This event will be a chance to raise funds for the great work Just Food is doing, including facilitating Community Supported Agriculture (CSAs) in New York City, providing support to urban farmers, conducting workshops and hands on training, cooking demonstrations and food justice advocacy work.

The event will also recognize Brian Halweil, the executive editor of Edible Manhattan, Edible Brooklyn, and Edible East End magazines for his contribution to the local food movement, as well as Jean Paul and Jody Courtens of Roxbury Farms, as well as garden leader and advocate Karen Washington, and East New York Farms!

In addition to artisanal, handcrafted beer — the event is being held in conjuction with New York Craft Beer Week — many of New York’s sustainable-minded restaurants will be feeding the crowd good, clean and fair food — including Angelica Kitchen, Aureole, Blue Hill, Candle 79, Cookshop, Dell’anima, Five Points, Hundred Acres, Da Silvano, Dirt Candy, Gotham Bar and Grill, Gramercy Tavern, Great Performances, The Green Table, Jean-Georges, Jimmy’s #43, Marlow and Sons, Mas (farmhouse), Palo Santo, Pure Food and Wine, Rose Water, Rouge Tomate, Saul, Telepan, and The Tipsy Parson.

Tickets are still available! Get yours here and support a great organization.

Local foods are patriotic, whether you’re buying them directly from producers in your area or growing your own. They’re good for our local farmers, our economies, our health, and the health of our planet.  Local foods give us pause to (re)consider our connection with the land and those who produce our food.  And they taste great because they’re fresh from the soil.  (Who says that what is good for you can’t taste good, too?)

This Fourth of July, please consider celebrating your independence by including locally sourced foods in your menu.  Roger Doiron of Kitchen Gardeners International – who earlier this year petitioned the Obama administration to plant a Victory Garden on the White House lawn – recently launched Food Independence Day to encourage local eating on the Fourth.  Part of this effort was to gain the commitment of individuals to include local foods in their menu.  Another goal?  To petition our nation’s 50 governors to consume local foods and publish their menus for the day.

Let Food Freedom Ring!  Several governors have published their menus, and you can help us get more to join the effort.  Sign the petition at www.FoodIndependenceDay.org and check out the Associated Press story currently running:

Governors don’t have to look far for Fourth fare
07/02/2009
By CLARKE CANFIELD  / Associated Press

“This is an opportunity to celebrate our food culture,” he said.

On the day Americans celebrate the land of the free, a Maine man wants governors to feel free to live off the land.

A sustainable food advocate who campaigned for the Obamas to plant a garden at the White House has now received pledges from several governor’s offices to feature local foods on their Fourth of July menus, from Maine lobster to South Dakota pheasant jerky to milkshakes made with Montana huckleberries.

Roger Doiron said he was inspired to lobby governors to promote locally grown food after a patch of White House lawn was turned into an organic vegetable garden this spring.

“I said to myself, ‘Maybe we should try to look to other first families to eat by example and use their Fourth of July to make that happen,’” said Doiron, who wants to brand the holiday “Food Independence Day.”

Doiron is founder of Kitchen Gardeners International, a nonprofit that promotes food self-reliance through kitchen gardens and sustainable local food systems. Local foods are good for the palate, the health, local economies, the environment and your wallet, he said.

For the “Food Independence Day” effort, he teamed up with the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy Food and Society Fellows Program and the Mother Nature Network.

After setting up a Facebook page to promote the idea, they heard from more than 6,000 people who vowed to build their July Fourth menus around local and home-grown ingredients.

The governors’ offices in Idaho, Maine, Maryland, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Texas and West Virginia pledged to do the same, Doiron said. The office of Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty said the family would be out of state on July Fourth but would make efforts to eat locally through the year.

In Maine, the family of Gov. John Baldacci is planning a reunion this weekend that will include Maine lobsters, clams, mussels, potato salad and blueberry pie.

The menu in Maryland will have local crab cakes. South Dakota Gov. Mike Rounds will be serving up pheasant jerky (the state bird) and walleye (the state fish) along with hamburgers and hot dogs.

Montana first lady Nancy Schweitzer is planning a meal that includes Montana-raised beef, milkshakes made with local huckleberries, and huckleberry crisp. In West Virginia, the produce is coming from a local farmers market, and tomatoes and herbs were grown at the governor’s mansion.

In North Dakota, the meal will feature hamburgers made from North Dakota beef, along with hamburger buns made from local wheat, potato salad from local potatoes, and baked beans with bacon using local beans and North Dakota-raised pork.

Agriculture is North Dakota’s No. 1 industry, said Donald Caton, spokesman for Gov. John Hoeven. “It wasn’t difficult to put together a home-grown menu,” he said.

For his part, Doiron’s Fourth of July menu will include potatoes, dill, peas, salad makings and strawberries from his home garden in Scarborough. He also plans to dig clams from a local flat.

“This is an opportunity to celebrate our food culture,” he said.

P.S. from the author of this post, aka Victory Grower:  Today, a group of Food and Society Policy Fellows gathered on the phone to talk about Food Independence Day and the local foods we’d be eating with our families.  It was small talk about food from our gardens and food we’re purchasing from local farmers.  About preparing the recipes we’ve borrowed from one another.  Small talk, but sharing big ideas about public policy and food systems and culture and food independence.  Because small actions can result in big changes.

So, from the reaches of Maine (and Roger’s little “white house”) to the coast of Southern California (Rose), to the Pacific Northwest (Erin), to our nation’s heartland (Angie, Eric and Lisa) — or whatever place of the country you call home — let Food Freedom Ring!

