To market, to market

I've been thinking a lot recently about industrial organic, and who buys (can afford) organic food. Several articles this week have converged on this topic.

A friend sent me a link to a Globe and Mail article - another person, this time a Canadian sociologist, questioning what happened to the environmental and economic justice values of the organic farming movement. She suggests that most organics are really "yuppie chow." (I like that!)

Irena Knezevick writes in her paper (as quoted by the G&M)
"Organic foods have less and less to do with the ethics of environmentalism, anti-globalization and social justice, indeed less to do with organic agriculture as a concept, but more and more with hip consumerism, cultural and economic capital and the moral pedestals of those who have the luxury to make such purchasing choices."

This brought to mind my own modest consumer research project last week. I decided that if we are having an Oliver's Market (high end local rising chain) in my neighborhood, I had better overcome my reverse snobbery and try once again shopping there. I had to pass by the one in Cotati between my book group and a potluck, so I stopped in. The people - not the staff, the people who shop there - really do seem part of the yuppie chow crowd, a group with which I would prefer not to identify. But focusing on the merchandise, what I saw was that there was a lot of local food, things were well labeled, and the specials were worth shopping. Standard prices are high, but when something is on sale it really is. And 60+ get a 10% discount on Wednesdays.

The Globe and Mail article also touches on a lot of the problems we hope our U.S. Farm Bill will address: declining numbers of farmers, loss of small diversified farms, erosion of quality in rural life, excessive subsidies for industrial agriculture. It reminded me of meeting with some rural folks from Saskatchewan when I went to the Anglican Church's General Synod in 1989. Amazing that there is just beginning to be some wider recognition (outside of those who live and minister in rural North America) of the problems almost 20 years later.

Read about it here:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20070530.wfood30/BNStory/National/?page=rss&id=RTGAM.20070530.wfood30

Back to organics. There was also an interesting article in the news feed I get from the BBC earlier in the week. The modest proposal of the Soil Association, which certifies organics, is to remove the certification from food stuffs flown into Britain, since clearly food miles are part of the equation if one really cares about the planet. (Rather than just one's own personal health - when any organic, even one that's travelled halfway around the world will do.)

Here's the story:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6694251.stm
The accompanying video clip is worth watching. Apparently part of the problem is that most organic produce is imported, and most of the UK produce on offer in supermarkets is conventionally grown. A basket of local seasonal produce racked up a total of 1100 food miles; while a basket of organics rang up 32,000 food miles. No - no mistake on those zeroes - organic asparagus flown from Thailand to Britain will do that, especially if you throw in lots of fruit from Israel and South America.

One more note: I finally saw both in print and on television (what was I watching? reading?) ads for Target's "Archer Farms" line. Talk about greenwashing! It's like they watched the Meatrix and created a caricature of the caricature of the happy farm shown there.
See and hear it here:
http://sites.target.com/site/en/supertarget/archer_farms.jsp#
Aw shucks!

an article I wish I'd written

Do check out the article by Michael Pollan from yesterday's New York Times over in the links. He's covered, in a compact article, many of the issues we need to address in a renewed Farm Bill. (Unfortunately not bio-fuels, but hey - you can't do everything in three pages.) While I find it easy to gripe about the more stereotypical folks from Marin and Berkeley, I think Pollan manages for the most part to avoid elitism in his writing about the food system. God bless him for pointing out the difference in the cost of subsidized industrial food and fresh food in ways we can grasp. It fits right in with the eat local theme for this week - the challenge of doing so on a budget. And Pollan's reminded us once again that real change will require more than consumer choices. It will take political creativity and nerve as well as some systems revisioning.

More than shopping

Yes, we can't shop our way out of this mess that is our food system. But we do need to look at the retail aspects of the system: at how and where food is sold to us and who benefits.

More than thirty years ago when I moved to Reno, I first lived in a low income area in the northeast part of town. Having neglected to learn to drive (and hurrying to catch up!), I was happy that there were both a supermarket and a mom and pop market within walking distance. Soon, though, the supermarket closed, as more housing was built on the outskirts of town and markets moved there.

In 1990 when I moved to the Los Angeles area I was happy to find a nice apartment on a tree lined street in a walking neighborhood. Almost anything I could want or need in daily life was within a mile walk - bank, library, shops. But when I made my first three block trip to the supermarket, I saw that it was preparing to close its doors. Eventually it became an Office Depot, and when I moved my office into my home that was a boon. But retail food in my neighborhood consisted of two corner markets serving primarily the Armenian community. You can't knock feta, lavash, and hummus either, but there was little variety in the other foods, and fairly limp produce. Finally, in the last year or two of the nineties, we had a mid-week certified farmer's market a little less than a mile's walk away.

Now I live in a neighborhood that never had a center. It's suburban in flavor, but pretty densely populated with condominiums, mobile home parks, apartments. There was a supermarket (the local expression of Kroger, unfortunately) within nine-tenths of a mile, but it closed. There's another, one of the big discount variety, within a mile and a quarter. They have very little that's local. Then 1.6 miles away, there is a farm stand. The Imwalle family is in their fourth generation of growing and selling produce and garden starts. It's not all local, though much of it comes from fairly near, and it's not all organic, but they tell you what's theirs and what else is local, and you can ask about anything, "Where did this come from?" and get a straight answer.
Then about 2 1/2 miles away in different directions are a regional chain supermarket, which is pretty good also about identifying sources on fresh produce, and a local huge supermarket, with better prices than information, but with a full range of local dairy and eggs.

Now this is all fine for me. I have an economical car to get me where I need to go quickly, I organize trips, and once in a great while I will walk (and may find myself doing it more often if a local high end market really does come in where Krogerland used to be). But I have been wondering for some months - how does a person in my neighborhood who is transportation indigent obtain fresh and mostly local food? Is it possible? How much would it cost as compared with doing a week's shopping at the big bargain market? And how much time would it take each week to do so, again compared to one shopping run? I keep threatening to try this for one week. One thing I've already figured out - being a vegetarian makes it easier. The only local sustainably grown meat - turkey, sold at a shop not really near anything else - would require a trip on an infrequently running county bus.

Why am I going on about this? Because the access to fresh local food is a particular challenge to those who live in poor neighborhoods in cities all over this country. The movement to put California certified farmer's markets into the poorer neighborhoods has failed, I think, here in Sonoma County. Even if one were near my neighborhood, prices here are two or more times what one pays at a supermarket or at Imwalle's - whereas it was the exceptional market in southern California (Santa Monica, for example) which catered to high end produce shoppers.

I've posted a link to a new policy briefing today, "Facing Goliath" by Katy Mamen for the Oakland Institute. Katy takes on the systematic issues of supermarket consolidation and food security. There are even more reasons in her report to shun Walmart, if you didn't have enough already.

And I have been pondering this reality: when communities offer incentives for new box stores to move in - usually near more affluent neighborhoods which require a car - the community appears to win as sales tax revenues are increased. But the community loses over time, as local businesses decline, and then churn much less money back into the local community. And the poor lose in two additional ways, as they pay proportionally more sales tax, and their access to local wholesome food declines.

We need concerted community action, far beyond individual shopping decisions, if we are to address the unjust and unhealthy things that are happening to our food supply. Check out Katy's report.