Fw: The Town That Food Saved

[Guest guest]

I received this from a friend in NY.

Don Prohaska

I am reading the book " The Town That Food Saved " by Ben Hewitt now and cannot

put it down! It describes an economically hard hit rural town in VT, that is

not unlike mine in central NY, who is successfully turning itself around by

going back to it's roots and focusing on growing and processing food. You

cannot compete with Big Ag but you can find the niche markets, which is what

this town has done. They have also created permanent jobs for the people in

their town in the process.

I thought I would share an excerpt - not anything we don't know - but written in

a way that really makes you think about where our country is going. (Red

highlighting mine.)

I have 2 excellent DVD's " Food Inc " (which won a number of Academy Awards in the

documentary section) and the newly released " Ingredients " . Both show what is

happening to our food system in this country and are well worth watching as

well.

Nowak

The Town That Food Saved by Ben Hewitt

Excerpt from Chapter Five

The agricultural revolution came and went without dramatically changing the art

and science of fertility; most prominently, the Belgians discovered the

nitrogen-fixing properties of clover and incorporated it into their rotations.

Slowly, a degree of mechanization began to infiltrate the fields. But this early

mechanization was of the pre-petroleum sort: seeders and plows and cultivators

pulled behind the high, broad backs of oxen and horses. Farming was changing in

scale, scope, and ambition, but it remained a practice chat was nourished by the

sun and practiced by almost everyone.

Things changed dramatically in the mid-1800s, when the German chemist Justis von

Liebig realized that nitrogen could be applied to plants on its own in the form

of ammonia. Liebig's efforts at concocting a concentrated nitrogen fertilizer

failed, both commercially and practically, but they were the first steps toward

a chemical fertilizer industry that would quickly supplant sun­based fertility.

In the late 1890s, average annual consumption of commercial fertilizers in the

United States totaled 1,845,900 tons (it should be said that not all of this was

chemical fertilizer; in these early days of the industry, much of the fertilizer

was based on pulverized bone and bat guano); by the 1940s, that number had risen

to 13,590,466 tons and by the '80s, it had hit 47,411,166 tons. At the same

time, combustion engine technology gained traction, allowing fewer farmers to

cultivate more acreage in what eventu­ally became air-conditioned,

GPS-navigated, MP3-playing com­fort. The result was a dramatic drop in the

number of person-hours required to grow 100 bushels of wheat-from 50 to 3. This

was a monstrous achievement, and it has freed billions of people from trillions

of hours of toil worldwide. Of the many technologies that have changed our lives

over the past century, none has been as transformative as the agricultural

innovations that have enabled us to pretty much ignore the sun.

But a tragic truth is becoming increasingly clear: It cannot con­tinue forever.

It's tragic because we've become utterly dependent on the chemicals and

petroleum we use to outfarm the sun, and it's true because our agricultural

system is now more vulnerable than ever. If ever the chemicals and petroleum

stop flowing, we will go hungry; we simply can't have 1 person feeding 140 of us

without these inputs. We probably can't have 10 people feeding 140. Maybe the

demise of our petroleum-funded ag system will unfold slowly, as it seems to be

now: death by a thousand paper cuts. Or maybe it will happen with a dramatic

flourish: a bioterror attack, an oil embargo, or t he sort of withering drought

we've flirted with, but haven't really suffered with, since the Dust Bowl days.

Or perhaps it will come on the back of an unintended consequence. The

tre­mendous economy of scale delivered by our 21st-century system of farming

has centralized food production like never before. Any kink in the system could

generate a cascade of disruptions, idling the steady stream of trucks that

barrel down our nation's inter­states, pulling our dinners behind them.

A decentralized food system must, above all else, be resilient in the face of

rapid, disruptive change. It must be capable of surviving a disruption in oil

supply, fertilizer availability, and animal feed stocks. It should thrive in (or

at least survive) periods of economic growth and contraction. It has to bend,

not break, before the whims of nature and climate. To be clear, despite my

disdain for the word " sustainable, " I don't believe that the local food systems

of today must run on sickle, scythe, and horse-drawn purity; instead, they need

only be a step (or two, or three) in that direction. We have lost more than a

century of knowledge, and in the process, massively inflated our agricultural

expectations. We need to relearn those skills and reset our expectations, and

any movement in this direc­tion should be applauded. Chemical fertilizers and

petroleum are to agriculture what easy credit was to the housing market, and we

all know how that turned out. At some point, the air will come out of the

agribusiness bubble, just as it came out of the housing bubble. At some point,

petroleum and chemicals will be gone or, at the least, will have become so

clearly untenable as to be unusable.

