The attacks coming from economists against the local and sustainable food movement sound a lot like this joke: The arguments are based in flawed assumptions, obfuscated by fancy charts, big words, and complex calculations. 

Consider this most recent rant, “The Inefficiency of Local Food,” on the Freakonomics blog by economist Steven Sexton, who challenges the claim that “relocalized” food systems can be as efficient as today’s modern farming. He writes, “Today’s high crop yields and low costs reflect gains from specialization and trade, as well as scale and scope economies.”

Let’s start with Sexton’s assertion that industrial agriculture’s high yields can be attributed in part to specialization and trade—gains presumably lost when we “locavores” start frequenting farmers’ market. He writes, “The case for specialization is perhaps nowhere stronger than in agriculture, where the costs of production depend on natural resource endowments, such as temperature, rainfall, and sunlight, as well as soil quality, pest infestations, and land costs.”

When I was in graduate school, our economics textbooks spun this old yarn, too. It’s based in the theory of “comparative advantage,” dating back to classical economist David Ricardo’s writings in the 19th century. Specialization, argued Ricardo, makes sense because regions and countries should grow what best suits their climate and soils and then trade for what grows best elsewhere.

But when Ricardo extolled the benefits of comparative advantage, “capital” couldn’t move. Now that corporations can, and do, this theory no longer holds. In fact, regional or national agricultural comparative advantage often reflects nothing “natural” at all, but rather the extreme imbalances in power in our food system that enable those at the pinnacle to more heartlessly exploit the land and the workers lacking power.

To choose but one example: Ricardo’s theory doesn’t explain why North Carolina jumped from a bit player in the hog industry to number two, after Iowa, just in the past few decades. The key was the state’s concessions that lured the hog confinement industry, including its weak environmental and labor laws.

Of course it doesn’t make sense to try to grow mangoes on rooftop farms in Manhattan, but contrary to what Sexton implies, that’s not what regional food advocates suggest. Indeed, one of advocates’ core tenets is that the healthiest diet, for eaters and the planet, prioritizes choosing foods that grow well where we are, when they are in-season or when they can be stored, and considers those mangoes a special treat.

Sexton’s other hit on the efficiency of sustainable farming is that its yields don’t measure up. As a result, he says, shifting to a regional food system would require “more inputs to grow a given quantity of food, including more land and more chemicals.” But his calculations are based on assuming we’re not reconsidering what we grow or how we grow it.

But locavores and regional food advocates aren’t suggesting we try to plant Iowa-like monoculture corn farms in New York’s Hudson Valley; we’re arguing we need to radically rethink not only where we source our food, but what we plant and what methods we use.

Most American industrial farm acreage, for example, is devoted not to growing food for people to eat directly, but to grow commodity crops like corn and soybeans that are mainly used as inputs—for livestock production, ethanol, and industrial products. In addition, the American industrial food system wastes as much as half the food we could all be consuming. This waste embedded in the industrial model and its squandering of vital farmland for non-food production is enough to shake your head at the economist who praises its alleged efficiency—or suggests that by shifting away from this model we are putting the planet at a greater risk for hunger.

Sexton misses two other important points. For one, those industrial yield figures start looking a lot less impressive when you consider the cost by which we’ve achieved them—and especially when you learn that those costs are ones we need not pay. High yields from industrial agriculture rely entirely on external inputs—most of them in the finite, nonrenewable, we’re-not-gonna-have-them-in-fifty-years category.

Consider, for example, that in the Midwest we’re outstripping the nation’s largest source of groundwater faster than we’re replenishing it. A recent peer-reviewed study published by the National Academies Press concluded that if we don’t shift away from this industrial model, the Ogallala aquifer—which one-quarter of the farmers growing corn, soy, and cotton and 40 percent of those raising feedlot beef rely on for water—will be completely drawn down in a few decades.

Using new techniques to track soil erosion, scientists at the Environmental Working Group  found that vast swaths of Iowa and other Corn Belt states were losing their rich topsoil soil at rates many times faster than official estimates had assumed. Industrial monoculture methods leave the soil bare for most of the year and relying on external inputs for fertility defeats the build up of healthy soil—both practices make land vulnerable to erosion.

By definition, industrial agriculture relies on applying manmade fertilizer year-upon-year. But relying on external inputs for farming’s key macronutrients—nitrogen, potash, phosphorus—comes at big costs. While nitrogen is abundant in our atmosphere, to “bind” it into a usable form requires an enormous amount of energy–often natural gas. In China, 70 percent of nitrogen fertilizer production is powered by coal-fired plants.

The widespread use of phosphorus in industrial agriculture–by 2008 industrial agriculture was applying 17 million metric tons annually–has led to what some experts call “the gravest natural resource shortage you’ve never heard of.” Relatively rare on the Earth’s crust, phosphorus is mined from ancient marine deposits, but it’s running out. Some say that within 30 to 40 years we may have none left. Plus, for every ton of phosphorus we mine, we produce five tons of radioactive waste. Today, the U.S. is home to more than one billion tons of this waste stored in 70 towers, ranging from just a few acres wide to some the size of 720 football fields.  In addition, we’re using more potent pesticides than ever, yet despite massive chemical pesticide use, we still face significant crop loss due to pests.

The second point Sexton misses is that strong yields don’t necessarily require chemical inputs and egregious water overuse. Truly sustainable growers know how to grow abundant food without all these external inputs: They recycle nutrients, employ natural methods to repel pests and conquer weeds, and tap ecological sources for fertility, like nitrogen-fixing cover crops. And guess what? Yields hold. In one crop-by-crop analysis over three decades, organic corn yields held steady per acre with conventional ones. Even more notably, during drought years the organic fields, with quality soil structure that retain water better, had 31 percent higher corn yields than conventional ones.

