City moves ahead with pound for livestock
By Richard Rolke - Vernon Morning Star
Published: May 12, 2009 7:00 PM
Urban hens are taking flight in Vernon, but that means officials must handle anyone breaking the law.
On Monday, council instructed staff to determine whether a private contractor is interested in setting up a pound for chickens, rabbits or any other livestock.
“Perhaps a local farmer would take on this responsibility and look after loose cattle,” said Clint Kanester, bylaw enforcement manager.
“It gives us a place where the animals can be cared for before they are disposed of through auction.”
In previous years, staff have had problems with livestock being loose in residential areas and finding someone who would capture the animals and care for them.
“Should council wish to implement an urban hen program, impound regulations and a pound may be required to ensure regulated numbers are maintained,” states a staff report.
Coun. Buffy Baumbrough supports backyard hens as a way of increasing food security among residents, and she also backs establishing a livestock pound.
“If someone is in contravention of the bylaw, what do we do with the hens?” said Baumbrough.
But Coun. Jack Gilroy is concerned that city staff will be running around town checking on animals.
“I want to make sure this isn’t going to create a bylaw nightmare,” he said.
It will cost about $6,000 a year for a livestock pound contract and it’s anticipated that the city will earn about $400 a year in permit fees from 20 properties with four hens each.
In terms of allowing backyard hens, there will be restrictions on where the chicken coop can be located in a yard and in relation to the property lines.
However, that has Coun. Shawn Lee questioning whether a building permit will be required for the coop.
“You’re not just throwing up a bunch of chicken wire. You need a decent building to do it,” he said.
Wednesday, May 13, 2009
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
Food Talk in the BC Election 2009
It is the eve of a new provincial government in BC and I am reflecting on the last 28 days of campaigning. My electoral area, Shuswap-Monashee saw some interesting topics debated, the first all candidates meeting was organized by the Food Action Society of the North Okanagan. Food is a strong topic here as a core agriculture area in BC. The meat regulations was interestingly the one topic that all candidates supported some kind of reform/review, but that was about it. The liberal candidate generally dismissed food issues, and confirmed he would not support core funding for food intitiatives. The NDP candidate was supportive of many questions, but I was so disappointed in his knowledge of most issues, he just did not know. The conservative candidate was generally against spending any money on anything, (ok predictable), but again really didn't know the food issues. The green candidate, is a well known food advocate and outspoken community leader, she spoke well on the issues overall in particular around meat regulations, funding for core local programs, and the links between food and climate change. But none of them were able to speak to the issues that linked poverty and food access.
At this moment, an ex. liberal MLA is discussing food/agriculture on cbc radio, she discussed the agricultural plan as an amazing achievement by the liberals. Hah, our liberal candidate stated he would not increase funding for the Ministry of Agriculture, it is the lowest by far in funding across Canada, and according to people within the Ministry (pers. comm.) there is no way they can implement many of the objectives of this plan, since they have no money for any of their programs.
Only a few hours till we know the fate of the next four years, but despite the outcome of the election we can all still focus on working in our communities, supporting our farmers, and working for change.
At this moment, an ex. liberal MLA is discussing food/agriculture on cbc radio, she discussed the agricultural plan as an amazing achievement by the liberals. Hah, our liberal candidate stated he would not increase funding for the Ministry of Agriculture, it is the lowest by far in funding across Canada, and according to people within the Ministry (pers. comm.) there is no way they can implement many of the objectives of this plan, since they have no money for any of their programs.
Only a few hours till we know the fate of the next four years, but despite the outcome of the election we can all still focus on working in our communities, supporting our farmers, and working for change.
Thursday, April 30, 2009
Launch of Community Food Mapping Initiative in the North Okanagan
Food Action Society of the North Okanagan and the Centre for Social, Spatial and Economic Justice at UBC-Okanagan, launch an exciting regional food project. We are looking for community volunteers to help in developing the map and in showcasing our local food growers, producers, markets and community food projects.
We want to tell the story of our regions food and build a valuable community resource to help in building a strong regional food system. Come learn about the project and share your ideas around local food in your neighborhood.
Where: People's Place, Rm 001, 3402 27 Ave, downtown Vernon
When: Wednesday, May 13th 7pm
We want to tell the story of our regions food and build a valuable community resource to help in building a strong regional food system. Come learn about the project and share your ideas around local food in your neighborhood.
Where: People's Place, Rm 001, 3402 27 Ave, downtown Vernon
When: Wednesday, May 13th 7pm
Monday, April 27, 2009
Swine Flu linked to Mexico's Industrial Agricutlure
After the announcement today that British Columbia has confirmed cases of Swine Flu, this came to me via a US community food security list serve I subscribe too. 68 people have now died in Mexico and it has spread into California, Texas, and yes, BC.
Please read below.
According to the swine flu time-line put together by a company called Veratect, who evidently map infection disease events for clients like the WHO & CDC:
"Residents [of La Gloria, Perote Municipality, Veracruz State, Mexico] believed the outbreak had been caused by contamination from pig breeding farms located in the area. They believed that the farms, operated by Granjas Carroll, polluted the atmosphere and local water bodies, which in turn led to the disease outbreak. According to residents, the company denied
responsibility for the outbreak and attributed the cases to 'flu.' However, a municipal health official stated that preliminary investigations indicated that the disease vector was a type of fly that reproduces in pig waste and that the outbreak was linked to the pig farms. It was unclear whether health officials had identified a suspected pathogen responsible for this
outbreak." (1)
Granjas Carroll is a subsidiary of Smithfield Foods. According to the Smithfield Foods website, Granjas Carroll produced 950,000 hogs in fiscal 2008. (2)
So now it is possible that our Global Industrial Food System is responsible for unleashing a deadly pandemic, somehow I am not surprised nor do I think it is the first time...
Please read below.
According to the swine flu time-line put together by a company called Veratect, who evidently map infection disease events for clients like the WHO & CDC:
"Residents [of La Gloria, Perote Municipality, Veracruz State, Mexico] believed the outbreak had been caused by contamination from pig breeding farms located in the area. They believed that the farms, operated by Granjas Carroll, polluted the atmosphere and local water bodies, which in turn led to the disease outbreak. According to residents, the company denied
responsibility for the outbreak and attributed the cases to 'flu.' However, a municipal health official stated that preliminary investigations indicated that the disease vector was a type of fly that reproduces in pig waste and that the outbreak was linked to the pig farms. It was unclear whether health officials had identified a suspected pathogen responsible for this
outbreak." (1)
Granjas Carroll is a subsidiary of Smithfield Foods. According to the Smithfield Foods website, Granjas Carroll produced 950,000 hogs in fiscal 2008. (2)
So now it is possible that our Global Industrial Food System is responsible for unleashing a deadly pandemic, somehow I am not surprised nor do I think it is the first time...
