Plains, free-market farming yields pain, upheaval. Wall Street Journal May 5, 1998, 1.
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3 1,10-11 and July 1998 4 1,s-9. 5. Hileman B. Fertilizer concerns prompt new standards. C & E News 1998; May 11:24-5. 6. Llpson M. Searching for the "0-Word." Santa Cruz, CA: Organic Farming Research Foundation, 1997. 7. Mydans S. For want of feed, Indonesia is losing its chickens. NewYork Times April 3 , 1998,A4. 8. Fox N. Spoiled. NewYork: Basic Books, 1997. 9. Anon. Groups organize to "Fight BAC,"improve food safety. CNI Nutr Week 1998;XXVI1:42:6. 10. Anon. Chemical industry attack wilts child health plan. CNI NutrWeek 1998;XXVIII:14:2. 11. Stecklow S. New food-quality act has pesticide makers doing human testing. Wall Street Journal September 9, 1998, A1, A10.
21. How to (really) eat locally-from
dogma to diet, 1998.Workshoppresented
at the Joint Annual Meetlng of Association for the Society of Food Science and Argiculture Food and HumanValues, San Francisco,June 1998. 22. Wilkins JL, Gussow JD. Regional dietary guidance: is the northeast nutritionally complete? In: Lockeretz W, ed. Agricultural production and nutrit~on.Proceedings of an International Conference, Boston, March 19-21, 1997. Medford, MA:Tufts University School of Nntrition Sc~enceand Policy, September 1997. 23. Robinson JP, Godbey G.Time for 1ife.Thr surprising ways Americans use their time. University Park, PA:The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997. 24. Schor J.The overworked American. New York: Basic Books, 1991. 25. Thinking locally in a global economy. Interview with SusanWitt. Berkshire Trade 81 Commerce Monthly 1997;1:7.
DYE G U S S O W
Nutrition and Education, Teachers College, Columbia University, New York, New York 10027
This article is based on a speech presented in July 1998 at the SNE Annual Meeting in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
I N T R O D U C T I O N A N D HISTORY Almost 2 decades ago, a group of SNE members tried to broaden the concerns of nutrition educators by raising in this Society some of the issues that this paper will address. In 1981, for example, resolutions were offered to the membership encouraging increased production and use of local fruits and vegetables, establishment of policy guidelines to stem farmland loss, and the development by nutrition educators of model local diets that would minimize dependence on highly traveled foods. Over 900 members voted for the first two resolutions, more than 600 voted for the third. All three resolutions passed overwhelmingly. In light of that history, I want to begin by addressing a concern implied by the program's description of this session, namely, that for some people the term "sustainable diets" is "confusing and sometimes threateningVThatis not surprising. Over a decade ago, the newsletter of the University of California-Davis Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program published an abstract of Kate Clancy's and myJNE paper "Dietary Guidelines for Sustainability." Shortly afterward, the director received a letter that included the following comment: I f . . . your goal [is] to provide a soapbox to activists and protagonists, you have succeeded. . . Perhaps the authors are excellent nutritionists, but this article indicates that they are willing to subvert their professionality in order to promote their social cause. Such phrases as 'Consumers today need to make food choices . . . which contribute to the protection of our natural resources'. . . negate the objectivity that should be the hallmark of University publications. Others have attempted to decide what to allow the population to do, with tragic results.