Studies are coming in from around the world—from the UK government to the United Nations to the OECD—that innovative sustainable farming techniques can match industrial agriculture in yields. And, when and if yields are lower, the lower output is more than made up for in reduced costs (both financial and societal) of inputs, better nutritional quality, improved soil and biodiversity, and more. In one of the largest studies of its kind, researchers at the University of Essex analyzed 286 farming projects in 57 countries, including 12.6 million farmers transitioning towards agricultural sustainability, and found a yield increase of 79 percent across a wide variety of crop types. Take a look at just those projects in East Africa and the increase in yields jumped 116 percent when sustainable farming approaches were introduced.

But, despite the evidence, Sexton and other economists with their collective blinders on still argue that the only way to feed the planet is with the industrial agriculture methods they endorse. Sure, that works. Just assume unlimited water, fossil fuels, petrochemicals, potash, phosphorus, topsoil, land, stable climate, and endless storage for radioactive waste. Just assume farmers can keep paying for these expensive inputs. And, assume all of us can afford the environmental and health consequences.

You’ll also need to ignore the plain fact that industrial agriculture has already proven unable to feed the world: Globally, we’re now producing over 20 percent more food per person than the late 1960s, but there are more hungry people—now almost a billion. Fixated narrowly on production, industrial agricultural so concentrates power that people go hungry no matter how much we grow.

So, ignore all that; assume the can opener.

If, however, you’d rather join me in the real world—where the occasional economist resides—and where natural resources are preciously limited and where farmers prefer not to pay dearly for inputs or be poisoned by pesticides, you’ll see that the most effective way to feed the world is to embrace a food system based in ecological systems and common sense.

I never would have believed they could pull this off.  The new guidelines recognize that obesity is the number one public health nutrition problem in America and actually give good advice about what to do about it: eat less and eat better. For the first time, the guidelines make it clear that eating less is as priority.

She did criticize the guidelines for talking about “food” when it came to things you needed more of (such as vegetables) and “nutrients” when it was time to talk about cutting back (less saturated fat instead of less meat).

But to be honest, I don’t really want to talk about the dietary guidelines. As important as they are–they are central to school lunch menu creation, for example–they are just guidelines and don’t exactly have the force of law.

In fact, two recent studies suggest the causes of the obesity epidemic are so pervasive and so deeply intertwined with our advanced industrialized way of life, that we’ll really need to “go long” if we’re to have any hope of addressing it.

The first study out of Oxford University, which appeared in the journal Economics & Human Biology, suggests that the root cause of obesity can be summed thusly: “It’s the economy, stupid.”

Researchers found a relationship between living in “free market” countries such as the United States and obesity, likely due to the experience of prolonged economic stress (via ScienceDaily):

The researchers believe that the stress of living in a competitive social system without a strong welfare state could be causing people to overeat. According to the study published in the latest issue of the journal Economics and Human Biology, Americans and Britons are much more likely to be obese than Norwegians and Swedes.

Interestingly, the researchers were able to separate out the effect of junk food availability on people’s eating habits and measure that against economic stress. They found that economic stress was a greater contributing factor to obesity than the fact that so many cheap, nutrient-poor calories are available to consumers. Lead author Avner Offer commented:

Policies to reduce levels of obesity tend to focus on encouraging people to look after themselves but this study suggests that obesity has larger social causes. The onset and increase of large-scale obesity began during the 1980s, and coincided with the rise of market-liberalism in the English-speaking countries.

It may be that the economic benefits of flexible and open markets come at a price to personal and public health which is rarely taken into account. Basically, our hypothesis is that market-liberal reforms have stimulated competition in both the work environment and in what we consume, and this has undermined personal stability and security.

Tom Philpott and I have both written about the role of wage stagnation in the obesity epidemic. And now, we learn that it may be our economic system itself that’s to blame. It’s already established that economic stress can cause poor health — so why not obesity as well.

The second study, also from Britain — this time, University College London–and published in Obesity Reviews, found a relationship between the obesity epidemic and the global North’s love of central heating. It turns out that we’ve reduced our exposure to “thermal stress,” especially to cold during winter, and as a result, spend fewer calories on maintaining our body temps. Indeed, it has even changed the balance of different kinds of fat in our bodies (“brown fat” is burned for energy and cold exposure encourages its formation while more permanent “white fat” forms at higher temperatures).

While turning down the heat is certainly not an “answer” to the obesity epidemic, nor is making the United States into a European-style welfare state in the cards, we do need to get our arms around the breadth of the challenge before us. Admitting we have a problem with our economic system would be a good start.

Originally published on Grist

The new documentary screening around the country The Economics of Happiness says everything it should say. Ambitiously, it attempts to explain the many downsides of economic globalization, while offering actual alternatives that the viewer can get behind, and (for a movie just a little over an hour long) it does this concisely and without too much dreadful hyperbole or schmaltz. For this I am thankful. All too often, environmental themed movies rely on over-exaggerations, simplifications, and a preaching-to-the-choir sentimentalities–which result in a product unlikely to perform the educational (that’s entertainingly educational) role it was made for.

Director Helena Norberg-Hodge and her team use the case study of the Ladakhi people from the high-altitude regions of India, Pakistan, and China (whose traditional, sustainable, joyful, tightly-knit community lifestyle has been disintegrating since their introduction to the products and values of modern global capitalist culture) to illustrate their criticism of globalization, without overly romanticizing the Ladakhis or failing to address pro-globalization arguments.

The film’s analysis of the negative effects of globalization is spot on, citing eight main outcomes: mounting unhappiness in the industrialized world; feelings of insecurity for those who are not leading industrial-world lives; unsustainable use of resources; climate change; loss of meaningful livelihoods, especially farming for those in the “developing world”; increasing inter-group conflict; handouts to big businesses; and a false accounting of progress. The film contains effective explanations for how corporately-controlled global trade causes these results, including Hodge’s brilliant metaphor of how our “arms are so long we don’t know what our hands are doing.”