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
Is Local Food Better? Yes, But There's More by Sarah DeWeerdt
Published on Monday, April 20, 2009 by World Watch Magazine
Is Local Food Better? Yes, But There's More
by Sarah DeWeerdt
In 1993, a Swedish researcher calculated that the ingredients of a typical Swedish breakfast-apple, bread, butter, cheese, coffee, cream, orange juice, sugar-traveled a distance equal to the circumference of the Earth before reaching the Scandinavian table. In 2005, a researcher in Iowa found that the milk, sugar, and strawberries that go into a carton of strawberry yogurt collectively journeyed 2,211 miles (3,558 kilometers) just to get to the processing plant. As the local-food movement has come of age, this concept of "food miles" (or "-kilometers")-roughly, the distance food travels from farm to plate-has come to dominate the discussion, particularly in the United States, the United Kingdom, and parts of Western Europe.
The concept offers a kind of convenient shorthand for describing a food system that's centralized, industrialized, and complex almost to the point of absurdity. And, since our food is transported all those miles in ships, trains, trucks, and planes, attention to food miles also links up with broader concerns about the emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases from fossil fuel-based transport.
In the United States, the most frequently cited statistic is that food travels 1,500 miles on average from farm to consumer. That figure comes from work led by Rich Pirog, the associate director of the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University (he is also behind the strawberry-yogurt calculations referenced above). In 2001, in some of the country's first food-miles research, Pirog and a group of researchers analyzed the transport of 28 fruits and vegetables to Iowa markets via local, regional, and conventional food distribution systems. The team calculated that produce in the conventional system-a national network using semitrailer trucks to haul food to large grocery stores-traveled an average of 1,518 miles (about 2,400 kilometers). By contrast, locally sourced food traveled an average of just 44.6 miles (72 kilometers) to Iowa markets.
In light of such contrasts, the admonition to "eat local" just seems like common sense. And indeed, at the most basic level, fewer transport miles do mean fewer emissions. Pirog's team found that the conventional food distribution system used 4 to 17 times more fuel and emitted 5 to 17 times more CO2 than the local and regional (the latter of which roughly meant Iowa-wide) systems. Similarly, a Canadian study estimated that replacing imported food with equivalent items locally grown in the Waterloo, Ontario, region would save transport-related emissions equivalent to nearly 50,000 metric tons of CO2, or the equivalent of taking 16,191 cars off the road.
What's "Local"?
But what exactly is "local food" in the first place? How local is local?
One problem with trying to determine whether local food is greener is that there's no universally accepted definition of local food. Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon, authors of The 100-Mile Diet, write that they chose this boundary for their experiment in eating locally because "a 100-mile radius is large enough to reach beyond a big city and small enough to feel truly local. And it rolls off the tongue more easily than the ‘160-kilometer diet.'" Sage Van Wing, who coined the term "locavore" with a friend when she was living in Marin County, California, was inspired to eat local after reading Coming Home to Eat, a chronicle of author Gary Paul Nabhan's own year-long effort to eat only foods grown within 250 miles of his Northern Arizona home. She figured that if Nabhan could accomplish that in the desert, she could do even better in the year-round agricultural cornucopia that is Northern California, so she decided to limit herself to food from within 100 miles.
There's some evidence that a popular understanding of local food is, at least in some places, coalescing around this 100-mile limit. A 2008 Leopold Institute survey of consumers throughout the United States found that two-thirds considered local food to mean food grown within 100 miles. Still, a variety of other definitions also persist. Sometimes local means food grown within a county, within a state or province, or even, in the case of some small European nations, within the country. In the United Kingdom, reports Tara Garnett of the Food Climate Research Network, "on the whole, organizations supporting local are now less likely to put numbers on things." Meanwhile, rural sociologist Clare Hinrichs, of Pennsylvania State University, has found that in Iowa local has shifted from signifying food grown within a county or a neighboring one to food grown anywhere in the state. For some in the agricultural community, promoting and eating "local Iowa food" is almost a kind of food patriotism, aimed at counteracting the forces of globalization that have put the state's family farmers at risk.
All of those are perfectly valid ways of thinking about local. But they don't have all that much to do with environmental costs and benefits.
Tradeoffs
In any case, warns Pirog, food miles/kilometers don't tell the whole story. "Food miles are a good measure of how far food has traveled. But they're not a very good measure of the food's environmental impact."
That impact depends on how the food was transported, not just how far. For example, trains are 10 times more efficient at moving freight, ton for ton, than trucks are. So you could eat potatoes trucked in from 100 miles away, or potatoes shipped by rail from 1,000 miles away, and the greenhouse gas emissions associated with their transport from farm to table would be roughly the same.
The environmental impact of food also depends on how it is grown. Swedish researcher Annika Carlsson-Kanyama led a study that found it was better, from a greenhouse-gas perspective, for Swedes to buy Spanish tomatoes than Swedish tomatoes, because the Spanish tomatoes were grown in open fields while the local ones were grown in fossil-fuel-heated greenhouses.
That seems obvious, but there are subtler issues at play as well. For example, Spain has plenty of the warmth and sunshine that tomatoes crave, but its main horticultural region is relatively arid and is likely to become more drought-prone in the future as a result of global climate change. What if water shortages require Spanish growers to install energy-intensive irrigation systems? And what if greenhouses in northern Europe were heated with renewable energy?
Perhaps it's inevitable that we consumers gravitate to a focus on food miles-the concept represents the last step before food arrives on our tables, the part of the agricultural supply chain that's most visible to us. And indeed, all other things being equal, it's better to purchase something grown locally than the same thing grown far away. "It is true that if you're comparing exact systems, the same food grown in the same way, then obviously, yes, the food transported less will have a smaller carbon footprint," Pirog says.
But a broader, more comprehensive picture of all the tradeoffs in the food system requires tracking greenhouse gas emissions through all phases of a food's production, transport, and consumption. And life-cycle analysis (LCA), a research method that provides precisely this "cradle-to-grave" perspective, reveals that food miles represent a relatively small slice of the greenhouse-gas pie.