This criticism raises several important issues. First, it assumes that those who question the status quo plan to dic-
Address for correspondence: Joan Dye Gussow, B.A., M.Ed., Ed.D., 563 Plermont Ave., Piermont, NY 10968. 01999 SOCIETY F O R N U T R I T I O N EDUCATION
tate what the population may eat."Others have attempted to decide what to allow the population to do," the letter writer says, "with tragic results." O n e wonders which attempts he's referring to, other than prohibition. Those of us promoting sustainable diets have no plans to take over.We simply believe we have an obligation, as scholars and activists, to speak the truth as we understand it. As nutrition educators, we urge people to make food choices that contribute to their health. Much of the time, they do not do what we suggest, but we go on urging anyway; yet, no sensible person accuses us of dictating what people can eat. Our Dietary Guidelines article suggested that "consumers need to make food choices that contribute to the protection of our natural resources." Consumers probably will not do that either, at least not right away. But some of us intend to go on urging it. What is the alternative: asking people to make food choices that do not contribute to the protection of our natural resources? Another alternative, to ignore the whole issue and hope it will go away, no longer seems rational. Focusing solely on human health, nutritionists have been urging people to eat more fish even as global fisheries are collapsing. Such professional indifference to impending food system catastrophes seems, at a minimum, shortsighted. Here is another sentence from that critical letter. The writer abbreviates our comment, "locally grown commodities . . . more favorable energy cost," and responds with indignation, "Come back with me to my childhood home, and produce these fruits and vegetables at a n y energy cost!" Then he huffs,"Objectivity? Professionalism?" O u r comment about energy and locally grown commodities was meant to imply, of course, that if the true cost of fossil energy used to cool and transport foods thousands of miles was taken into account, then we would be sensible to urge people to eat foods produced closer to home.The example we used in "Dietary Guidelines for Sustainability" was the five-calorie California strawberry flown to NewYork at a cost of 435 calories. It is not being suggested that we pass a law barring California strawberries from NewYork, although local strawber-
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ries taste better, and it would be rational not to waste all of that energy. But Kate Clancy and I were simply describing what dietary counselors might want to talk about if-$-we wanted to help people live within their planetary budget. The most fundamental question the letter raises, however, is at the heart of disagreements that have in the past driven people out of the Society for Nutrition Education: namely, how is it that we tend to accept as "objective" assertions that the status quo is just fine and denounce as "subjective" or "biased" statements that question the way things are? It is true that to talk about moving toward sustainable diets implies that our present diets are unsustainable. I believe the evidence is clear that they are, and are growing more so. Some people disagree. However dificult it may be, this means we need dialogue about such issues, not mutual disparagement. Let me now review briefly what Kate and I wrote 12 years ago as an introduction to explaining where recent events have led me. "Dietary Guidelines for Sustainability" noted that nutritionists' recommendations about diets had been based almost entirely on accepted relationships between food and human health. Kate and I suggested that our recommendations should also take account of the health of the planet. Groups and individuals outside the nutrition community, who had been talking for several years about the impact of personal food choices on the long-term stability of the food system, were using adjectives such as "just" or "responsible" to describe the food patterns they recommended. We attempted to avoid the implied moral superiority of those terms, using instead the term "sustainable" for the diets we were recommending.This seemed a way of linking what we were proposing with the term "sustainable" that was being used in many other settings. We suggested some obvious first steps toward sustainability: choosing foods that were minimally processed and minimally packaged, and when possible buying foods that were locally produced. Then, to translate this general advice into a familiar format, we showed how each of the Dietary Guidelines could be linked to ideas for making more sustainable dietary choices. I will not review that list today; you know the Guidelines and our sustainability suggestions are in print. Both of us are proud of the article, but in our own ways, each of us has gone beyond the ideas it presented.
G O I N G BEYOND T H E GUIDELINES I myself have become deeply committed to the importance of relocalizing diets, urging that people everywhere in the world depend more on foods produced in the regions where they live. O u r article did not put much emphasis on the idea of eating locally because at that time it seemed implausible to most people, and it seemed to go against "progress" as it was then understood, that is, year-round availability of almost any food one could imagine. It is encouraging to note that in the intervening years, the desirability of getting at least part of our diets from local farms has moved from being an odd
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idea pursued by a few eccentrics to an attractive alternative that many people are adopting. It took me some time to begin talking seriously about local diets. However, because I started with no clear idea of what people in northerly climates like my own might actually eat if they had to live on such a diet year round. O u r nation's founders did well mostly on what they grew, and hunted where they landed. But like others of my generation, I was raised on stories of famished pioneers at the end of a snowy winter, gagging down what remained at the bottom of the salt barrel and the root cellar. Since then, of course, we have developed food preservation methods beyond their imagining; yet, it was hard at first to imagine a northeast winter diet that anyone would agree to eat. For most eaters, it is still hard to imagine. Encouraging as it may be to see wider acceptance of the idea of eating locally, implementation of that idea is still as unlikely for most people as it was for me 20 years ago, and, at best, it is seasonal. Many shoppers happily go to farmers' markets for fresh local produce in the seasons when it is abundant and familiar. But anything beyond that-for example, trying to base one's yearround diet on what the farmers of one's region grow-still seems impossible, unlikely, and even unhealthy. Although it is none of these, the idea remains sufficiently surprising that I feel the need to spend some time emphasizing its importance. Only then can we begin the pleasant task of imagining what local diets might really look like.