I have reservations regarding the use of climate change as an discursive tactic for getting people to make societal change toward sustainability. That being said, these other effects are clearly perceptible to the average person. With even a little effort to look at the world as it is, whether through scientific studies or personal experience, a reasonable American could see that these effects are real, and by watching this film could be convinced that they are a direct outcome and corollary of global capitalism.

The solution the film offers–economic and political localization–is one that we’ve heard for some time and with substantial frequency in the sustainable food world. Refreshingly, the film even includes a critique of the “buying our way out of the mess” argument which too often circumscribes the limits of sustainable foodies’ activism. And so I can heartily recommend this film as an activist tool, for introducing emerging or tentative foodies to the larger economic context of local, sustainable foods (and how to actually create more sustainable systems in general).

I do have one issue with the film, which isn’t really so much about what it says as what it doesn’t cover (and–as a filmmaker–I know this can be due to limitations of time, capacity, and/or the need to focus a film on one audience). That issue is that this film, like so many others coming from the environmentally-aware left, doesn’t ask the hard questions of how to actually leverage large-scale change. The film mentions the influence of corporate capital on our political system (which continues to be depressingly evidenced in all sections of government), but offers no ideas for how to counter this. It offers alternatives to the false accounting mentioned earlier, that of Genuine Progress Indicators (GPI) or Gross National Happiness (GNH) instead of the grossly inaccurate Gross Domestic Product (GDP). But how to actually get governments to implement those measures, when those in charge are completely enthralled with and beholden to the ideologies of endless growth and “free” markets?

Something else kept haunting me as I watched the film: “the masses.” Globalization is no doubt the hegemonic ideology of our time, and the masses (at least its vocal, politically active members like Tea Partiers) have bought the line, practically without reservations. I believe that the biggest question for the anti-globalization (or better, the pro-localization) movement is: how do we change this? Can people be convinced to break from ideologies that don’t serve them? Can “everyday” Americans (those who this film claims to be at their unhappiest level of the past 60 years) be convinced that localization is a preferable alternative? More importantly, perhaps, can they be convinced that it is actually possible, and not just a hippie pipe dream?

The sad reality is that these questions are much easier to ask than to answer. I ask them not to try to seem like I have it figured out, but to honestly plea for continued conversation from those who would like to see humanity and the planet “saved.” We know the problems, and we think we know the (physical) solutions. Now, how do we get from here to there? I have a feeling that, at minimum, it will involve a lot of education. And for that, this movie is a great start.

For the urban office worker, buying your lunch every day can be a drag. It leaves your palate uninspired, your wallet empty, and your butt growing slowly across your desk chair. It can leave you with a permanent distaste for turkey sandwiches and a fear of deli lines.

Christine Johnson and Joanna Helferich—a public health director and a corporate lawyer respectively—came up with a solution for their lunch blahs.  For the past five years the two college friends have been getting together on Sunday evening and cooking their lunches for the entire week.

I recently joined the two lunch ladies for an evening of chopping and stirring and was totally won over by their low-key but dedicated routine. While the cooking takes a certain amount of focus and coordinated kitchen Twister in a small New York space, it also leaves space for gabbing—and maintaining and deepening a friendship that began over ten years ago.

The meals they make are largely vegetarian, incorporate produce from the local farmers markets, and cost about a quarter of what it used to cost them to buy their lunch every day. The process starts via email during the week with a conversation about what they’re in the mood to cook and eat. After five years, they’ve created a stable of favorites, recipes they’ve co-created and tweaked, and keep in a Google doc.

They also try new things, including the Moroccan lentil stew they were making this evening for the second time. The inspiration was a soup Joanna liked from a NYC chain called Pret-a-Manger; they read the posted ingredient list and made adjustments. Their second dish was an old favorite—classic turkey meatloaf (made with ground turkey from their farmers market) with boiled potatoes and peas (a rare appearance by a frozen vegetable).

What you’ll need to rock it like Christine and Joanna:

1)   five to six covered pyrex dishes a piece (they make six portions for five lunches and one for a dinner)
2)   two to three hours of time on a Sunday night
3)   About $2–$4 per meal
4)   A big enough kitchen for two people to share space and share tasks
5)   A microwave at work in which to heat up your meal

Has it been hard to keep this routine going for so many years? Sometimes, they say, especially when one or the other is traveling a lot. But the benefits—time together, a guaranteed healthy lunch with two to three servings of vegetables, a huge savings of money—far outweigh the hassles. And the experience has shaped them, and their palates. “My lunches used to be very meat-centric,” said Helferich. “Now I actually prefer eating vegetables.”

Moroccan Lentil Stew
2 cups French lentils (scant) – picked over and rinsed
Olive oil for sauteing
3 small-medium onions, chopped
6–8 small-medium carrots, chopped
4 celery stalks, chopped
8 cloves garlic, minced
2 med. turnips, 1/2 inch cubed
1 6oz can tomato paste
1 box container (4 cups) low sodium vegetable broth
4 cups water
2 tsp paprika
2 tsp garam masala
2 tsps cumin
A handful of chopped parsley
1 1/2 tsp sherry vinegar
Salt and pepper

Saute onions, carrots, and celery in olive oil until transparent; add garlic and pepper, cook 1 minute. Add broth and water, lentils, tomato paste, turnips, and spices. Bring to boil, then turn down and cover and simmer 1 to 1.5 hours, until lentils are soft. Taste and add adjust seasonings, add salt, sherry vinegar and parsley. Optional: Use hand blender to blend some of the lentils and vegetables. Makes 6 main course servings.