In a paper published last year, Christopher Weber and H. Scott Matthews, of Carnegie Mellon University, wove together data from a variety of U.S. government sources into a comprehensive life-cycle analysis of the average American diet. According to their calculations, final delivery from producer or processor to the point of retail sale accounts for only 4 percent of the U.S. food system's greenhouse gas emissions. Final delivery accounts for only about a quarter of the total miles, and 40 percent of the transport-related emissions, in the food supply chain as a whole. That's because there are also "upstream" miles and emissions associated with things like transport of fertilizer, pesticides, and animal feed. Overall, transport accounts for about 11 percent of the food system's emissions.
By contrast, Weber and Matthews found, agricultural production accounts for the bulk of the food system's greenhouse gas emissions: 83 percent of emissions occur before food even leaves the farm gate. A recent life-cycle analysis of the U.K. food system, by Tara Garnett, yielded similar results. In her study, transport accounted for about a tenth of the food system's greenhouse gas emissions, and agricultural production accounted for half. Garnett says the same general patterns likely also hold for Europe as a whole.
There's Something about Dairy
The other clear result that emerges from these analyses is that what you eat matters at least as much as how far it travels, and agriculture's overwhelming "hotspots" are red meat and dairy production. In part that's due to the inefficiency of eating higher up on the food chain-it takes more energy, and generates more emissions, to grow grain, feed it to cows, and produce meat or dairy products for human consumption, than to feed grain to humans directly. But a large portion of emissions associated with meat and dairy production take the form of methane and nitrous oxide, greenhouse gases that are respectively 23 and 296 times as potent as carbon dioxide. Methane is produced by ruminant animals (cows, goats, sheep, and the like) as a byproduct of digestion, and is also released by the breakdown of all types of animal manure. Nitrous oxide also comes from the breakdown of manure (as well as the production and breakdown of fertilizers).
In Garnett's study, meat and dairy accounted for half of the U.K. food system's greenhouse gas emissions. In fact, she writes, "the major contribution made by agriculture itself reflects the GHG [greenhouse gas] intensity of livestock rearing." Weber and Matthews come to a similar conclusion: "No matter how it is measured, on average red meat is more GHG-intensive than all other forms of food," responsible for about 150 percent more emissions than chicken or fish. In their study the second-largest contributor to emissions was the dairy industry.
Nor are these two studies unique in their findings. A group of Swedish researchers has calculated that meat and dairy contribute 58 percent of the total food emissions from a typical Swedish diet. At a global level, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization has estimated that livestock account for 18 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions-more even than all forms of fossil fuel-based transport combined.
"Broadly speaking, eating fewer meat and dairy products and consuming more plant foods in their place is probably the single most helpful behavioral shift one can make" to reduce food-related greenhouse gas emissions, Garnett argues.
Weber and Matthews calculated that reducing food miles to zero-an all-but-impossible goal in practice-would reduce the greenhouse gas emissions associated with the food system by only about 5 percent, equivalent to driving 1,000 miles less over the course of a year. By comparison, replacing red meat and dairy with chicken, fish, or eggs for one day per week would save the equivalent of driving 760 miles per year. Replacing red meat and dairy with vegetables one day a week would be like driving 1,160 miles less. "Thus," they write, "we suggest that dietary shift can be a more effective means of lowering an average household's food-related climate footprint than ‘buying local.'"
However, Weber acknowledges, "these calculations were done assuming that local foods are no different than non-local foods." And that's not always the case. For example, local-food advocates also emphasize eating seasonal (often meaning field-grown) and less-processed foods. Those qualities, along with shorter distances from farm to table, will also contribute to lower emissions compared to the "average" diet.
Food marketed in the local food economy-at farmers' markets and through community-supported agriculture (CSA) schemes-is frequently also organic. Organic food often (though not always) is associated with lower greenhouse gas emissions than conventionally grown food, because organics don't generate the emissions associated with production, transport, and application of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides.
Organic food also has other environmental benefits: less use of toxic chemicals promotes greater farmland biodiversity, and organic fields require less irrigation under some conditions. Because local food is so frequently talked about in terms of food miles, its environmental benefits have largely been couched in terms of greenhouse gas emissions. But food's carbon footprint "can't be the only measuring stick of environmental sustainability," notes Gail Feenstra, a food systems analyst at the University of California at Davis Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program.
Finally, farmers who market locally are often relatively small in scale, and can more feasibly adopt environmentally beneficial practices such as growing a diversity of crops, planting cover crops, leaving weedy field borders or planting hedgerows that provide a refuge for native biodiversity, and integrating crop and livestock production. In short, Weber says, "the production practices matter a lot more than where the food was actually grown. If buying local also means buying with better production practices then that's great, that's going to make a huge difference."
Of course, the relationship between local food marketing and sustainable agricultural practices is far from perfect. A small farmer can still spray pesticides and plow from road to road. Not all farmers-market vendors are organic. Clare Hinrichs, who calls herself an "ardent" farmers-market shopper, nevertheless acknowledges that "the actual consequences-both intended or unintended-[of local food systems] haven't really been all that closely or systematically studied."
How Green Is My Valley?
So, is local food greener? Not necessarily. But look at the question from the opposite direction: if you're a consumer interested in greener food, the local food economy is currently a good place to find it. By the same token, a farmer who sells in the local food economy might be more likely to adopt or continue sustainable practices in order to meet this customer demand. If local food has environmental benefits, they aren't all-or perhaps even mainly-intrinsic to local-ness. Or, as Hinrichs has written, "it is the social relation, not the spatial location, per se, that accounts for this outcome."
For local food advocates like Sage Van Wing, that interaction between producer and consumer, between farmer and eater, is precisely the point. Regarding food miles, Van Wing says, "I'm not interested in that at all." For her, purchasing an apple isn't just about the greenhouse gas emissions involved in producing and transporting the fruit, "it's also about how those apples were farmed, how the farm workers were treated"-a broad array of ecological, social, and economic factors that add up to sustainability. Interacting directly with the farmer who grows her food creates a "standard of trust," she says.
Christopher Weber, who followed a vegan diet for 10 years and calls himself "somewhat of a self-proclaimed foodie," agrees: "That's one thing that's really great about local food, and one of the reasons that I buy locally, is because you can actually know your farmer and know what they're doing."
Van Wing says that her approach to local food has evolved over time-she started out trying to eat within a 100-mile radius, but now she simply tries to get each food item from the closest source feasible. Foods that can't be grown nearby are either rare treats or have disappeared from her diet altogether. "I just don't do things that don't make sense," she says. Her statement echoes journalist and sustainable-agriculture guru Michael Pollan, who in his recent book In Defense of Food offers a common-sense guide to eating ethically and well: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." You could sum up the ecological case for eating locally by adding one more sentence: "Mostly what's in season and grown not too far away."