W H Y LOCAL? Why do we need to encourage more local eating? Propaganda to the contrary notwithstanding, none of the environmental concerns that led us to write sustainability guidelines 12 years ago have been resolved; things have mostly gotten worse, which means that thinking seriously about the future of our food supply is an increasingly urgent task. Let me explain by describing only three of the destructive forces that threaten our long-term food security. First, the industrial agriculture that provides most of our food is not sustainable over the long term. Its vast expanses of single crops depend on successive generations of toxic chemicals to control weeds, insects, and diseases and on heavy use of soluble fertilizers that drain into our waters. Decades of regulation have not reduced our exposure or the environment's to these questionable agricultural chemicals. Pesticide use is greater today than it was 36 years ago when Rachel Carson alerted us to the dangers of these chemicals.' And the assertion that by 2000, 100% of U.S. soybeans will be genetically engineered to tolerate herbicides gives the lie to the claim that biotechnology will lead us to a nonchemical agriculture.' More recently, the need to find a "sink" for our "civilization's" waste products has led to the use of agriculture as a dump. Municipal sewage sludge-an uncharacterized mix of human and factory wastes with household chemicals,
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drainage from nuclear dumps, potentially dangerous organisms, and other unsavory materials-is regularly applied to f a r ~ n l a n dand , ~ it has recently been revealed that many of the so-called "inerts," the largest components of conventional fertilizers, are "recycled" toxic waste^.^.^ As for retaining our soil resources, we have no federal policy aimed at preserving our best farmland, and there is little government support for research that would help farmers adopt sustainable practices.A recent study found that less than one-tenth of 1%of 4500 agricultural research studies paid for by the U.S. Department ofAgriculture (USDA) were directly focused on sustainable organic systems or methods." The sustainability of the food system is also threatened by the "normal" working of "free trade." O f the foods that fill the produce sections of U.S. supermarkets, a large proportion is grown outside the nation's borders, often by citizens of nations whose populations suffer widespread hunger. Producing food from the soil takes land, labor, and capital. O f these, only capital is free to move anywhere in the world; so it keeps moving, to where land and labor are cheapest.There, poor farmers are minimally paid to grow foods that we rich folk can afford to eat, even if their producers cannot. N o concessions are made to environmentally sound farming practices that might add to product cost.These crops are exported to undersell the product of our own farmers, who then must extract the maximum production from their own soils just to survive. The system functions almost automatically as a farmer/environment destruction machine. The eating public represents a third threat to agricultural sustainability. For while poor people go hungry around the world (and in our own nation), comfortable U.S. consumers are directed to focus on fat or its substitutes and on free choice. Most of the foods consumers bring home or eat out have been severely modified by processing, often to reduce or eliminate calories that people elsewhere lack. As a consequence, most residents of the U.S. are completely delinked from food growing, often even from food itself. When I asked myself 20 years ago how these thoughtless eaters could be made more conscious of how their food was produced, I hit upon the idea of urging at least a partial relocalization of the food supply. Learning to pay attention to the sources of their food seemed the only way the eating public might come to recognize its own dependence on farms, farmers, and nature. The underlying imperative for eating locally is still to create awareness and thereby promote sustainability, not only of our food supply but of food supplies around the world. As some Asian and Latin American economies melt down, people in those nations have confronted the implications of growing crops for export and counting on importing our food to eat. When Indonesia, for example, could no longer afford to import American grain, it discovered it was running out of chickens, eggs, and bread.' Yet, with our immense economic power, as I indicated earlier, we can induce countries that are not feeding their own populations to grow luxury foods for our tables. But it -
-
is morally questionable and politically risky to do so.As they should, consumers elsewhere are beginning to talk about eating locally. If we care about social justice, we should help them do that while we learn to feed ourselves, right here where we live.