But the sun? That, hopefully, will still be there. Or else we've got even bigger

things to worry about.

3. It must feed the locals.

It sounds absurdly obvious, doesn't it? Because really, what is the point of a

local food system if the locals are still shuffling down supermarket aisles

piling on the Cocoa Puffs and chicken fingers?

But perversely, this might be the toughest edict to fulfill, because it directly

contradicts rule number one: It must offer economic viability to small-scale

food producers. Once again, we run up against our own iriJ1ated expectations.

Or, in this case, our deflated expectations. Because, for all its faults, the

industrial agriculture system does one thing extraordinarily well: It fills our

bellies for a fraction of what it cost our ancestors, or what it costs the

citizens of other nations. The average European spends nearly 20 percent of his

income on food, while his Bangladeshi counterpart spends 87 percent of her

income to m eet her daily nourishment needs.

Of course, it's become almost fashionable to discuss the hidden costs of our

" cheap " food diet. They're real, and they matter, but the truth is that most

Americans simply don't have the luxury of looking beyond the tangible metric of

money in, money out. If you're bringing home $300 per week (as many in Hardwick

do), you're not spending a heck of a lot of time thinking about the hid­den

toll of industrial agriculture. You're not considering its health costs, or the

erosion of topsoil caused by mono cropping, or even the backward logic of a

subsidy system that pays farmers not to farm (or, conversely, to farm too much);

you're too busy trying to find the Cocoa Puffs coupon tucked in your wallet.

Therefore, in order for a local food system to actually feed the locals, it must

find a way around the cost issue. Calculating the carbon footprint of our diet

is noble and all, but let's face it: To many working poor, who are struggling

just to keep pace with the day-in, day-out fiscal demands of modern life, such

exercises in eco­betterment are distractions for the well-off. Of course, the

sad irony is that these are the people who stand to benefit most from vibrant,

decentralized food systems.

Local food activists tend to argue that as energy and fertilizer prices rise,

the price of commodity foods will rise, too. They say there will come a point

when local foods-which are less reliant on these inputs-are actually cheaper

than industrial foods. That may or may not happen; it seems equally plausible to

me that inflated input prices might only compound the economy-of-scale

advan­tage enjoyed by large-scale producers.

In any event, it seems foolhardy to wait for the price issue to resolve itself

on the back of calamitous food inflation or for a dis­ruption in our

just-in-time supply chain to empty supermarket shelves in a matter of hours. The

infrastructure and knowledge must be cultivated now, while we still enjoy

relative plenty and sta­bility. There's a Chinese proverb that goes something

like this:

" What's the best time to plant a tree? "

" One hundred years ago. "

" What's the second best time? "

“Todayâ€

4. It must be circular.

Our current food system doesn't have much of a shape. It starts at one end,

based on a river of nonrenewable inputs: nitrogen fertil­izer is manufactured

using natural gas, diesel fuel runs the farm tractors, the GMO seeds are

engineered to tolerate farming prac­tices that abuse the land. From there, it

depends on more inputs to keep it chugging along on the straight line from field

to processing plant to supermarket and, finally, to table. And there it finally

ends, with whatever scraps remain being scraped into the garbage or fed to the

dog. If the many failings of our industrialized food supply chain could be

summed up in one image, it would look like a thin straight line across a page.

The problem is that the page will eventually end; the line will run out of room.

That's when we'll start to see skyrocketing food prices, shortages, and a

growing awareness that something is not right in the world of agriculture. Any

of that sound familiar?

