Opinion

Eating isn’t just about consuming; it is about growing an economy

By BILL CHAISSON
We received a press release today from Hunger Free Vermont because it was recently School Nutrition Day and this nonprofit was in Montpelier reminding the legislators how important a healthy diet is for kids.

The third paragraph begins with the sentence, “Farm to School has been a successful program that has helped schools incorporate local foods into their meals, as well as to move toward universal school meals and breakfast after the bell.”

The incorporation of local foods into school meals is a tremendously important public initiative. It doesn’t just help the children eat better in school, it helps the entire community. 

Farming is perhaps the easiest example of using local natural resources to construct a local economy. 

Is the farming great here? Not really. The short growing season, rocky soils and steep slopes made upstate New York extremely attractive when the Erie Canal opened in the 1820s and the first exodus from New England began.

But New England is most definitely arable and modern farming techniques make it more productive than it was in the 18th and early 19th centuries. For example, the use of hoop houses greatly extends the growing season and makes it possible to grow cold weather crops like lettuce when there aren’t even any leaves on the trees.

In the village where I lived in upstate New York the elementary school children had a vegetable garden on the school campus and the produce was served in the school cafeteria. It has been shown conclusively that the best way to get children to eat their vegetables is to have them grow and prepare them themselves.

The appetites of hundreds of school children eating two meals a day provides a nice steady market for local farms. School is out in the summer, of course, but that is the easiest time for farmers to find markets elsewhere.

And what about in the colder months when gardens (even hoop houses) are dormant?

That is when the “value-added item” comes to the fore. Many more ambitious home gardeners can and freeze their produce, if for no other reason than it comes in too quickly for a family to eat during the season. 

Local farmers can do a scaled-up version of this, if they are assured of a market, which would help convince a bank to give them the necessary loan to build the facilities that would meet public health standards and employee the people to do the work.

The invention of refrigerated rail cars (dramatized in John Steinbeck’s “East of Eden,” which took place just before World War I) was one of the many inventions that began to nationalize the production and distribution of food. The expansion of the interstate highway system and the increasing corporatization of California and Midwest farms scaled up agriculture to make it quite difficult for small-scale local farms to compete.

But the American attitude toward food has undergone a remarkable change over the last 15 years or so. I was raised on organic vegetables in the 1970s and ate the eggs from our own chickens. But hey, we were urban hippies and not exactly on the curve.

Now there is an organic produce section in nearly every supermarket and a growing number of people are willing to pay more per pound for a free-range chicken or a cut of beef from a grass-fed cow. Come to that, a growing number of young people don’t eat meat at all.

Locally-produced food is very often naturally raised food. With the bastardization of the standards for organic food, the leading edge of conscious eaters are putting locally-produced before organically-produced food.

Eating isn’t just a consumer issue, people are realizing, it is an economic issue. What you eat doesn’t just affect your own health, if affects the health of your entire community.

When the farming sector grows and it branches into production of value-added items, it begins to employ a significant number of people. It also begins to require an expanded service economy to keep in materials and repairs. 

 

Like Joni said:

We are stardust

Billion year old carbon

We are golden

Caught in the devil’s bargain

And we’ve got to get ourselves

Back to the garden

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