Eat the Stimulus
Investing in a new food system should
be part of the economic-spending package |
By Tom Philpott
09 Jan 2009
from Grist
President-elect Barack Obama and the new Congress can't afford to turn their attention to reforming the food system.
We've got two wars to fight, the Middle East conflict is raging again,
the financial system is in chaos, and layoffs are mounting. And don't
forget the likelihood of trillion-dollar annual budget deficits for years to come. Food, it's clear, is just too banal when matched up against those challenges.
That's the conventional wisdom, anyway.
Even some veteran food-reform advocates accept the "food-must-wait"
logic. "I think it's somewhere between na�ve and fairy tale to think
[Obama's] No. 1 focus is going to be on food," Ann Cooper recently told The New York Times. Cooper is the "renegade lunch lady"
who's made a mission of turning public-school cafeterias into places
where people actually cook nutritious food. When someone as bold as she
preaches patience, it's time to sit up and take note.
But while food can't be the nation's No. 1 priority, we can no longer afford to keep it on the back burner, either. As Michael Pollan made clear in his widely read open letter to the next president
last fall, our food system contributes mightily to problems that have
been bedeviling our society for decades and show no sign of letting up:
dependence on greenhouse gas-spewing petroleum, violent entanglements
in the regions where that resource is concentrated, and a flailing,
unjust health care system.
Pollan deftly defined the food system as a prime leverage point. Reform
it, he argued, and you create opportunities to really treat these
on-the-verge-of-metastasizing maladies. Ignore it, he warned, and we
lurch ever closer to climate and public-health catastrophes.
Spice Up the Stimulus Package
So the conventional wisdom is wrong; food-system reform can't wait. But
how do we elevate it on the national agenda when the political class is
focused on other things? I have an idea that wouldn't require a
radically new program or a major expenditure of political capital.
Obama has already argued that a comprehensive "stimulus package"
-- a mammoth government expenditure, fiscal deficit be damned -- is
necessary to revive the economy as it stumbles into the worst recession
in at least a generation. The president-elect reckons that the package -- a combination of new spending and tax cuts -- will cost between $775 million and $1.2 trillion.
This represents a stunningly large claim on the nation's resources. The
new administration and Congress are obligated to spend it in ways that
don't just create immediate jobs, but that also generate positive
ripple effects for decades to come. At this point, the great bulk of
expenditures seems destined to flow toward repairing the nation's
creaking road-and-bridge infrastructure.
But a better use would be to dedicate a large portion of the stimulus
to infrastructure that bolsters local and regional food systems.
Despite the dramatic recent success of farmers markets, CSAs, and other
initiatives, the great bulk of the food consumed in this country is
grown in chemical-intensive monocrops, processed until it's
unrecognizable, and hauled vast distances in highway-chewing,
greenhouse gas-spewing trucks. As I've argued so many times, that's because our nation has spent decades building a food infrastructure geared to industrial production.
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FEATURED PRODUCERKing's Hill Farm
19370 Highway G
Mineral Point, WI 53565
 Joel
and Jai Kellum are the proud new farm managers of King's Hill Farm in
Mineral Point, Wisconsin. They have been certified organic farmers since 2000,
and are excited about the 50 acres of vegetables they now grow at
King's Hill. They are currently implementing permaculture methods to
further their sustainability and increase their diversity to include
fruits, nuts, berries and wildlife foods.
Joel and Jai are offering 2009 CSA shares for pick up at the farm or at the Chicago Botanic Garden. They also offer a work trade membership for folks who live near Mineral Point. Additionally, they are looking to establish new pick-up sites for their CSA from Madison to Dubuque and in Chicagoland. Contact Jai if you are interested in starting a pick-up site in your area!
Working with my family on a unified goal of feeding other families,
providing jobs for the local community, and providing natural space for
the local community to feel welcome to. Watching the life process of a
season and being a part of it are amazing gifts I have in my life.
It is financially a burden. We play monopoly constantly, hoping to just
keep our heads above water. But our quality of life makes the money
shuffle worth it.
Our diversity is back to the old school farm ways. We have animals on
the farm to provide some of our compost needs. We have bees for our
pollination needs which also provide us with honey. We have veggies to
fill our bellies and many more, we have many perennials in the works so
that someday we can also have our fruit and nut needs provided for as
well.