Yet there are limits to this common-sense approach. In many areas, the climate is such that eating local, seasonal, field-grown produce would be a pretty bleak proposition for much of the year. Large concentrations of people live in areas not suited to growing certain staple crops; it's one thing to forego bananas, but quite another to give up wheat. And population density itself works against relocalization of the food system. Most of the land within 100 miles of large cities such as New York is itself very built up; where will the farmland to feed us all locally come from? (By the same token, that very situation makes preservation of what farmland remains all the more important, a goal that buying from local farmers can help advance.)
In this sense, life-cycle analyses of the current food system offer a paradoxically hopeful perspective, because they suggest that, if the goal is to improve the environmental sustainability of the food system as a whole, then there are a variety of public policy levers that we can pull. To be sure, promoting more localized food production and distribution networks would reduce transport emissions. But what if a greater investment in rail infrastructure helped to reverse the trend toward transporting more food by inefficient semi-truck? What if fuel economy standards were increased for the truck fleet that moves our food? Or, to name one encompassing possibility, what if a carbon-pricing system incorporated some of the environmental costs of agriculture that are currently externalized? Local food is delicious, but the problem-and perhaps the solution-is global.
© 2009 World Watch Magazine
--Sarah DeWeerdt
Is Local Food Better? Yes, But There's More
by Sarah DeWeerdt
In 1993, a Swedish researcher calculated that the ingredients of a typical Swedish breakfast-apple, bread, butter, cheese, coffee, cream, orange juice, sugar-traveled a distance equal to the circumference of the Earth before reaching the Scandinavian table. In 2005, a researcher in Iowa found that the milk, sugar, and strawberries that go into a carton of strawberry yogurt collectively journeyed 2,211 miles (3,558 kilometers) just to get to the processing plant. As the local-food movement has come of age, this concept of "food miles" (or "-kilometers")-roughly, the distance food travels from farm to plate-has come to dominate the discussion, particularly in the United States, the United Kingdom, and parts of Western Europe.
The concept offers a kind of convenient shorthand for describing a food system that's centralized, industrialized, and complex almost to the point of absurdity. And, since our food is transported all those miles in ships, trains, trucks, and planes, attention to food miles also links up with broader concerns about the emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases from fossil fuel-based transport.
In the United States, the most frequently cited statistic is that food travels 1,500 miles on average from farm to consumer. That figure comes from work led by Rich Pirog, the associate director of the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University (he is also behind the strawberry-yogurt calculations referenced above). In 2001, in some of the country's first food-miles research, Pirog and a group of researchers analyzed the transport of 28 fruits and vegetables to Iowa markets via local, regional, and conventional food distribution systems. The team calculated that produce in the conventional system-a national network using semitrailer trucks to haul food to large grocery stores-traveled an average of 1,518 miles (about 2,400 kilometers). By contrast, locally sourced food traveled an average of just 44.6 miles (72 kilometers) to Iowa markets.
In light of such contrasts, the admonition to "eat local" just seems like common sense. And indeed, at the most basic level, fewer transport miles do mean fewer emissions. Pirog's team found that the conventional food distribution system used 4 to 17 times more fuel and emitted 5 to 17 times more CO2 than the local and regional (the latter of which roughly meant Iowa-wide) systems. Similarly, a Canadian study estimated that replacing imported food with equivalent items locally grown in the Waterloo, Ontario, region would save transport-related emissions equivalent to nearly 50,000 metric tons of CO2, or the equivalent of taking 16,191 cars off the road.
What's "Local"?
But what exactly is "local food" in the first place? How local is local?
One problem with trying to determine whether local food is greener is that there's no universally accepted definition of local food. Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon, authors of The 100-Mile Diet, write that they chose this boundary for their experiment in eating locally because "a 100-mile radius is large enough to reach beyond a big city and small enough to feel truly local. And it rolls off the tongue more easily than the ‘160-kilometer diet.'" Sage Van Wing, who coined the term "locavore" with a friend when she was living in Marin County, California, was inspired to eat local after reading Coming Home to Eat, a chronicle of author Gary Paul Nabhan's own year-long effort to eat only foods grown within 250 miles of his Northern Arizona home. She figured that if Nabhan could accomplish that in the desert, she could do even better in the year-round agricultural cornucopia that is Northern California, so she decided to limit herself to food from within 100 miles.
There's some evidence that a popular understanding of local food is, at least in some places, coalescing around this 100-mile limit. A 2008 Leopold Institute survey of consumers throughout the United States found that two-thirds considered local food to mean food grown within 100 miles. Still, a variety of other definitions also persist. Sometimes local means food grown within a county, within a state or province, or even, in the case of some small European nations, within the country. In the United Kingdom, reports Tara Garnett of the Food Climate Research Network, "on the whole, organizations supporting local are now less likely to put numbers on things." Meanwhile, rural sociologist Clare Hinrichs, of Pennsylvania State University, has found that in Iowa local has shifted from signifying food grown within a county or a neighboring one to food grown anywhere in the state. For some in the agricultural community, promoting and eating "local Iowa food" is almost a kind of food patriotism, aimed at counteracting the forces of globalization that have put the state's family farmers at risk.
All of those are perfectly valid ways of thinking about local. But they don't have all that much to do with environmental costs and benefits.
Tradeoffs
In any case, warns Pirog, food miles/kilometers don't tell the whole story. "Food miles are a good measure of how far food has traveled. But they're not a very good measure of the food's environmental impact."
That impact depends on how the food was transported, not just how far. For example, trains are 10 times more efficient at moving freight, ton for ton, than trucks are. So you could eat potatoes trucked in from 100 miles away, or potatoes shipped by rail from 1,000 miles away, and the greenhouse gas emissions associated with their transport from farm to table would be roughly the same.
The environmental impact of food also depends on how it is grown. Swedish researcher Annika Carlsson-Kanyama led a study that found it was better, from a greenhouse-gas perspective, for Swedes to buy Spanish tomatoes than Swedish tomatoes, because the Spanish tomatoes were grown in open fields while the local ones were grown in fossil-fuel-heated greenhouses.
That seems obvious, but there are subtler issues at play as well. For example, Spain has plenty of the warmth and sunshine that tomatoes crave, but its main horticultural region is relatively arid and is likely to become more drought-prone in the future as a result of global climate change. What if water shortages require Spanish growers to install energy-intensive irrigation systems? And what if greenhouses in northern Europe were heated with renewable energy?
Perhaps it's inevitable that we consumers gravitate to a focus on food miles-the concept represents the last step before food arrives on our tables, the part of the agricultural supply chain that's most visible to us. And indeed, all other things being equal, it's better to purchase something grown locally than the same thing grown far away. "It is true that if you're comparing exact systems, the same food grown in the same way, then obviously, yes, the food transported less will have a smaller carbon footprint," Pirog says.