A version of this post first appeared on Well and Good NYC

Few would argue that Joan Dye Gussow is the mother of the sustainable food movement. For more than 30 years, she’s been writing, teaching (she is emeritus chair of the Teachers College nutrition program at Columbia University), and speaking about our unsustainable food system and how to fix it. (This excellent article by journalist Brian Halweil showcases her work in detail.) Now more than ever, her ideas have wings. Michael Pollan, for example, has said, “Once in a while, when I have an original thought, I look around and realize Joan said it first.”

Gussow lives what she teaches, growing most of her own food year-round in her backyard. The New York Times profiled her last spring as she was rebuilding her garden after it was destroyed by a flood. When I asked her about her newly rebuilt garden, she said, “It’s given me 10 additional years of life, at least!”

I spoke to her recently about how far we’ve come, the future of the food system, and her new book, Growing, Older: A Chronicle of Death, Life, and Vegetables.

Your have been talking about food, energy and the environment for decades. Do you think there is real potential now for a big change in the food system?

I must say that compared to the reception my ideas got thirty years ago, its quite astonishing the reception they’re getting now. I am excited to see the kinds of things that are going on in Brooklyn, for example. People are butchering meat, raising chickens, and it’s become the sort of “heartland” of the food movement. But whether or not there’s going to be sea change in the whole system is so hard to judge. I am politically very discouraged, because of what happened in the [last] election and what has happened with our president whom we elected with such hope. He seems completely unable to get really really passionate about anything.

Do I have hope? Yes, because as Michael Pollan wrote in the Omnivore’s Dilemma, what it means to say that something is unsustainable is that it will stop. And we have an unsustainable food supply. I believe the short-sightedness of both national and international leaders and their inability to do anything useful politically is so stunning that we’re going to come to a crisis period much sooner than anyone expects. But what I really believe is hopeful is that there are so many experiments going on on the ground now all over the country, everything from [Growing Power’s] Will Allen to what’s going on in Hardwick Vermont, and the Slow Money movement putting money into agriculture and the food system. There’s going to be models out there when we need them.

What do you think went wrong the first time around with the “Back to the Land” movement? and how can this generation get things right this time around?

Seeing young people in agriculture is so promising. However, I also know people who’ve hung in there who are in their 40s or 50s who have no retirement and no health insurance, and don’t know how long they can continue to farm.

We’re only set up right now for those people to make a living in a situation where there are enough rich people to buy their food at a decent price. I know there are all kinds of groups working to make good food accessible to poor people, but the reality is that you can’t go into a supermarket for the most part and get anything good for someone in that situation to eat. And there is still a class divide, an economic divide between the foodie movement, if you like, and the reality of the world.

In 1980, they had just brought out a report at the USDA that studied organic foods. There was so much hope. There was an alternative energy center in the upper Midwest, and I remember getting a newsletter from them that was dated January 1980, and showed all of the things they were trying, and I wrote at the top, “The End.” Because it was clear that Reagan would just kill it all, and he did. He took the solar panels off the White House roof, he fired the one person at USDA focused on organic agriculture and he sent us back twenty years. And it was very hard at that point to keep the momentum going because there was no money in it. At least now there is money around the fringes. The thing that is different now is that it’s got publicity, it’s caught the eye of the press, which is of course dangerous too.

How so?

We’re such a faddish country. And of course you’ve noticed there is a real blow back. These attacks on “local” saying how naïve it is, how its better to import your lamb from New Zealand. And then you have the corporations gathering together to do a publicity campaign. The last one I saw was that the meat industry is getting together to push back against this notion that this way that we’re raising animals is not healthy.

Do you think this is the last gasp of industry, or do you think they have the ability to mobilize that other 80 percent against this growing movement?

[Laughs] Oh they have many more gasps left. I believe that is the reason that you have to keep hope alive, you have to keep moving along the way you believe in and keep telling the truth and trying to get the word out there. Because the reality is that the pressure is on the other side. There is a lot of money at stake, and they’re not giving up their livelihoods.

How do you see the field of nutrition now as opposed to when you first started teaching your “nutritional ecology” course?

The existence of farmers markets, CSAs, all these things have in a sense forced the profession to move. [But] there is a huge resistance. I gave the keynote address at Teacher’s College in which I talked about giving up nutrients [because] we don’t know enough. Like what is the ideal mix of fat, carbohydrates and protein? We don’t even know that. And when it comes to micro-nutrients, we are really up a tree.

The fact of the matter is that we’ve allowed people to be led astray. Michael [Pollan, in In Defense of Food] identified that moment when the FDA said that if a food is essentially equivalent you didn’t have to call it imitation. Once you could restore the nutrients and say something is nutritionally equivalent, we allowed ourselves to be lured into thinking that as long as it met nutrient requirements, it was healthy. [Yet] here we have this abundant food supply and this incredibly unhealthy population. The level of obesity, the level of diabetes, all these things are shocking.

Michael [Pollan]’s advice in that book, which is to get off the western diet, is really the right advice. And if I had tried to say that twenty years ago, it wouldn’t have been possible. There was no place to go to buy foods that were not so processed, to get meat that was raised right, or many types of fresh fruits and vegetables.

In Growing, Older you write about how “having possibilities” means freedom from despair in the face of climate change, resource depletion, biodiversity loss, soil loss, etc. Could you explain this?

Temperamentally I’ve never been the sort of person who looks ahead in my life and gloomily assesses the future. Maybe at this point in my life I should be doing that a little bit more [laughs]. I have to say that [I have possibilities] because I don’t know what the answers to anything are going to be. Like when my garden was totally destroyed last March, people were sort of astounded that I didn’t fall apart. And I spent the whole summer rebuilding it two feet higher.