F O O D SAFETY ISSUES Since I first hit upon local eating as a way of attracting people's attention to global food system problems, other, less abstract reasons for eating from close to home have emerged. The most dramatic and immediate of these is health.The protection of food from deadly microorganisms, a problem this technologically advanced nation was supposed to have resolved, has turned out to be harder than was thought in a system where poultry and livestock live and die in crowded and filthy conditions and perishable foods are kept on sale for weeks. There have been literally hundreds of disasters-many of them unpublicized-that involve serious illness and death: Salmonella-contaminated raspberries, E. coli-tainted strawberries, poisoned melons, toxic mesclun, and other inevitable contaminations, as perishable foods are shipped from south to north, from east to west, from poverty to wealth. Americans have sickened and sometimes died from Peruvian carrots, Mexican scallions,Thai coconut milk, Chinese canned mushrooms. Shortening the distance your food must travel may turn out to be the best way of ensuring that what you eat is not laden with the often deadly organisms that ride our perishable foods to see the world. But food that never leaves our shores can also be dangerous. In 1997,25 million pounds of ground beef prepared from cattle whose farmyard origins could not be traced beyond seven slaughterhouses and whose yecall the USDA would not have had the authority to order had to be voluntarily withdrawn from the marketplace for probable contamination with the E. coli that produces a deadly shigella toxin. The facts about the overall hazards of our modern food supply have been devastatingly laid out by Nicole Fox in a . ~ own solution to the dilemmas she book called S p ~ i l e dHer uncovers is to relocalize the food system-break it up into smaller, more local units.The reporter who called my attention to the book told me she thought Fox's solutions were unrealistic. Relocalization probably is unrealistic; it may also turn out to be the only real solution. The government's approach to the food safety crisis seems to include a good deal of victim blaming: householders are not careful enough in handling their food. So the federal government, in an attempt to "humanize" Salmonella and E. coli, has partnered with the meat industry to create BAC, a cute green character representing the bacteria that cause foodborne illness."The BAC character puts a face on foodborne bacteria which we believe will help Americans remember that they have the power to control bacteria in their home kitchens," commented the Department of Health and
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Human Services secretary Donna Shalala, introducing the "fight BAC" campaign.' But most of the deadly outbreaks have not occurred in home kitchens: 80% of food poisoning incidents take place outside the home. Meanwhile, efforts to improve meat inspection appear to be making slow progress. Implementation of the pesticide reform bill that passed last year is being strangled by industry lobbyists,"' and pesticide manufacturers are so desperate to avoid the implications of the law that they are testing pesticides on humans." A mere 700 FDA inspectors are responsible for guaranteeing the safety of all of the products manufactured in 53,000 domestic food processing plants as well as the hundreds of tons of produce carried across the Mexican border by more than 150,000 trucks every year.I2at3 Surely, one reason USDA got more than 275,000 comments on the proposed Organic regulation is becausewhen stories about hazards in the food supply began to scare folks-they saw organic as a safer alternative. It may not be possible to continue eating as heedlessly as we are and expect the government to keep us safe. Even if more foods are irradiated, some organisms (including the mysterious fragment that causes mad cow disease) are resistant to irradiation and more will become so if it is widely used; even if the FDA does, as promised, double the number of its inspectors (to 1500!), nature evolves, biology will win. Eating a raspberry from a country whose water you would not feel safe drinking really ought to seem risky, because it is.