But a broader, more comprehensive picture of all the tradeoffs in the food system requires tracking greenhouse gas emissions through all phases of a food's production, transport, and consumption. And life-cycle analysis (LCA), a research method that provides precisely this "cradle-to-grave" perspective, reveals that food miles represent a relatively small slice of the greenhouse-gas pie.
In a paper published last year, Christopher Weber and H. Scott Matthews, of Carnegie Mellon University, wove together data from a variety of U.S. government sources into a comprehensive life-cycle analysis of the average American diet. According to their calculations, final delivery from producer or processor to the point of retail sale accounts for only 4 percent of the U.S. food system's greenhouse gas emissions. Final delivery accounts for only about a quarter of the total miles, and 40 percent of the transport-related emissions, in the food supply chain as a whole. That's because there are also "upstream" miles and emissions associated with things like transport of fertilizer, pesticides, and animal feed. Overall, transport accounts for about 11 percent of the food system's emissions.
By contrast, Weber and Matthews found, agricultural production accounts for the bulk of the food system's greenhouse gas emissions: 83 percent of emissions occur before food even leaves the farm gate. A recent life-cycle analysis of the U.K. food system, by Tara Garnett, yielded similar results. In her study, transport accounted for about a tenth of the food system's greenhouse gas emissions, and agricultural production accounted for half. Garnett says the same general patterns likely also hold for Europe as a whole.
There's Something about Dairy
The other clear result that emerges from these analyses is that what you eat matters at least as much as how far it travels, and agriculture's overwhelming "hotspots" are red meat and dairy production. In part that's due to the inefficiency of eating higher up on the food chain-it takes more energy, and generates more emissions, to grow grain, feed it to cows, and produce meat or dairy products for human consumption, than to feed grain to humans directly. But a large portion of emissions associated with meat and dairy production take the form of methane and nitrous oxide, greenhouse gases that are respectively 23 and 296 times as potent as carbon dioxide. Methane is produced by ruminant animals (cows, goats, sheep, and the like) as a byproduct of digestion, and is also released by the breakdown of all types of animal manure. Nitrous oxide also comes from the breakdown of manure (as well as the production and breakdown of fertilizers).
In Garnett's study, meat and dairy accounted for half of the U.K. food system's greenhouse gas emissions. In fact, she writes, "the major contribution made by agriculture itself reflects the GHG [greenhouse gas] intensity of livestock rearing." Weber and Matthews come to a similar conclusion: "No matter how it is measured, on average red meat is more GHG-intensive than all other forms of food," responsible for about 150 percent more emissions than chicken or fish. In their study the second-largest contributor to emissions was the dairy industry.
Nor are these two studies unique in their findings. A group of Swedish researchers has calculated that meat and dairy contribute 58 percent of the total food emissions from a typical Swedish diet. At a global level, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization has estimated that livestock account for 18 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions-more even than all forms of fossil fuel-based transport combined.
"Broadly speaking, eating fewer meat and dairy products and consuming more plant foods in their place is probably the single most helpful behavioral shift one can make" to reduce food-related greenhouse gas emissions, Garnett argues.
Weber and Matthews calculated that reducing food miles to zero-an all-but-impossible goal in practice-would reduce the greenhouse gas emissions associated with the food system by only about 5 percent, equivalent to driving 1,000 miles less over the course of a year. By comparison, replacing red meat and dairy with chicken, fish, or eggs for one day per week would save the equivalent of driving 760 miles per year. Replacing red meat and dairy with vegetables one day a week would be like driving 1,160 miles less. "Thus," they write, "we suggest that dietary shift can be a more effective means of lowering an average household's food-related climate footprint than ‘buying local.'"
However, Weber acknowledges, "these calculations were done assuming that local foods are no different than non-local foods." And that's not always the case. For example, local-food advocates also emphasize eating seasonal (often meaning field-grown) and less-processed foods. Those qualities, along with shorter distances from farm to table, will also contribute to lower emissions compared to the "average" diet.
Food marketed in the local food economy-at farmers' markets and through community-supported agriculture (CSA) schemes-is frequently also organic. Organic food often (though not always) is associated with lower greenhouse gas emissions than conventionally grown food, because organics don't generate the emissions associated with production, transport, and application of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides.
Organic food also has other environmental benefits: less use of toxic chemicals promotes greater farmland biodiversity, and organic fields require less irrigation under some conditions. Because local food is so frequently talked about in terms of food miles, its environmental benefits have largely been couched in terms of greenhouse gas emissions. But food's carbon footprint "can't be the only measuring stick of environmental sustainability," notes Gail Feenstra, a food systems analyst at the University of California at Davis Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program.
Finally, farmers who market locally are often relatively small in scale, and can more feasibly adopt environmentally beneficial practices such as growing a diversity of crops, planting cover crops, leaving weedy field borders or planting hedgerows that provide a refuge for native biodiversity, and integrating crop and livestock production. In short, Weber says, "the production practices matter a lot more than where the food was actually grown. If buying local also means buying with better production practices then that's great, that's going to make a huge difference."
Of course, the relationship between local food marketing and sustainable agricultural practices is far from perfect. A small farmer can still spray pesticides and plow from road to road. Not all farmers-market vendors are organic. Clare Hinrichs, who calls herself an "ardent" farmers-market shopper, nevertheless acknowledges that "the actual consequences-both intended or unintended-[of local food systems] haven't really been all that closely or systematically studied."
How Green Is My Valley?
So, is local food greener? Not necessarily. But look at the question from the opposite direction: if you're a consumer interested in greener food, the local food economy is currently a good place to find it. By the same token, a farmer who sells in the local food economy might be more likely to adopt or continue sustainable practices in order to meet this customer demand. If local food has environmental benefits, they aren't all-or perhaps even mainly-intrinsic to local-ness. Or, as Hinrichs has written, "it is the social relation, not the spatial location, per se, that accounts for this outcome."
For local food advocates like Sage Van Wing, that interaction between producer and consumer, between farmer and eater, is precisely the point. Regarding food miles, Van Wing says, "I'm not interested in that at all." For her, purchasing an apple isn't just about the greenhouse gas emissions involved in producing and transporting the fruit, "it's also about how those apples were farmed, how the farm workers were treated"-a broad array of ecological, social, and economic factors that add up to sustainability. Interacting directly with the farmer who grows her food creates a "standard of trust," she says.