If someone had told me that I would look upon what happened [in 2010] as a blessing I would have thought they were out of their mind. I am not a religious or superstitious person, but I honestly believe that mother nature took care of me in the spring. She looked down and she said, “Joan you’re not getting any younger, this yard is getting worse and worse. Its getting wetter all the time because the tides are rising. You have access to your land from the north for the first time in 100 years because someone has torn down a house and isn’t going to build until April, and you have the first ever advance that you’ve ever gotten on a book, so you can pay for it.” So wham. And that’s what it feels like, it feels like I was given this gift. Now I couldn’t have forecast that, I couldn’t have wished for that.

If there is anything that worries me, really worries me deeply, its how we’re going to overcome American and modern peoples’ detachment from the natural world, and how we’re going to get them connected again. Unless we’re connected, we’re never going to be able to save the planet. I mean we can’t isolate ourselves in these boxes that are artificially maintained by energy that we don’t even recognize as maintaining us, and save the planet. We have to be in touch with what the planet is calling out for us to do.

What is it about gardening that inspires you?

It provides so many rewards. There is so much beauty out there and there is so much interest out there, and there are so many wonderful plants and animals sharing your life with you out there. Katherine Hodgson Burnett wrote that “to have a garden is to have a future, to have a future is to be alive.” That’s my theme for my old age.

In a chapter called “My Obituary” You write about how you would like to be remembered. What do you hope is your legacy?

I’d love to be remember as having a sense of humor. I was most pleased when some of my students told me I should go into stand-up environmental comedy. I would like to be remembered as having tried to tell the truth.

I feel like the food movement has difficulty in trying to explain to people that reducing their consumption is actually a net benefit for them, that it’s not about deprivation, but about life improvement.

I obviously feel that the life that I live, in which I attempt to consume minimally, and don’t waste things and don’t buy things often, I consider it very life affirming. I really do believe that people would be so much happier and creative if they had some limitations and if they acknowledged their limitations. What I love about the way I eat for instance is that basically I eat what is available. Going to the supermarket to try to figure out what to eat is so deadly to me. It doesn’t feel good at all. What does feel good is that you don’t have to go out and shop, you can make do with what you have.

The common wisdom says that if we don’t buy stuff, the economy will collapse. How do you respond to that?

My brilliant young friend Jennifer Wilkins, who writes a monthly column up in Ithaca, was at my house at Thanksgiving and was looking at the paper about Black Friday. And she decided to write about the sudden changeover from these Thanksgiving values, which is the only really non-commercial holiday we have where your not asked to buy cards or go shopping for gifts, you just buy food and you eat.

She wrote about how Black Friday is the opposite: get out there and spend. And when you don’t spend you aren’t helping the merchants, and the economy doesn’t recover. She also talked about “Buy Nothing” day and she goes on and says that the answer is not to buy nothing, it’s to invest your money in things that make a difference, and that help grow the things that matter to you, like local food and local merchants, or having a meal with friends. Something that promotes your values, which is sort of the premise of the Slow Food movement. When you put your money down there, where is it going to go? What is your money doing out in the world? If we need to keep spending to keep the economy going, we just have to start deciding which economy, which parts of the economy do we want to grow? And if what we want to grow is a sustainable local food system, then we need to put our money where our hearts are.

Photo: Lohud

The reference to Gates and Buffett in a speech about Enough was a result of their project called the Giving Pledge, which encourages billionaires to give away more than half their wealth.  And while this may not seem immediately relevant to life in the hills of Hardwick or the dales of Dorset, it raises important questions about the meaning of Enough, about ways in which we might, as a society, secede from the cult of He Who Dies With The Most Toys Wins and, maybe, just maybe, about ways to put back into the soil—the soil of the restorative economy and the actual soil—what we take out.

Ask any earthworm.  Here are a few data points from Earthworm Economics:

• There are some 1,000 billionaires on the planet, 400 of them American.

• In an acre of fertile soil, there are 50,000 to two million earthworms, none of them American.  (Estimates range widely, conditions vary from hummock to swale, from Butterworks Farm to Lucky Penny Farm to Full Belly Farm.  There is no Earthworm Department of the Census or Forbes list of the richest 400 earthworms.)

• 90 million acres of American cropland is devoted to corn.  75 percent of this goes to feed livestock and cars.  Since 1776, a third of America’s topsoil has eroded.

The story of Enough is told in chapters of money, food and soil.

In the 20^th century, our food and our money became fast.  Our farms became factories.  The erosion of our soil accelerated, as did the erosion of our sense of connection to one another and our sense of collective purpose.  Our money zoomed around the planet with ever accelerating speed, increasingly complex and abstract.  We raised children who thought that food came from supermarkets and investors who thought that investments came from computer screens.  We filled our land with chemicals, our portfolios with zeros and our heads with financial speculation. (“What will be the stock price of McDonalds on the day of the 10 billionth person?”) We ignored the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico—not the one caused by BP’s oil, but the one caused over decades by billions of tons of agricultural run-off coming down the Mississippi River.  In the 20^th century, the idea of Enough became as rare as an earthworm under an ethanol plant.

In the 21^st century, can philanthropy, even radically generous philanthropy of The Giving Pledge kind, come to the rescue?  Can it rekindle an abiding sense of Enough?

Yes and No.

Yes, because the idea of giving away more than 50 percent of your money helps us all look in the direction of putting back as much as we take out.  The act has about it both an air of ageless morality and a sense of modern urgency.  The Giving Pledge may or may not contain, but is consistent with, an implicit recognition that facing the global predicaments of climate change, financial volatility, social inequality and political inertia, neither economic growth based on consumerism nor philanthropy as usual will be sufficient.

No, because if we are going to build a restorative economy, an economy that values preservation and restoration as much as it values extraction and consumption, an economy that heals broken social and ecological relationships while it creates wealth and commercial opportunity (rather than relying on strategies of Wealth Now/Philanthropy Later), we are going to need billions and billions of dollars of investment capital.  We are going to need investment capital and investors of an entirely new kind.

