THINK GLOBALLY,
EAT LOCALLY
Two food conferences grow connections BY VANESSA SALVIA
L
et’s face it: Local food is fashionable right now.
Following a high tide in recent years of books and
graphic documentaries about food and how it’s
made, people are more aware than ever of what they
put into their mouths. We want to know who raised the meat
we eat, and how far that parsnip shipped.
Two conferences about food are imminent: One, held at
Lane Community College, focuses on making it easy for
local farmers to find buyers for their crops; another, the
Food Justice conference held at Wayne Morse Center for
Law & Politics at UO, connects international and local
food scholars with food activists. And while the two
conferences do have some overlapping goals, Food Justice
ultimately challenges many of the dominant paradigms of
the buy local movement.
CREATING FOOD CONNECTIONS
As wholesome and fresh as local food is, without
buyers for the produce farmers grow, a local food system
is less than practical. Now in its fifth year, the LCC Local
Food Connection conference aims to establish and
strengthen connections between food producers and food
buyers. At the conference will be representatives of K-12
schools, colleges, hospitals, wholesale buyers (restaurants,
natural food stores and food distributers such as
Hummingbird Wholesale) as well as ranchers, fishers and
farmers that grow fruits and veggies, eggs, beans and
grains. Consumers at any level are welcome to come and
learn more.
“The goal really is to make the local food supply system
stronger,” says event organizer Willow Cordain. “What
that means is, for example, you have somebody who is
starting to grow beans. If there’s a local buyer, that’s a
circular thing, so then the farmer can put that money into
growing more beans and promoting more and different
avenues of distribution.”
Eugene-based Willamette Farm and Food Coalition will
present information in a couple of workshops, one on
sourcing local beans, grains and flours, and another on local
food economics. Megan Kemple,
Farm to School Program
Coordinator for WFFC, says
that we need healthy farms
and farmers that can
afford to keep farming or
there will be no one to
grow food for our
community.
“We’re working
really hard to make
sure that consumers
know where to find
local food, and that
institutions such as K-12
schools are able to
buy as much
local produce
as possible,” she says. From 2008 to 2009, WFFC helped
to double the amount of local food purchased by schools,
and the doubling happened again in 2010. “The Local
Food Connection is a wonderful opportunity for farms and
food buyers to connect directly,” Kemple says.
Café Yumm! is an example of that successful
networking. The owners of Café Yumm! didn’t know they
could access a local producer large enough to supply their
beans. At last year’s conference, they sat next to a
representative of Hummingbird Wholesale, and through
this connection they now have a supplier of local beans for
their popular restaurants.
“Our business is based on sustainable values, and so we
try to look at all aspects of sustainability in the business,”
says Julie Tilt, Hummingbird’s president and co-owner. “A
big part of that is encouraging organically grown foods and
trying to find locally grown foods. We want our food
grown here. I think most people don’t realize that if the
trucks stopped running up and down I-5 for some reason,
the food stores would run out of food in three days.”
PROTECTING SMALL-SCALE FARMS
Kitchen gardens are touted as the way to self-sufficiency,
and subsistence farmers in other countries are often
encouraged to increase their own food production as a
means to keep their communities strong. But what happens
to the community when that farmer is essentially forced to
buy seeds from a large multinational agri-corporation,
losing their indigenous food identity in the process?
How realistic is a local food system in the grip of
winter? How far afield can you look for additional
resources and still fit with your locavore philosophy?
“Sometimes the local food movement and particularly the
locavore does neglect how inter-connected our food
system is, for good and bad,” says Allison Carruth, the
organizer of Food Justice. “We should think about food
regions in the way that ecologists think about watershed
regions. In order for the Willamette Valley to become
sustainable it may be necessary to foster connections with
other food regions.”
Regionalism, says Carruth, is an important bridge
between local and global. “It doesn’t really get enough
attention in the food movement around the country,”
she explains. “It offers a framework to really
challenge the local food system and build on its
strength.”
This inaugural Food Justice conference builds
on an event Carruth organized in February 2009
while a postdoctoral fellow at UC Santa Barbara,
called Food Sustainability + Food Security.
Carruth proposed the Food Justice conference last
year when she applied to be a fellow at Wayne
Morse Center. “We’re hopeful this might become a
biannual event which will bring scholars together
with community groups as well as international
activists,” she says. Scholars on topics from
environmental law to literature to cultural
geography and anthropology will present
information. “It’s an incredibly rich set of
scholars who are going to be talking
across traditional boundaries,”
Carruth adds.
Margaret
Hallock,
director of the Wayne
Morse Center, says the
tremendous changes in
the past 30, 40 years
in food production
Vandana
Shiva
chow.eugeneweekly.com
Allison Caruth, organizer of Food Justice
and distribution have created trade opportunities for some
indigenous people as they shift from producing for
themselves to producing for export markets. But trade
doesn’t provide food security, or food sovereignty.
“We want to boost scholarship by highlighting this
issue as a key issue, and connect the scholars with local
activists,” says Hallock, “so they have access to the
scholarship but also create new lines of inquiry and
connect these communities to move forward on better food
policies.”
Among those speaking at the conference will be
Vandana Shiva, who mobilizes communities in India to
reclaim their power over food from agri-business and
biotech corporations, and Darra Goldstein, founder of the
journal Gastronomica. “Darra is an eloquent and dynamic
speaker who will reflect on the journal’s tenth anniversary,”
says Carruth, “but also on the bigger conversation about
why food really matters as a subject for both research and
scholarship, and also political action.”
The work of human ecologist David Cleveland, an
environmental studies professor at UC Santa Barbara,
focuses on small-scale, sustainable agriculture. His panel
presentation will translate some of the research findings into
creating sustainable agriculture and genetically engineered
plants. “Organizations that are dealing with the food crisis
always emphasize the need for more production,” he says,
“because they are so embedded in the mainstream economic
system which is ideologically committed to perpetual
growth. So the idea that we could help solve the food crisis
and address the issue of food injustice by changing
distribution patterns is anathema to the establishment.”
Simply telling hungry people to grow more food means,
in effect, telling them to increase production through
modernizing techniques and eliminating subsistence
farming. “The people who are at the short end of the food
and agriculture stick may have more food but they will
have even less power,” Cleveland asserts. “Helping small
scale farmers becomes the cool thing to say, but you have
to really then do your homework. That’s what they’re
saying, but what does it really mean?”
Within the mainstream, supply side food system,
Cleveland says, transgenic crop varieties (plants with
inserted genes derived from another species) are controlled
by a handful of multi-national corporations presiding over
the genetically engineered crop industry. “There’s a
misrepresentation by the people who are promoting
genetically engineered varieties,” he says. “They claim to
be trying to address issues of food injustice and hunger by
helping small-scale farmers. Maybe they do really want to
help them, but the way they are going to help them is by
eliminating them. That’s something that needs to be talked
about.” ■
CHOW! Winter 2011 3