Christopher Weber, who followed a vegan diet for 10 years and calls himself "somewhat of a self-proclaimed foodie," agrees: "That's one thing that's really great about local food, and one of the reasons that I buy locally, is because you can actually know your farmer and know what they're doing."
Van Wing says that her approach to local food has evolved over time-she started out trying to eat within a 100-mile radius, but now she simply tries to get each food item from the closest source feasible. Foods that can't be grown nearby are either rare treats or have disappeared from her diet altogether. "I just don't do things that don't make sense," she says. Her statement echoes journalist and sustainable-agriculture guru Michael Pollan, who in his recent book In Defense of Food offers a common-sense guide to eating ethically and well: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." You could sum up the ecological case for eating locally by adding one more sentence: "Mostly what's in season and grown not too far away."
Yet there are limits to this common-sense approach. In many areas, the climate is such that eating local, seasonal, field-grown produce would be a pretty bleak proposition for much of the year. Large concentrations of people live in areas not suited to growing certain staple crops; it's one thing to forego bananas, but quite another to give up wheat. And population density itself works against relocalization of the food system. Most of the land within 100 miles of large cities such as New York is itself very built up; where will the farmland to feed us all locally come from? (By the same token, that very situation makes preservation of what farmland remains all the more important, a goal that buying from local farmers can help advance.)
In this sense, life-cycle analyses of the current food system offer a paradoxically hopeful perspective, because they suggest that, if the goal is to improve the environmental sustainability of the food system as a whole, then there are a variety of public policy levers that we can pull. To be sure, promoting more localized food production and distribution networks would reduce transport emissions. But what if a greater investment in rail infrastructure helped to reverse the trend toward transporting more food by inefficient semi-truck? What if fuel economy standards were increased for the truck fleet that moves our food? Or, to name one encompassing possibility, what if a carbon-pricing system incorporated some of the environmental costs of agriculture that are currently externalized? Local food is delicious, but the problem-and perhaps the solution-is global.
© 2009 World Watch Magazine
--Sarah DeWeerdt
Friday, March 27, 2009
Big Industry has the Tenure, We Get the Black Market
Ocean to Land, we don’t have the rights to our resources. The fisherman, can’t sell me his fish; it goes for pennies to the fishbar destined for export. The rancher can’t sell me his meat; it is illegal. Our resources, our food is owned by big industry. I can buy meat from large companies that source their food from around the world. I can buy fish as long as a big industry owns the tenure, the product. I have lived in tiny fishing villages, big cities and now ranching country. Eating close to home has meant different things through this journey, but one link across my BC home is that eating local meant sourcing food that is in somehow restricted by industry to the point of it being illegal.Resource and food regulations support and drive industry, but prevent small-scale food producers from legally selling their food close to home. Tenure resides not with the community but with an industry that is not accountable to me, or you or even government, but to their shareholders.
In reading the responses to the US proposed Food Safety Modernization Act (bill HR 875) this situation could get much worse on our continent. Unfortunately, my country follows the states, mostly to the detriment of our citizens. With much of our local and I argue ethically produced food already akin to the black market, what will the future look like. Many people are already prevented from buying from local farmers, fisherman and wildcrafters for the fear of breaking the law. These food regulations, have decentralized the resources, and have resulted in there fall. Large companies decimated our fish, and shutting down our family farms. I see it happen all through this province. Many people are left, only with industrial food, and no livelihood. This in a land of plenty.
In reading the responses to the US proposed Food Safety Modernization Act (bill HR 875) this situation could get much worse on our continent. Unfortunately, my country follows the states, mostly to the detriment of our citizens. With much of our local and I argue ethically produced food already akin to the black market, what will the future look like. Many people are already prevented from buying from local farmers, fisherman and wildcrafters for the fear of breaking the law. These food regulations, have decentralized the resources, and have resulted in there fall. Large companies decimated our fish, and shutting down our family farms. I see it happen all through this province. Many people are left, only with industrial food, and no livelihood. This in a land of plenty.
We Can End Hunger & Support Local Food
Published on Friday, March 13, 2009 by YES! Magazine
The City that Ended Hunger
A city in Brazil recruited local farmers to help do something U.S. cities have yet to do: end hunger.
by Frances Moore Lappé
"To search for solutions to hunger means to act within the principle that the status of a citizen surpasses that of a mere consumer." CITY OF BELO HORIZONTE, BRAZIL
In writing Diet for a Small Planet [1], I learned one simple truth: Hunger is not caused by a scarcity of food but a scarcity of democracy. But that realization was only the beginning, for then I had to ask: What does a democracy look like that enables citizens to have a real voice in securing life's essentials? Does it exist anywhere? Is it possible or a pipe dream? With hunger on the rise here in the United States-one in 10 of us is now turning to food stamps-these questions take on new urgency.
To begin to conceive of the possibility of a culture of empowered citizens making democracy work for them, real-life stories help-not models to adopt wholesale, but examples that capture key lessons. For me, the story of Brazil's fourth largest city, Belo Horizonte, is a rich trove of such lessons. Belo, a city of 2.5 million people, once had 11 percent of its population living in absolute poverty, and almost 20 percent of its children going hungry. Then in 1993, a newly elected administration declared food a right of citizenship. The officials said, in effect: If you are too poor to buy food in the market-you are no less a citizen. I am still accountable to you.
The new mayor, Patrus Ananias-now leader of the federal anti-hunger effort-began by creating a city agency, which included assembling a 20-member council of citizen, labor, business, and church representatives to advise in the design and implementation of a new food system. The city already involved regular citizens directly in allocating municipal resources-the "participatory budgeting [2]" that started in the 1970s and has since spread across Brazil. During the first six years of Belo's food-as-a-right policy, perhaps in response to the new emphasis on food security, the number of citizens engaging in the city's participatory budgeting process doubled to more than 31,000.
The city agency developed dozens of innovations to assure everyone the right to food, especially by weaving together the interests of farmers and consumers. It offered local family farmers dozens of choice spots of public space on which to sell to urban consumers, essentially redistributing retailer mark-ups on produce-which often reached 100 percent-to consumers and the farmers. Farmers' profits grew, since there was no wholesaler taking a cut. And poor people got access to fresh, healthy food.
When my daughter Anna and I visited Belo Horizonte to write Hope's Edge [3] we approached one of these stands. A farmer in a cheerful green smock, emblazoned with "Direct from the Countryside," grinned as she told us, "I am able to support three children from my five acres now. Since I got this contract with the city, I've even been able to buy a truck."
The improved prospects of these Belo farmers were remarkable considering that, as these programs were getting underway, farmers in the country as a whole saw their incomes drop by almost half.