The trick is to make our food system operate within the boundaries of that page;

I describe it as a circular system, but in reality, it might be more oblong,

with a few hard edges here and there, or an occasional triangular point. And,

until we relearn everything we've forgotten and reset our expectations, it will

prob­ably veer off the page on occasion to benefit from a nonrenewable resource

(most likely oil). But it always, always seeks to return, along the way seeking

to benefit from fertility to be had from nearby: manure from the dairy farm down

the road, food scraps from the local high school, or cover crops sown into

fallow fields.

One of the great strengths of Hardwick's food system-indeed, one of the reasons

I believe it has garnered so much attention-is the ease and clarity with which

it articulates circular agriculture. Within a 10-mile radius of the town, you

can find a seed producer, a composting operation, and numerous vegetable

growers. These are not the only businesses participating in the region's farming

circle, but they make it incredibly simple to demonstrate roundness in food

production: The seeds are sown and grown into vegetables. The vegetables are

served, and whatever scraps remain are turned into compost. The compost

fertilizes the seed and vegetable crops. And so on. Heck, even if you've never

given more thought to your food than deciding whether or not to ask for extra

special sauce on your Big Mac, you can under stand the relationship between

compost, seed, and vegetable.

The circular food system has its limits, of course. If you live as I do, in a

northern clime, there will be no bananas in January. In fact, there will be no

bananas ever, unless you stroll on down to Ecuador and pick a few bunches. If

you live in the midst of a rural, Great Plains town, there will be no salmon or

lobster. Processed foods will all but disappear; when that bag of Chips Ahoy in

your pantry is gone, there won't be another, so enjoy it. No more Chips Ahoy, no

more chicken fingers, no more Mc's or Burger King. Food will almost surely

be more expensive, at least in the most tangible respect: the price tag attached

to it.

Clearly, this is a very different articulation of the food system than we've

become accustomed to and clearly, it's not going to hap­pen in a week, or a

month, or even a year. It probably can't happen in a decade. The redrawing of

our straight-line agriculture system into something even vaguely circular is a

generational and perhaps multi generational task. It's taken us more than a

hundred years to get where we are; there's no reason to believe it will take us

any less time to get back. Which means only one thing: We'd better plant our

tree today.

[Guest guest]

AFAIK, Food Inc did not win any Academy Awards. It got a thumbs down from WAPF.

>

> I received this from a friend in NY.

>

> Don Prohaska

> I am reading the book " The Town That Food Saved " by Ben Hewitt now and cannot

put it down! It describes an economically hard hit rural town in VT, that is

not unlike mine in central NY, who is successfully turning itself around by

going back to it's roots and focusing on growing and processing food. You

cannot compete with Big Ag but you can find the niche markets, which is what

this town has done. They have also created permanent jobs for the people in

their town in the process.

> I thought I would share an excerpt - not anything we don't know - but written

in a way that really makes you think about where our country is going. (Red

highlighting mine.)

> I have 2 excellent DVD's " Food Inc " (which won a number of Academy Awards in

the documentary section) and the newly released " Ingredients " . Both show what

is happening to our food system in this country and are well worth watching as

well.

> Nowak

> The Town That Food Saved by Ben Hewitt

[Guest guest]

AFAIK, Food Inc did not win any Academy Awards. It got a thumbs down from WAPF.

>

> I received this from a friend in NY.

>

> Don Prohaska

> I am reading the book " The Town That Food Saved " by Ben Hewitt now and cannot

put it down! It describes an economically hard hit rural town in VT, that is

not unlike mine in central NY, who is successfully turning itself around by

going back to it's roots and focusing on growing and processing food. You

cannot compete with Big Ag but you can find the niche markets, which is what

this town has done. They have also created permanent jobs for the people in

their town in the process.

> I thought I would share an excerpt - not anything we don't know - but written

in a way that really makes you think about where our country is going. (Red

highlighting mine.)

> I have 2 excellent DVD's " Food Inc " (which won a number of Academy Awards in

the documentary section) and the newly released " Ingredients " . Both show what

is happening to our food system in this country and are well worth watching as

well.

> Nowak

> The Town That Food Saved by Ben Hewitt

[Guest guest]

http://www.westonaprice.org/Food-Inc.-by--Kenner.html

>

> > AFAIK, Food Inc did not win any Academy Awards. It got a thumbs down

> > from WAPF.