At the UC-sponsored professional conference that I recently attended, I had the opportunity to hear historian James McWilliams speak.   I have read some of McWilliams’s work previously and greatly admire his research and work. (He’s also an incredibly likable and humorous man on a personal level). Like me, McWilliams is an historian attempting to use the past to inform current public policy in the nation’s food system. (I like this. We need more historians informing public policy in general, and particularly vis-à-vis food systems). Our research focuses on different areas; we agree on some things, but disagree on others. I will be reviewing his upcoming book, Just Food: How Locavores Are Endangering the Future of Food and How We Can Truly Eat Responsibly (Little Brown, June 2009), for this blog.

The title of McWilliams’ talk was “Business, But Not Business as Usual: A Proposal for the Future of Sustainable Agriculture.” It was offered to academic and program staff affiliated with UC’s Agriculture and Natural Resources Division, some of us working with Extension, others with campuses.  For an organization charged with working with all aspects of the food system, we don’t actually talk about it at the systems level much. This conference was different: McWilliams offered the plenary, and spoke directly to the topic. There were also two other sessions/workshops that discussed these sorts of issues; they were very well attended, and have provoked discussion and conversation that is continuing in post-conference settings. Not just nationally, but in my own institution, forces and issues and needs and agendas are converging in a perfect storm of interest in the food system. Change is inevitable; nearly every institution is going through a period of “creative destruction” due to budget constraints. There are new challenges and opportunities for all of us.

McWilliams’ opened his talk by asserting that fixing the food system is one of the most pressing tasks we face in this country. Agreed. Nearly every problem we face as a nation can be addressed in some way – and in some big ways – by improving the current food system. But McWilliams made a statement with which I heartily disagree: essentially, that the Locavore movement seeks to “banish to the dustbin” other models.

I’ve never termed myself a “Locavore,” although I’m a strong believer in the value of strong local and regional food systems, and actively promote them. I believe that multiple food systems exist – and probably always will – and that most of us participate in several kinds of food systems simultaneously. I don’t seek the destruction of any food system. I seek instead, the room and opportunity to develop alternatives for the places and situations in our country where the predominant, or meta, food system is not working effectively.

McWilliams argued for a kind of pragmatism that I find appealing in a general and theoretical sense…work within the system rather than against it. There’s a certain logic in that…perhaps…sometimes.  Using the success of Forest Ethics as a model, McWilliams argued that those of us advocating for local food systems should be more pragmatic, reconsider working with agribusiness, find common ground, seek real solutions, and be prepared to compromise some, to seek evolution in the food system rather than revolution. McWilliams presents a persuasive model, in a persuasive way. Evolutionary rather than revolutionary.

But I’ve had other people to persuade me, too, to remind me that real change is needed, and needed now. Will Allen is someone I admire immensely. I heard him speak (again) the week before McWilliams made his presentation at UC. The creator of Growing Power, a MacArthur genius grant recipient, and a national leader in the sustainable food systems movement, Allen provides eloquent testimony about the kinds of changes needed to make the food system more effectively meet the needs of some parts of urban America. In his case, that has involved creating a new kind of food system model. What he has done in Milwaukee within a framework of urban agriculture is simply astounding. There is a lot to be learned from this work. Allen is a big man, physically; he also has big ideas. What I love about his work is that he applies his visionary ideas in ways that are highly impactful on the local level.  I believe his work has the ability to be scaled up, which could have positive implications for other urban areas.

Allen has recently published a manifesto proposing a novel and worthy public policy idea, suggesting the creation of a “public-private enabling institution” called the Centers for Urban Agriculture. Per Allen’s document:

It would incorporate a national training and outreach center, a large working urban farmstead, a research and development center, a policy institute, and a state-of-the-future urban agriculture demonstration center into which all of these elements would be combined in a functioning community food system scaled to the needs of a large city. We proposed that this working institution – not a “think tank” but a “do tank” – be based in Milwaukee, where Growing Power has already created an operating model on just two acres. But ultimately, satellite centers would become established in urban areas across the nation. Each would be the hub of a local or regional farm-to-market community food system that would provide sustainable jobs, job training, food production and food distribution to those most in need of nutritional support and security.

Allen is not only proposing a new kind of model for urban food systems…it seems to me that he is proposing a (largely) new location for Extension work and new kind of Extension model.   Allen’s proposal seems to combine elements of working both within and outside of the system. Especially because I’m familiar with his work, I find it compelling and thought-provoking. It is clear to me that our current land grant system – in a national sense – has not put enough muscle into urban agricultural and local food systems efforts.  We have made many notable contributions, to be certain, but our institutional resources have not flowed into this area in the large way that would be needed to effect national change. There are many reasons for this: years of declining funding; the relative dearth of funded research opportunities in this area, at least until recently; political pressures; lack of mandate; lack of understanding of the interconnectedness of our work in agriculture and human areas; a failure to fully anticipate the converging crises and challenges facing us; and perhaps even a lack of awareness of how large, mainstream and dynamic the interest in sustainable foods systems has become.

I’d suggest that everyone reading this blog read Will Allen’s proposal and James McWilliams’ soon-to-be-released book. Their work represents stark differences in opinion on options for local food systems. Point and counter-point.

A final note: As we participated in this UC conference, which was focused on creating implementation strategies for a Strategic Vision plan UC Cooperative Extension and its related components have developed relating to our work for the next 15 years, we were initially told to “think out of the box.”

Then a better framing statement was offered…”There is no box.”

McWilliams’ ideas actually retain the box – or framework – of the existing national and largely industrialized food system. Allen’s work assumes no box.