In addition to the farmer-run stands, the city makes good food available by offering entrepreneurs the opportunity to bid on the right to use well-trafficked plots of city land for "ABC" markets, from the Portuguese acronym for "food at low prices." Today there are 34 such markets where the city determines a set price-about two-thirds of the market price-of about twenty healthy items, mostly from in-state farmers and chosen by store-owners. Everything else they can sell at the market price.
"For ABC sellers with the best spots, there's another obligation attached to being able to use the city land," a former manager within this city agency, Adriana Aranha, explained. "Every weekend they have to drive produce-laden trucks to the poor neighborhoods outside of the city center, so everyone can get good produce."
Another product of food-as-a-right thinking is three large, airy "People's Restaurants" (Restaurante Popular), plus a few smaller venues, that daily serve 12,000 or more people using mostly locally grown food for the equivalent of less than 50 cents a meal. When Anna and I ate in one, we saw hundreds of diners-grandparents and newborns, young couples, clusters of men, mothers with toddlers. Some were in well-worn street clothes, others in uniform, still others in business suits.
"I've been coming here every day for five years and have gained six kilos," beamed one elderly, energetic man in faded khakis.
"It's silly to pay more somewhere else for lower quality food," an athletic-looking young man in a military police uniform told us. "I've been eating here every day for two years. It's a good way to save money to buy a house so I can get married," he said with a smile.
No one has to prove they're poor to eat in a People's Restaurant, although about 85 percent of the diners are. The mixed clientele erases stigma and allows "food with dignity," say those involved.
Belo's food security [4]initiatives also include extensive community and school gardens as well as nutrition classes. Plus, money the federal government contributes toward school lunches, once spent on processed, corporate food, now buys whole food mostly from local growers.
"We're fighting the concept that the state is a terrible, incompetent administrator," Adriana explained. "We're showing that the state doesn't have to provide everything, it can facilitate. It can create channels for people to find solutions themselves."
For instance, the city, in partnership with a local university, is working to "keep the market honest in part simply by providing information," Adriana told us. They survey the price of 45 basic foods and household items at dozens of supermarkets, then post the results at bus stops, online, on television and radio, and in newspapers so people know where the cheapest prices are.
The shift in frame to food as a right also led the Belo hunger-fighters to look for novel solutions. In one successful experiment, egg shells, manioc leaves, and other material normally thrown away were ground and mixed into flour for school kids' daily bread. This enriched food also goes to nursery school children, who receive three meals a day courtesy of the city.
"I knew we had so much hunger in the world. But what is so upsetting, what I didn't know when I started this, is it's so easy. It's so easy to end it."
The result of these and other related innovations?
In just a decade Belo Horizonte cut its infant death rate-widely used as evidence of hunger-by more than half, and today these initiatives benefit almost 40 percent of the city's 2.5 million population. One six-month period in 1999 saw infant malnutrition in a sample group reduced by 50 percent. And between 1993 and 2002 Belo Horizonte was the only locality in which consumption of fruits and vegetables went up.
The cost of these efforts?
Around $10 million annually, or less than 2 percent of the city budget. That's about a penny a day per Belo resident.
Behind this dramatic, life-saving change is what Adriana calls a "new social mentality"-the realization that "everyone in our city benefits if all of us have access to good food, so-like health care or education-quality food for all is a public good."
The Belo experience shows that a right to food does not necessarily mean more public handouts (although in emergencies, of course, it does.) It can mean redefining the "free" in "free market" as the freedom of all to participate. It can mean, as in Belo, building citizen-government partnerships driven by values of inclusion and mutual respect.
And when imagining food as a right of citizenship, please note: No change in human nature is required! Through most of human evolution-except for the last few thousand of roughly 200,000 years-Homo sapiens lived in societies where pervasive sharing of food was the norm. As food sharers, "especially among unrelated individuals," humans are unique, writes Michael Gurven, an authority on hunter-gatherer food transfers. Except in times of extreme privation, when some eat, all eat.
Before leaving Belo, Anna and I had time to reflect a bit with Adriana. We wondered whether she realized that her city may be one of the few in the world taking this approach-food as a right of membership in the human family. So I asked, "When you began, did you realize how important what you are doing was? How much difference it might make? How rare it is in the entire world?"
Listening to her long response in Portuguese without understanding, I tried to be patient. But when her eyes moistened, I nudged our interpreter. I wanted to know what had touched her emotions.
"I knew we had so much hunger in the world," Adriana said. "But what is so upsetting, what I didn't know when I started this, is it's so easy. It's so easy to end it."
Adriana's words have stayed with me. They will forever. They hold perhaps Belo's greatest lesson: that it is easy to end hunger if we are willing to break free of limiting frames and to see with new eyes-if we trust our hard-wired fellow feeling and act, no longer as mere voters or protesters, for or against government, but as problem-solving partners with government accountable to us.
Frances Moore Lappé wrote this article as part of Food for Everyone [5], the Spring 2009 issue of YES! Magazine. Frances is the author of many books including Diet for a Small Planet and Get a Grip, co-founder of Food First [6] and the Small Planet Institute [7], and a YES! contributing editor.
The author thanks Dr. M. Jahi Chappell for his contribution to the article.
Interested? [8]Walking Through Fear [8]: interview with Frances Moore Lappé.
The City that Ended Hunger
A city in Brazil recruited local farmers to help do something U.S. cities have yet to do: end hunger.
by Frances Moore Lappé
"To search for solutions to hunger means to act within the principle that the status of a citizen surpasses that of a mere consumer." CITY OF BELO HORIZONTE, BRAZIL
In writing Diet for a Small Planet [1], I learned one simple truth: Hunger is not caused by a scarcity of food but a scarcity of democracy. But that realization was only the beginning, for then I had to ask: What does a democracy look like that enables citizens to have a real voice in securing life's essentials? Does it exist anywhere? Is it possible or a pipe dream? With hunger on the rise here in the United States-one in 10 of us is now turning to food stamps-these questions take on new urgency.
To begin to conceive of the possibility of a culture of empowered citizens making democracy work for them, real-life stories help-not models to adopt wholesale, but examples that capture key lessons. For me, the story of Brazil's fourth largest city, Belo Horizonte, is a rich trove of such lessons. Belo, a city of 2.5 million people, once had 11 percent of its population living in absolute poverty, and almost 20 percent of its children going hungry. Then in 1993, a newly elected administration declared food a right of citizenship. The officials said, in effect: If you are too poor to buy food in the market-you are no less a citizen. I am still accountable to you.