HELPING LOCAL FARMERS SURVIVE The second trend that has made relocalization seem more urgent in the last decade is the catastrophic loss of farms, and farmers. We have been losing farms for years, especially the small and medium-sized farms that are the hearts of our rural communities.The government has given lip service, at best, to small farmers and their policies have helped the largest ones. "Get big or get out" has been the general message. In the 1970s and 1980s, it looked as if small farmers might save themselves by moving into organic production. Selling their products through Community Supported Agriculture (CSA), farmers' markets, restaurant-supported agriculture, and other innovative arrangements, they could avoid being forced to sell cheap into the wholesale market. Together with the "organic premium" farmers could get for their products, these marketing innovations enabled them to continue producing food even on land that was under severe development pressure. As interest in "organic" foods increased among the buying public, however, the organic "industry" began to grow rapidly enough to attract big money. The controversy that erupted over the USDA's disastrous proposed rule for regulating "organic" has tended to obscure the fact that even a well-crafted national standard would help very little in the struggle to save local farms. It is likely, instead, to draw even bigger players into organic production. California organic
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carrots regularly undersell local organic carrots in the northeast. And in California, Mexican organic produce may soon be underselling California organic. And so it goes. Last year, the NewYork Times ran a story about three farmers who were making it in New Jersey, the most urbanized state in the nation.The largest of these farmers commented that he thought there would be a shift away from farming in his state into wholesaling and retailing. H e plans to keep the things that attract tourists, his farmstand, his petting zoo, and his sheep shearing, but for the future, he said,"You've got to adapt. The retail end-what we call 'entertainment farming'-that's where all the growth will be."14 Entertainment farming: the foundation of society, the base of culture, the source of our food, the sine qua non of survival, the activity without which we will end up like King Midas, with nothing to eat but gold! Farming as entertainment! Neil Postman once wrote a book called Amusing Ourselves to Death. We are well on the way to doing so.This farmer plans to sell produce.Who is going to grow it for him? H e is one of the reasons why I urge people to buy local. If we want to keep open our option to buy food grown near where we live, we must buy from local farmerswhether or not they are organic. We have to save them first and reform them later. NewYork State dairy farmers are desperately trying to stay afloat and are drowning in a sea of low prices. Northwestern farmers cannot sell their crops because the Asian market has collapsed."The situation among northern plains wheat farmers is desperate enough to have made and desperate growthe front page of the Wall StreetJo~rnal,'~ ers blockaded the Canadian border to keep imported wheat out.I7 North Dakota farmers spent $110 an acre to produce wheat last year. When disease hit, quality and yield dropped off and the farmers got a return of $60 an acre, losing $50 on every acre of wheat they planted. Not surprisingly, there was a net loss of farmers that year. But farmers in North Dakota and elsewhere do not abandon farming because of a bad year. They are used to bad years. They quit farming before their equity is gone, before they have to leave the farm to the bank. O f course, we can always get our food from California or Florida, except that Florida was burning up from drought and fire in the summer of 1998, and California's agricultural heartland is losing to development one acre of farmland an hour.The nation as a whole loses 1 million acres of farmland a year.IRSince cropland per capita is being lost on the rest of the planet as well," poor countries are becoming increasingly dependent on importing basic foodstuffs.Yet food must be produced somewhere. There is no magic food machine just over the horizon; everyone cannot import food. Keeping local agriculture alive is an urgent reason for eating locally. ~
~
EATING LOCALLY Which brings us to the good part.Assurning I have convinced you that foods from your neighborhood producers may be both safer and more sustainable, I want to begin looking seri-
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ously at what eating locally means, starting with the question people seem always to ask: what is local? It is pointless to get bogged down in such questions. Whether we talk about bioregions or neighborhoods or foodsheds, there is no theoretical answer to the question "what's local?"The pragmatic answer is to eat close to home, trying to get a significant proportion of your daily food from farms you could visit in a day if you wanted to. Does eating local mean eating nothing that is not locally grown? As a northeasterner, I personally eat oranges and use sustainably grown and fair-traded coffee and chocolate from sources that pay the growers a premium price. There is no reason to think that northerners cannot sometimes have a banana or a mango without destroying our planetary home. Unquestionably, we need to begin reasoning together about what "local" ought to mean in a given region. Because unless we are prepared to provide a year-around market for what local farmers can produce, most parts of the country will lose their farms and all of the benefits those farms bring: open space, summer farmstands with local produce, and, most important, really fresh food. And we cannot create a yearround market for local produce until we are willing to rethink our own diets and the diets we recommend to others. Is a local diet really more sustainable? We do not have research comparing the ecological impact of one diet over another, so we cannot prove that one dietary pattern is more environmentally advantageous than another in a given region. But generalities are possible. In any region, a plantcentered diet is more sustainable. Some argue that earth can support even its projected population on high meat diets, but the numbers of animals that would fit into sustainable food systems (and some animals are probably essential) are well below those we currently ask the earth to support. We also know that