We need to move beyond philanthropy as usual.  Perhaps even more urgently, however, we need to move beyond investing as usual.

This recognition has lead thousands of us to the Slow Money Principles, one of which states:

Paul Newman said:  “We need to be more like the farmer who puts back into the soil what he takes out.”  Recognizing the wisdom of these words, let us ask:

• What would the world be like if we invested 50 percent of our money within 50 miles of where live?

• What if there were a new generation of companies that gave away 50 percent of their profits?

• What if there were 50 percent more organic matter in the soil 50 years from now?

Today, what if, following the leadership of the Giving Pledge and in honor of the New Year, we were to make a resolution, no, our own kind of pledge, to set about the task of moving beyond investing as usual?

I am ready to make the following Slow Money Pledge:

I hereby commit to investing 1 percent of my money in small food enterprises near where I live, in order to enhance soil fertility, expand access to fresh food and build a healthier local economy.

In recent years, as market demand for local and organic has grown, and as aversion to the excesses of derivatives, hedge funds and all manner of financial razzmatazz has begun to take root, a new family of financial products and services has begun to emerge.  Slow Money, with its local and national networks, is just one catalyst in this movement, this process of incubation and financial innovation.  There are many others, including community development financial institutions, the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies, Kiva, Kickstarter and RSF Social Finance.

Investing in small food enterprises offers us particular opportunities to roll up our sleeves, to sink our hands into the soil.  That’s one reason why over $4 million has been invested in 12 small food enterprises that participated in Slow Money’s national gathering at Shelburne Farms last June.

As this national process builds, let’s continue to explore ways to collaborate with friends and neighbors to put money to work more directly at the local level.  Let’s be ready to imagine and calculate in new ways the financial, social and environmental returns that will arise from such investing.

Where to start?  How about buying a farm and leasing it on concessionary terms to a young organic farmer?  How about expanding a CSA?  What if groups of us in communities around the country undertook one such investment per year?

If we are more ambitious, and have the financial capacity, we could look to the infrastructure for farmers markets and local food distribution; community kitchens and food incubators; composting and seed production; slow food restaurants; niche organic brands; biologically benign agricultural inputs; regional food processing facilities; and, other enterprises that repair the holes left in the social fabric and ecological web by industrialization and globalization.

Only a precious few of us have 50 percent of multi-billions to give away.  But many, many precious millions of us have money sitting in financial institutions, where it is under the guidance of Mr. Invisible Hand and Mr. Smokestacks In China and Mr. Slightly Better Regulated But Still Giving More Bonuses Than Ever Wall Street.

And while 1 percent isn’t 50 percent, it is an important beginning, a beautiful beginning.  It is our start down the road to the world that comes after “Enough is enough.”

In celebration of its 25th year, Farm Aid, the longest running concert-for-a-cause, has published a report to help us make this push. Rebuilding America’s Economy with Family-Farm Centered Food Systems takes one of the more sensitive topics in the American psyche today, the economy, and convincingly demonstrates the bounty of opportunity that family farmers can bring to local and regional communities.

Starting with a rally cry from Farm Aid’s celebrity board, originally drafted in a letter to Congress in September of 2008 in a call to recognize the potential of family farmers to revive the collapsing U.S. economy, Rebuilding America’s Economy paints a vision of what our nation could look like:

A $1 billion [a micro mini portion of the $700 billion bailout] investment in family farm agriculture would enrich us all, because we are all shareholders of the family farm. The return on investment in the family farm includes thriving local economies, nutritious food for better health, a safer and more secure food supply, a cleaner environment and more renewable energy. Investing in local, sustainable and organic food would shorten the distance between eaters and farmers, conserve energy, create economic opportunities, and new jobs through innovative processing and distribution systems, resulting in a better, greener, more efficient food and farm economy.

Willie Nelson, John Mellencamp, Neil Young, and Dave Matthews
Farm Aid Board of Directors

Showing the sophistication of knowing millions of farmers over the years, Farm Aid authors launch the report by eschewing black and white definitions of “family farmer” and other key terms. Instead, the report offers that family farmers are those who own the majority of the land or tools, make most of the decisions, and do most of the work. Perhaps more importantly, however, that each farmer who meets the above description inherently possesses the capacity to earn and demand fair wages, further community well-being, be an environmental steward, and promote public health. These are the values that make up the foundation for the family-farm centered food systems envisioned in the report.

It’s hard talking points fall right into line as you read “Rebuilding America.” For example, research by David Swenson of Iowa State University, in conjunction with the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture, shows “increased fruit and vegetable production could boost regional farm sales by over $882 million, and spur retail-level sales as high as $3.31 billion. The effort would also generate 9,032 farm-level jobs and 9,652 retail level jobs, and a corresponding $395.1 million in farm level labor income…”

To my mind, jobs and increased income/sales are exactly what’s needed at this very moment in economic history. Just in case data doesn’t make people’s heart sing the way mine does, I will simply submit that the report gives a multitude of similarly compelling facts that demonstrate the potential impact of small and medium sized farms to create thriving local economies by growing local, direct markets and regional value chains to feed wholesale demand.

Giving color to the well-researched data, are six case studies that show what can be done when a commitment to values is held equally to that of the bottom line: Shepherd’s Grain, Indian Springs Farmers Association, Woodbury County, IA, Red Tomato, Hardwick, VT, and Community Farm Alliance. These case studies show that each region, group of farmers, or specific product requires its own innovation. In Kentucky, for example, where tobacco used to be the cash crop, Community Farm Alliance has helped farmers put their Tobacco Settlement offers to good use shifting their farms to more diversified operations. With more food crops in the ground across the state, CFA can now estimate that “if Kentucky were to match the national average for per-farm direct marketing sales, it would generate an additional $7.9 million in farm income and $15.8 million for the state as a whole.”