The new mayor, Patrus Ananias-now leader of the federal anti-hunger effort-began by creating a city agency, which included assembling a 20-member council of citizen, labor, business, and church representatives to advise in the design and implementation of a new food system. The city already involved regular citizens directly in allocating municipal resources-the "participatory budgeting [2]" that started in the 1970s and has since spread across Brazil. During the first six years of Belo's food-as-a-right policy, perhaps in response to the new emphasis on food security, the number of citizens engaging in the city's participatory budgeting process doubled to more than 31,000.
The city agency developed dozens of innovations to assure everyone the right to food, especially by weaving together the interests of farmers and consumers. It offered local family farmers dozens of choice spots of public space on which to sell to urban consumers, essentially redistributing retailer mark-ups on produce-which often reached 100 percent-to consumers and the farmers. Farmers' profits grew, since there was no wholesaler taking a cut. And poor people got access to fresh, healthy food.
When my daughter Anna and I visited Belo Horizonte to write Hope's Edge [3] we approached one of these stands. A farmer in a cheerful green smock, emblazoned with "Direct from the Countryside," grinned as she told us, "I am able to support three children from my five acres now. Since I got this contract with the city, I've even been able to buy a truck."
The improved prospects of these Belo farmers were remarkable considering that, as these programs were getting underway, farmers in the country as a whole saw their incomes drop by almost half.
In addition to the farmer-run stands, the city makes good food available by offering entrepreneurs the opportunity to bid on the right to use well-trafficked plots of city land for "ABC" markets, from the Portuguese acronym for "food at low prices." Today there are 34 such markets where the city determines a set price-about two-thirds of the market price-of about twenty healthy items, mostly from in-state farmers and chosen by store-owners. Everything else they can sell at the market price.
"For ABC sellers with the best spots, there's another obligation attached to being able to use the city land," a former manager within this city agency, Adriana Aranha, explained. "Every weekend they have to drive produce-laden trucks to the poor neighborhoods outside of the city center, so everyone can get good produce."
Another product of food-as-a-right thinking is three large, airy "People's Restaurants" (Restaurante Popular), plus a few smaller venues, that daily serve 12,000 or more people using mostly locally grown food for the equivalent of less than 50 cents a meal. When Anna and I ate in one, we saw hundreds of diners-grandparents and newborns, young couples, clusters of men, mothers with toddlers. Some were in well-worn street clothes, others in uniform, still others in business suits.
"I've been coming here every day for five years and have gained six kilos," beamed one elderly, energetic man in faded khakis.
"It's silly to pay more somewhere else for lower quality food," an athletic-looking young man in a military police uniform told us. "I've been eating here every day for two years. It's a good way to save money to buy a house so I can get married," he said with a smile.
No one has to prove they're poor to eat in a People's Restaurant, although about 85 percent of the diners are. The mixed clientele erases stigma and allows "food with dignity," say those involved.
Belo's food security [4]initiatives also include extensive community and school gardens as well as nutrition classes. Plus, money the federal government contributes toward school lunches, once spent on processed, corporate food, now buys whole food mostly from local growers.
"We're fighting the concept that the state is a terrible, incompetent administrator," Adriana explained. "We're showing that the state doesn't have to provide everything, it can facilitate. It can create channels for people to find solutions themselves."
For instance, the city, in partnership with a local university, is working to "keep the market honest in part simply by providing information," Adriana told us. They survey the price of 45 basic foods and household items at dozens of supermarkets, then post the results at bus stops, online, on television and radio, and in newspapers so people know where the cheapest prices are.
The shift in frame to food as a right also led the Belo hunger-fighters to look for novel solutions. In one successful experiment, egg shells, manioc leaves, and other material normally thrown away were ground and mixed into flour for school kids' daily bread. This enriched food also goes to nursery school children, who receive three meals a day courtesy of the city.
"I knew we had so much hunger in the world. But what is so upsetting, what I didn't know when I started this, is it's so easy. It's so easy to end it."
The result of these and other related innovations?
In just a decade Belo Horizonte cut its infant death rate-widely used as evidence of hunger-by more than half, and today these initiatives benefit almost 40 percent of the city's 2.5 million population. One six-month period in 1999 saw infant malnutrition in a sample group reduced by 50 percent. And between 1993 and 2002 Belo Horizonte was the only locality in which consumption of fruits and vegetables went up.
The cost of these efforts?
Around $10 million annually, or less than 2 percent of the city budget. That's about a penny a day per Belo resident.
Behind this dramatic, life-saving change is what Adriana calls a "new social mentality"-the realization that "everyone in our city benefits if all of us have access to good food, so-like health care or education-quality food for all is a public good."
The Belo experience shows that a right to food does not necessarily mean more public handouts (although in emergencies, of course, it does.) It can mean redefining the "free" in "free market" as the freedom of all to participate. It can mean, as in Belo, building citizen-government partnerships driven by values of inclusion and mutual respect.
And when imagining food as a right of citizenship, please note: No change in human nature is required! Through most of human evolution-except for the last few thousand of roughly 200,000 years-Homo sapiens lived in societies where pervasive sharing of food was the norm. As food sharers, "especially among unrelated individuals," humans are unique, writes Michael Gurven, an authority on hunter-gatherer food transfers. Except in times of extreme privation, when some eat, all eat.
Before leaving Belo, Anna and I had time to reflect a bit with Adriana. We wondered whether she realized that her city may be one of the few in the world taking this approach-food as a right of membership in the human family. So I asked, "When you began, did you realize how important what you are doing was? How much difference it might make? How rare it is in the entire world?"
Listening to her long response in Portuguese without understanding, I tried to be patient. But when her eyes moistened, I nudged our interpreter. I wanted to know what had touched her emotions.
"I knew we had so much hunger in the world," Adriana said. "But what is so upsetting, what I didn't know when I started this, is it's so easy. It's so easy to end it."
Adriana's words have stayed with me. They will forever. They hold perhaps Belo's greatest lesson: that it is easy to end hunger if we are willing to break free of limiting frames and to see with new eyes-if we trust our hard-wired fellow feeling and act, no longer as mere voters or protesters, for or against government, but as problem-solving partners with government accountable to us.
Frances Moore Lappé wrote this article as part of Food for Everyone [5], the Spring 2009 issue of YES! Magazine. Frances is the author of many books including Diet for a Small Planet and Get a Grip, co-founder of Food First [6] and the Small Planet Institute [7], and a YES! contributing editor.
The author thanks Dr. M. Jahi Chappell for his contribution to the article.
Interested? [8]Walking Through Fear [8]: interview with Frances Moore Lappé.
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