nonrenewable resources-especially energy-are best conserved when fruits and vegetables are consumed in the regions where they are grown.This clearly implies that the plants we choose to eat would need to be produced close to home in order to be most ecologically responsible. And that is where the educational problem arises, since consumers have become accustomed to tropical products throughout the year. In summer and fall, local fruits and vegetables, including tropical ones like peppers and tomatoes, are familiar, abundant, and varied enough to make living locally seem easy. But when the local summer/fall produce disappears, everything changes.Those times of year we have been taught to call "out of season" are seasons, of course; they are late winter and early spring, the time when supermarkets in my part of the country fill with imported summer produce. Now what do we do? Some people try to meet at least a part of the demand with biological creativity. For Christmas last year, a farmer friend of mine sent me a Federal Express package filled with the amazingly - . delicious mesclun and sweet slender carrots he grows commercially in an uheated greenhouse on the coast of Maine where the ground freezes 2 feet deep in winter. H e
sells the majority of his produce within driving distance of his home, and he insists that others can do the same if they are assured of consumer support. That is one way of dealing with the "limitations" of trying to eat locally in the northeast winter. Some of us, however, believe that really successful seasonal eating will require not just creative growing technologies but new thinking on many levels. First, there is the question of winter vegetables. If you have forgotten what is in season at any particular time of year, begin patronizing farmers' markets where local farmers come in to sell what they grow. Ask them what is available in the different seasons, learn how to cook those foods, and teach others to do the same. The Northeast Regional Food Guide20 developed by Jennifer Wilkins and Jennifer Bokaer-Smith at Cornell is a wonderful model to use in your own area as you begin the educational task of letting people know what their regions can provide. Many people's thinking about what winter meals might actually look like is currently narrowed by a variety of conventional assumptions. Recently,Jennifer Wilkins and I organized a workshop to look at some of these.21I worked on the iceberg lettuce and tomato salad problem because Jennifer had found that consumers who were asked how important it was for them to have certain fruits and vegetables fresh year round ranked lettuce and tomatoes among the most important. People needed reminding, I concluded, that they pay fancy restaurants good money for salads made of grains, beans, raw and cooked winter vegetables, and the like. Wilkins and I have also examined the nutritional adequacy of northeast diets using vegetarian and vegan diets for fall, winter, and spring (the hardest diets in the hardest months).These "restricted" diets were completely a d e q ~ a t e . ~ ' So, local diets are agriculturally feasible-if we in the northeast can do it, almost anyone can-and nutritionally adequate. But are they practical, and how can nutrition educators help?The simplest, most powerful idea I have encountered began with the Director of the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association and has now spread widely. It is this: urge people to spend just $10 a week on local food. That might mean going to real farmers' markets, the ones that do not sell bananas. O r it may mean becoming part of the community-supported agriculture movement by joining a CSA, and urging those you counsel to do the same. Maybe you will spend part of your $10 on plants; many farmers come to market now with seedlings, and maybe you will, like me, spend part of it on local bread or tofu. Having to spend $10 locally, year round, will help the local economy as well as local farmers. And it will educate consumers who will encounter unfamiliar produce as the seasons change.
T H E C O O K I N G CRISIS I have ignored until now what is perhaps the most difficult problem in thinking about dietary relocalization. How is all this wonderful local food going to get prepared? I need not
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tell you that we are faced with an epidemic of culinary ineptness and a universal sense of being time starved that is not entirely illusory. Let me address the time issue first.The data are very confusing. O n the one hand, researcher John Robinson uses time diaries to tell us that we have more free time now than we had 20 years ago.'Wn the other hand, economist Juliet Schor uses Bureau of Labor Statistics data to show that each of us works 163 more hours a year than we did in 1969.24Whatever the truth-and the issue remains unresolved-the perception of being rushed is almost universal.And marketers capitalize on that perception by telling women how rushed they are and urging them to use more prepared foods. In class last December, a single working mom, raising two young sons and going to school, effectively told me I was insane when I mentioned food preparation. But time diaries show that lots of people out there have substituted several extra hours ofTV (orweb surfing) for time they might once have spent making meals. I hold nutrition educators at least partially responsible for the abandonment of food preparation; we have sought to avoid being associated with "home economics," bought into the convenience food trend, and have not accepted it as our responsibility to teach the joys of quick and easy food preparation from scratch, using produce that is in season at various times of the year. To do that, however, we would have to believe that meal planning and food preparation were not life-denying chores but both empowering and better for the health of people and the planet. Cooperative neighborhood food preparation and the revival of small-scale local food processing can ease the transition of those who really do not have time to cook or do not know how. Nevertheless, I acknowledge that finding local foods in the "out of season" seasons is probably much easier than making local eating popular in defiance of the global food supply and feasible, given the disappearance of home cooking. If we want to take on this task (and obviously I think we should), we need now to begin the dialogues and do the research that Kate Clancy and I hoped our article would stimulate 12 years ago.