In 1985, Willie Nelson named the family farmer the backbone of the country and the bottom rung on the economic ladder on which all else depends. Twenty-five years later, it is the job of the enthusiast and the advocate to understand what family farmers truly have to offer and what resources they need to seize the moment. Farm Aid, this report, the resources (down to the footnotes), and case studies in it, are an excellent place to start.

“Our [struggling] economy is making a compelling case that we shift toward more local food,” said Ken Meter of the Crossroads Resource Center in Minneapolis. “The current system fails on all counts and it’s very efficient at taking wealth out of our communities.”

Meter spoke at the annual conference of the Midwest Organic & Sustainable Education Service (MOSES) held recently in La Crosse, Wisc.

The bank bailouts have stabilized the crisis but they haven’t addressed wealth in local communities, he said. It’s likely that change may come through food because it is the third largest household expense (12.4 percent or $6,133) and $1 trillion nationally. The average consumer spends $49,638 per year with housing the largest expense (34 percent or $16,900), transportation number three (17.6 percent or $8,753) and insurance number four (10.8 percent or $5,336).

“Everyone needs to eat and a local food economy forces us to think differently,” said Meter.

Meter shared figures from his study of southwestern Wisconsin where 106,000 residents earn a total income of $2.7 billion. However, 30 percent of the people live below the poverty line. Out of 6,804 farms, 586 farmers sell less than $10,000 per year while 11 percent sell more than $100,000. Only 382 farms sell directly to consumers and 133 farms are organic. Such disparities result in lop-sided and unfair policies that need to be changed to meet everyone’s needs, Meter pointed out.

The past 40 years have seen rising sales and new markets for farm products, he said, but the expense of running these operations is mounting faster than the income. In fact, there has been a steady decline in income every year since 1969 except during the OPEC crisis in 1973-74. That’s the year former Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz ramped up production and sold wheat to the Soviet Union.

However, overproduction eventually led to the farm credit crisis in the 1980s, which resulted in much pain over family farm foreclosures including over 913 farmer suicides in Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota and Montana. For example, since 1969, farmers in southwestern Wisconsin made $166 million less despite the fact that they doubled their productivity. Meanwhile, they spent $429 million more equipment and chemical inputs.

“A community-based system of agriculture is all about relationships,” said Meter who predicts that “over time, communities will choose organic food…because they know the farmer is taking care of the land.”

Meter believes that in general, community-based organic farms make four major contributions: good health and nutrition for the population; a fair distribution of wealth among farmers; connections between people since food is so central to American and ethnic cultures; and the capacity for farmers, not corporations, to decide what foods to produce.

Government subsidies keep the industrial food system afloat because farmers are paid to produce below cost, said Meter. In southwestern Wisconsin, it took $434 million to raise $404 million in produce per year. Subsidies amounted to $21 million, which left a $10 million loss. Farmers made up this loss in off-farm income (89 percent of farm family income), renting out land, and other money-making ventures. Since 2002, 53 percent of farmers reported losses after subsidies, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

“This is not a healthy farm economy especially since $135 million in food is purchased outside the region,” said Meter. “We need to cut down that $135 million by sourcing food locally.”

As it is, the national average of buying local is only .8 percent and the effect is insidious. Wisconsin made $2 billion less on its farm products than it did in 1969. In 2009, it made the same income—adjusted for inflation—as it did in 1932.

“This is a startling reality the general public is not thinking about because it is so far removed from farms,” said Meter. “These are losses in the breadbasket of America! This is not a lucrative way to farm.”

To further advance the notion of a regional food system, a recent Iowa State University study found that farmers in six Midwestern states — Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin — could raise 28 crops in quantities large enough to meet local demand. Sales could generate $882 million in crops, create more than 9,300 jobs and raise about $395 million in labor income.

And it wouldn’t take much land either. One of Iowa’s 99 counties could meet the demand for all six states, said Rich Pirog, associate director for the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State.

The study included apricots, asparagus, mustard greens, bell peppers, onions, broccoli, peaches, cabbage, pears, cantaloupe, plums, carrots, raspberries, cauliflower, snap beans, collard greens, spinach, cucumbers, squash, eggplant, strawberries, garlic, sweet potatoes, kale, tomatoes, watermelon and lettuce — both leaf and head.

Crops such as pumpkins, apples and cherries weren’t included in the study because the Midwest already grows enough of them to meet local and regional demand. Corn, as well as soybeans, are considered grains, not produce.

However, the prospects for a regional food system won’t happen as long as the industrialized food system continues with its commodity payment programs, refrigerated trucks, interstate highway system, and subsidy policies.

It won’t be easy now for farmers to switch to other crops either, said David Swenson, the Iowa State economist who conducted the research. Expertise in the Midwest tends to be in livestock or commodity crops such as corn and soybeans, not produce. The states don’t have policies to encourage expanded fruit and vegetable production, and many consumers don’t think much about where their produce is grown.

The best opportunities for local production of fruits and vegetables are near metropolitan areas where there is a demand for locally grown food.

High gas prices could change everything, said Michelle Miller, associate director of the University of Wisconsin’s Center for Integrated Agricultural Systems, which helped fund the ISU study. California, which produces most of the country’s fruits and vegetables, relies heavily on water and transportation subsidies to ship these products all over the country.

It would also take buyers committing themselves to invest in organic and locally-grown agricultural products, said Meter. People would have to understand how such a strategy would benefit them and their community at the same time. It would require a sense of community or ownership over a place where people were unified on the basis of trust, mutuality, and support and not just a shared geography.

