Eat Here—Local Food and You

Eat Here (W. W. Norton, $13.95), Brian Halweil's fascinating new book about the growing worldwide local food movement, returns a certain lost dignity to buying and eating produce and meat, as well as farming one's own pea patch. Halweil, a senior researcher at the Worldwatch Institute, sees local food in terms of a web which sustains and strengthens communities and countries alike. Commenting on a farmer's market in Centerville, Nebraska, his eye lands on the corncob jelly from nearby Cushton, the egg pasta from Henderson, and Uncle Slappy's BBQ sauce from Hastings, all Nebraska towns. It is a point Halweil makes frequently and well, that local farmers wherever they may be can grow a huge range of mouthwatering and exotic foods—from peaches and quince by Lake Michigan to buffalo-milk mozzarella in Italy. But Centerville is, in fact, the only one of its kind so far in the U.S.: a supermarket that buys only from farmers, and mostly local ones.

Instead of Centervilles, America has seen the steady concentration of farming, food distribution, and marketing into the hands of six or seven companies as farmers are driven off the land in the name of efficient production. In an example of the extremes our food system has pushed us to, Halweil notes that Hawaii imports more than 90 percent of its food even as 85 percent of the state's farmland lies unused. It is this reliance on imports and centralized delivery that led to outgoing Secretary of Health and Human Services, Tommy Thompson, to warn last December, "For the life of me, I cannot understand why the terrorists have not attacked our food supply, because it is so easy to do." Of course, if small farms and agricultural land continue to vanish at the current rate, replaced by housing developments and monocrops vulnerable to the kinds of disease that brought about Ireland's potato famine, we may do more harm to ourselves than terrorists could. Meanwhile, the USDA reported that last June and August America imported more food than we exported, for the first time since 1986.

Farmers may be something of an endangered species, these days, as Eat Here claims, but Halweil has found that in cities around the US, people are reviving old pleasures in working the land, sharing fresh produce, and exploring flavors absent from supermarket shelves. Farmer's markets here have grown from 300 in the mid-seventies to over 3,100 today. Seeing that Hawaiian farmers raised cattle to be shipped to California before returning to the islands as meat, a former America Online executive has chosen to graze cattle, pigs, sheep and chicken on the same land in rotation without importing feed or shipping. The farmer, David Cole, points out to Halweil that taking land away from export crops like pineapple and raising organic meat brings into play Hawaiian concepts of ahupu'a (self-sufficient communities) and malamai'aina (care for the land), effecting cultural as well as agricultural revival.

Elsewhere in the world, Halweil notes that more than half St. Petersburgs 5 million residents grow food and that almost 10 percent of Greater London is farmland which includes a 1,000 beekeepers. Yet among his many fascinating examples, Cuba stands out. In the early nineties, the US embargo and the demise of the USSR deprived the country of agrochemicals, petroleum, farm machinery and food imports. Not only couldn't farmers grow as much food, what food they produced couldn't be trucked for lack for fuel. Cuba's government responded by helping people set up their own gardens, with eye-widening success: Urban and suburban plots growing on patios, in containers, and unused land or rooftops now produce 90 percent of the fresh produce eaten in Havana.

What are people raising and eating? Huckleberries for milkshakes in the Pacific Northwest's Burgerville chain of local fast food; succotash and samp, traditional foods of Long Island's Shinnecock tribe; and over in Italy where Slow Food had its start, "wines tasting of the landscape." This is to contrast with what Halweil calls the "transcontinental lettuce," shorthand for the produce that must be packaged and treated to handle traveling the length and breadth of the US. As he notes in his brief history of preserving foods, it was necessary for armies such as Napoleon's to have nutritious meals during long campaigns, but our food now regularly travels up to 2,500 miles to get to our plate, and involves unsavory processes such as artificially ripening tomatoes with ethylene. One end result is that most of the money we spend on food goes to marketers, shippers and others rather than farmers. In fact, the US wheat farmer only makes 6 cents on the loaf of bread, about the same as the cost of the plastic wrapper. Halweil brings home the absurdity with a telling quote from ecological economist Herman Daly, "Americans import Danish sugar cookies, and Danes import American sugar cookies. Exchanging recipes would surely be more efficient."

Halweil isn't in the business of predictions, but he does show promising movement particularly when governments help open fallow ground, not only out of necessity as in Cuba, but through local food policy councils in US cities like Knoxville, Tennessee, Los Angeles, St. Paul and elsewhere. And he's particularly adamant that government should stop subsidizing monocultural agribusiness that can result in food dumping in poorer countries, undercutting agricultural development.

In the end, by eating locally we get the pleasure of meeting farmers, tasting the freshest foods, and getting our hands dirty growing our own produce. Carlo Petrini, Slow Food's founder and president, sums it up best, "the gastronome who is not aware of the environmental implications of his food is stupid, and the environmentalist who is naVve of gastronomy is sad."

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