SUSTAINABLE F O R EVERYONE Finally, there is the issue of what really is sustainable. A colleague of mine runs a New York City-based organization called Just Food, a double entendre meaning both "It's only 'food"' and "food with justice." She works to link advocacy groups concerned with hunger and food access to groups in the city and state concerned with agriculture, urban gardens, teaching school children about food and the food system, and other long-term goals. The first thing she learned as she began to work with these groups was that they were very far apart. The foodgrowing folks were very concerned with overall reform of the agricultural system, with keeping peri-urban farms and farmers in business, with encouraging CSAs and local pro-
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cessing and distribution initiatives-in short, with creating an alternative food system.The hunger advocates were worried about feeding people now.They could not wait until the food system was reformed. In areas that were currently dependent on pricey and limited "mom and pop" stores, they wanted supermarkets carrying products of the existing food systemeven wasteful and unhealthy ones. They wanted more food throwaways from the excesses of our present system to use in feeding the poor.Yes, it would be good if food pantries and kitchens could have gardens next door to produce some of the food they used but, meanwhile, there are too many people to be fed and their numbers are going up, not down. At first, the hunger people did not even want to come to the coalition meetings. I cannot tell you that these issues have been resolved or that they will be any time soon, but the effort to create this coalition has made the reality clear. We will not have sustainable food systems merely by working to improve the environment or even by keeping local farmers in business with a two-tiered food system: healthy, fresh, local food for the well off and cheap industrialized food for the poor.Truly sustainable food systems will be those that provide good jobs for all of those working with food and good food for everyone who eats. N o more brutal, health-wrecking jobs gutting chicken or fish in dangerous plants in the south, no more dehumanizing, dangerous, speeded-up lines in slaughterhouses producing dirty meat that we are then urged to disinfect by irradiation, no more job-destroying consolidation in the food system, no more soup kitchens-you get the point. "My definition of sustainability has almost reversed," my colleague said recently. "I think a sustainable food system is one that provides good jobs, that is democratic, and that offers real choices."A really sustainable food system would be one that sustained communities and people, one based on democratic control. Saving the environment will occur, if it occurs at all, as a natural consequence of that. In short, if we want a democratic, sustainable food system, our bottom line has to be to keep small and medium-sized local farmers, processors, wholesalers, and retailers in business, providing good jobs for local people.And our reason cannot be simply because it is environmentally responsible-or because the quality is better. It is because these things sustain democracy and community and people. It is thrilling that we will be able to continue this dialogue at SNE's 1999 annual meeting about "Creating Healthy Communities." Some time ago, I read an interviewz5 with Susan Witt, director of the E.F. Schumacher Society in Massachusetts. Schumacher was the British economist who in 1973 wrote a book called Small is Beautijiul, which popularized the understanding that bigger was often not better. A local reporter asked Witt whether consumers have the power to make a difference in today's global environment. Her answer was that we do, and that we can begin by buying locally. She then goes on to say: "At the Schumacher Society, we say that our quality of life is dependent on the number of stories we know
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about the items we use in our daily life." She ends the interview by saying that "It will take imagination, courage, and a community ready to meet the initial inconveniences of a changing lifestyle if we are to build sustainable economies." We as nutrition educators can begin the task of building a sustainable economy by remembering always to ask the question about the food we eat: "Is this local?" And, if not, "can it be?"
12. Spake A. 0 is for outbreak. U.S. News and World Report 1997; November 24:70-80. 13. McGraw D. Maybe Jell-0 wasn't so bad. U.S. News &World Report 1997;November 24534. 14. Rohde D. Niche farming in NewJersey: is it diversity or gimmickry? NewYorkTimes May 17,1998,A6. 15. Verhovek SH. Northwest farms and industry pinched by Asia's fiscal criSIS.NewYork Times October 1, 1998,Al,A20. 16. Kilman S. O n the Northern Plains, free-market farming yields pain, upheaval. Wall Street Journal May 5, 1998, 1.
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