For example, if people in southwestern Wisconsin bought just 25 percent of their food from local sources, all production costs would be offset and create $33 million in new farm income.

“It is not a trivial thing to source food through local people,” said Meter. “That helps fund communities and their schools.”

Meter cited several examples where farmers have been able to invest in local and organic production AND make a difference in their communities.

Organic Valley started out in 1988 with $0 in sales and last year it made $532 million.

“This is a stellar example of a farmers cooperative where the price is fair and farmers work to make it good for all” said Meter. “It is strong, sensible thinking.”

Black Hawk, Iowa, created 475 new jobs in fruits and vegetables totaling $6.3 million in income for the community.

Will Allen started out with earthworm compost and has reduced Milwaukee’s cost of garbage dumping significantly.

A factory shut down in Viroqua, Wisc. and moved its operations to another state. City leaders confronted the company and asked what it would do for the community. In response, the company ended up selling its 100,000 square foot building, which allowed the city to create a regional food processing center, a fitness center, a bakery and cafeteria. The building is now 96 percent occupied.

In Eau Claire, Wisc., farmers, the hospital food service, distributors, and truckers teamed up to create the Food Buyers Co-op.

In Burlington, Vermont, a bakery-to-school program was developed where 2,000 extra artisan loaves were sold for $4 with $2 going to the bakery and $2 going to the school. It created a new profit margin for the bakery.

Such arrangements break down self-interest motives to help move everyone in the community forward, said Meter.

In Northfield, Minn., Home on the Range Poultry created a Latino/Anglo cooperative on quarter-acre sites where they raise chickens. There are 30 to 40 sites and the company owns its own processing center.

“The food systems of the future will also involve rethinking our habits of getting our food cheaply,” concluded Meter. “Such change can build wealth in our communities.”

And when capitalism and business speaks, America listens, particularly when the news is big – from politicians, to CEO’s, to the average Joe. When taxpayers were asked to dish out billions in the case of the recent banking and auto industry bailouts, ears perked and immediate action was taken to bring about long overdue and necessary change. Business could not continue under threat and no stone was to be left unturned. The banking sector was overhauled and policed while the auto industry was told to go electric or go home.

In both of these laborious examples of change, are there lessons that the sustainable food movement can learn to further its invaluable (and arguably far more laudable) agenda? Could our movement use these latest examples of change, attention and action within the economic and business realms to push through its goals?

Or can it be happening already? Take for instance the most recent case (and latest round) over the taxing of sodas and other sweetened beverages – a food category laden with processing and central to the debate over high fructose corn syrup – where business rhetoric coupled with a state of urgency has gotten a great deal of airplay, from CNN to the Colbert Report.

When Americans heard that their tax dollars will be going toward a comprehensive health-care system overhaul at a cost of nearly $1.2 trillion and that taxing sweetened drinks (a large culprit in the rise of obesity and chronic disease in the nation) could make up for about $24 billion of that, goals of the sustainable food movement reached the halls of Congress.

Although the sweetened beverage and soda tax debate is far from over and the idea may prove to be one of the fifteen options for bankrolling health care reform listed by the Senate Finance Committee that gets thrown to the wayside, at least an important subject of the sustainable food movement was heard. And this could just be the beginning. The soda tax debate could be used as platform for further and deeper analysis of our food system in the coming years.

And how about the salmonella scare? The real strength of food sustainability’s goals came not so much during the outbreak as it did in the aftermath. When it was unveiled that the recall could cost producers and small businesses up to $1 billion in economic losses, 2,100 products were pulled off shelves (one of the largest recalls in U.S. history), 683 sickened people needed care, PR budgets were blown, stock prices plummeted, and millions would be needed in settlement costs, the blame game began to turn toward better regulation of our food system and a reassessment of the FDA. Here again, sustainable food began to hit the mainstream – or at least peered its head a bit more.

In both of these examples, the language of business and economics helped open the door for the case of sustainable food and changes to our food system. How much more could be achieved if sustainability proponents used business rhetoric as a tool and powerful ally in the transmission of their ideas? Why not fight business with business?

This can be accomplished in light of the two greatest challenges facing the Obama Administration today: health-care and climate change. Sustainable food advocates must be ready and waiting in the wings for these debates, business-speak in tow, for climate change and health-care are undoubtedly the next Bear Stearns and General Motors, but on colossal scales. And so incredibly enmeshed are the goals of sustainable food with the foreboding perils of climate change and health care that these could be the next great opportunities for change to be made in our food system.

We don’t need Michael Pollan and others to tell us again. Diet plays a large role in chronic disease, the leading cause of death in the U.S.  Chronic diseases are responsible for about 75% of health care costs or about $975 billion. Obesity costs New York state $242 million per year in public and private medical expenses and diabetes patients pay nearly $2000 per year in drug store expenses. And a similar list can be made for our climate woes.

These facts provide some great ammunition. We can discuss taxes. Required government spending for these problems will affect not only our generation’s tax burden, but the tax burden of future generations as well. We can discuss investment, job creation and revenue streams. Just as the auto industry is leaning on electric vehicles and land is being transformed into space for harnessing wind energy, sustainable food systems and processes can be assessed in the transformation to new green economic sectors and green jobs. And we can discuss growth. Sustainable food need not be anti-science and anti-innovation, it’s model can instead lead to a new ways of making and distributing food in the 21st century.

Speaking and communicating in the language of business and economics, unfortunate or not, is a necessity in the fight to change our food supply. Whether discussing the morality over school lunches, the ideals of locally grown and distributed food, or fair and decent wages and labor conditions, business rhetoric must be kept at the tip of our tongues. Whether good or bad, economics and business are and forever will be at the heart of how our country operates and communication of messages will work a whole lot better when money takes the drivers seat. Just remember, taxes will always get ‘em talking.