We hope to be so well established that people are coming out to the
farm to partake in the process, pick their own, and we can continue to
farm without worrying who will support us. The goal is to provide our
food as completely as possible, because to us, that is the definition
of sustainable. We hope that our knowledge of farming will also feed
many other people well into the future.
You can find produce from King's Hill Farm through their CSA or at the Chicago Botanic Garden Farmers Market.
For more information about King's Hill Farm,
call Jai at 608.776.8413, email her,
or visit their website. |
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CALL FOR ACTIONHelp schools earn the right to purchase organic
and artificial hormone-free milk!
Food and Water Watch is launching the School Milk Campaign here in Chicago to ensure our public schools have the explicit right to purchase milk that is organic and artificial hormone-free. Over the next three months, they will be building public support nationally, and specifically here in Chicago, to make sure our elected officials stand up for this right. You can help right now by signing their online petition. To learn how you can make an even bigger impact over the next three months, come to the: *School Milk Campaign Community Kickoff Meeting*
When: Thursday January 22nd
Time: 7:00-8:00pm
Where: Oak Park Maze Branch Public Library
845 Gunderson Avenue, Oak Park, IL 60304
For more information, please email or call Dan at Food and Water Watch at 440-724-4716. |
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A 50-year Farm Bill
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By WES JACKSON and WENDELL BERRY, Op-Ed
Published: January 4, 2009
The New York Times
THE extraordinary rainstorms last June caused catastrophic soil erosion in the grain lands of Iowa, where there were gullies 200 feet wide. But even worse damage is done over the long term under normal rainfall - by the little rills and sheets of erosion on incompletely covered or denuded cropland, and by various degradations resulting from industrial procedures and technologies alien to both agriculture and nature.
Soil that is used and abused in this way is as nonrenewable as (and far more valuable than) oil. Unlike oil, it has no technological substitute - and no powerful friends in the halls of government.
Agriculture has too often involved an insupportable abuse and waste of soil, ever since the first farmers took away the soil-saving cover and roots of perennial plants. Civilizations have destroyed themselves by destroying their farmland. This irremediable loss, never enough noticed, has been made worse by the huge monocultures and continuous soil-exposure of the agriculture we now practice.
To the problem of soil loss, the industrialization of agriculture has added pollution by toxic chemicals, now universally present in our farmlands and streams. Some of this toxicity is associated with the widely acclaimed method of minimum tillage. We should not poison our soils to save them.
Industrial agricultural has made our food supply entirely dependent on fossil fuels and, by substituting technological "solutions" for human work and care, has virtually destroyed the cultures of husbandry (imperfect as they may have been) once indigenous to family farms and farming neighborhoods.
Clearly, our present ways of agriculture are not sustainable, and so our food supply is not sustainable. We must restore ecological health to our agricultural landscapes, as well as economic and cultural stability to our rural communities.
For 50 or 60 years, we have let ourselves believe that as long as we have money we will have food. That is a mistake. If we continue our offenses against the land and the labor by which we are fed, the food supply will decline, and we will have a problem far more complex than the failure of our paper economy. The government will bring forth no food by providing hundreds of billons of dollars to the agribusiness corporations.
Any restorations will require, above all else, a substantial increase in the acreages of perennial plants. The most immediately practicable way of doing this is to go back to crop rotations that include hay, pasture and grazing animals.
But a more radical response is necessary if we are to keep eating and preserve our land at the same time. In fact, research in Canada, Australia, China and the United States over the last 30 years suggests that perennialization of the major grain crops like wheat, rice, sorghum and sunflowers can be developed in the foreseeable future. By increasing the use of mixtures of grain-bearing perennials, we can better protect the soil and substantially reduce greenhouse gases, fossil-fuel use and toxic pollution.
Carbon sequestration would increase, and the husbandry of water and soil nutrients would become much more efficient. And with an increase in the use of perennial plants and grazing animals would come more employment opportunities in agriculture - provided, of course, that farmers would be paid justly for their work and their goods.
Thoughtful farmers and consumers everywhere are already making many necessary changes in the production and marketing of food. But we also need a national agricultural policy that is based upon ecological principles. We need a 50-year farm bill that addresses forthrightly the problems of soil loss and degradation, toxic pollution, fossil-fuel dependency and the destruction of rural communities.
This is a political issue, certainly, but it far transcends the farm politics we are used to. It is an issue as close to every one of us as our own stomachs.
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