Interview: Eat Here with Brian Halweil
Can you summarize the trends for buying local? Are they global trends? The interest in eating local is the most encouraging change in the American diet today. The number of farmers’ markets in the country has doubled in just the last 10 years. Although local food is still a relatively small share of all the food we eat, more restaurants, cafeterias, and supermarkets are starting to carve out space for local ingredients. About 200 school districts across the country now are making their food tastier and healthier by buying from local farmers. Major hospital chains are launching local salad bars. And dozens of major grocery chains—from Whole Foods to Wal-Mart—are featuring local food, partly because they know it will draw customers. This isn’t just an American trend either. People everywhere are craving a closer connection to their food. Chefs know that local food offers superior flavor. Environmentalists know that local food saves a tremendous amount of oil and helps preserve farmland. Farmers everywhere see local food as one of the best economic opportunities to hit rural areas in decades. In poorer nations, politicians are realizing that greater self-sufficiency can insulate their economies from the whims of global trade. With less people in farming and more people moving to urban centers, is food self-sufficiency realistic? Complete self-sufficiency isn’t really the goal. Historically, there has always been a certain amount of food trade. It can help make up for local shortfalls and bring exotic flavors and cuisines. New Yorkers should be able to import
In America, every state in the union can grow its own salad year round, and most can raise a lot more of their own produce and meat. Cities like Havana, Shanghai, and Vancouver have all shown that food can be raised in small paths of green, not to mention on the abundant roof space found in these cities. Fifty years ago, most of us got our food from within a few hundred miles, as opposed to the few thousand miles it travels today. So the potential is still there. Locally grown food can be provided by big or small farms. Small farms can often raise more food from a given plot of land, but they suffer from not having access to sales outlets, credit, and appropriate machinery. For many decades, small farms haven’t had the same support as their larger neighbors, but the trend to “buy local” represents a big economic opportunity for them. In your book Eat Here, you talk about the dangers of “putting all your eggs in one basket.” Explain what you mean by that phrase. Buying our food wherever we can find it most cheaply—even if that is thousands of miles away—seems like a good idea on paper. But, it also makes us incredibly vulnerable. A few years ago, the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Agriculture ran a series of war games to see how the United States would fare against an act of agricultural terrorism. For example, they asked what would happen if someone dropped some lethal E. coli into the mixer at a big food processing plant or someone walked onto a giant chicken farm with a sample of avian flu. The participants concluded that long-distance shipping and the centralization of our food system made us into sitting ducks. Any spike in the price of oil, or large-scale food contamination—whether accidental or malicious—would cripple our food supply. Unfortunately, participants focused on responses to the problem once it erupted, rather than addressing long-term solutions like bringing greater diversity to our farms and rebuilding small, regional food systems. What do you see as the advantages/disadvantages to trading food internationally? Food trade makes possible all sorts of cultural exchange and pleasurable culinary innovation. Personally, I try to get as much of my food from local sources, including from my own garden, but I also love Chinese, Indian, Korean, Middle Eastern, and Mexican cooking. There is always room on the collective table for exotic flavors. Of course, shipping coffee or spices by cargo tanker is more logical and much less energy intensive than shipping perishable foods like tomatoes by refrigerated jet. Besides gobbling up huge amounts of fuel, shipping food long distances also often means that money and jobs are hemorrhaging out of an area, as land is given over to grow raw commodities for distant markets. But, what about the point that export markets help developing countries? For most Third World exports, like bananas or coffee, the rural community actually gets very little of what wealthy consumers spend. Communities can often reap more benefit by processing the food for local markets instead—like a group of women in Zimbabwe who were getting paid very little for their peanuts on the global market. After making peanut butter to market to local and national grocers, they kept profits that normally would have gone to traders, brokers, and processors. The farther food travels, the less money stays in the local community and the less benefit that food has for the local community. Or, according to a useful rule of thumb described by Wendell Berry: communities should not be importing food they can readily grow themselves and they should not be exporting food before everyone in the community has been fed. What are some of the solutions you offer for strengthening the movement for buying local? The most important thing we can do is to ask more questions about our food. How was it raised, where was it raised, and by whom? Asking these questions will get our friends and neighbors thinking, not to mention restaurant owners, supermarket managers, and agribusiness executives. Once we start asking
Unfortunately, there hasn’t been very much official government support for this movement. Instead, it depends on concerned individuals—like parents who may work with their child’s school to source food from nearby farms. In the absence of action at the national level, local food policy councils have emerged in about 40 cities and states to help steer our food decisions. These bodies are typically formed by a motley group of farmers, consumer advocates, conservationists, business people, and politicians to fill a void in local governments. For instance, after finding links between hunger and poor access to transportation options in Hartford, the Connecticut Food Policy Council worked with city officials to modify bus lines so that routes connected low-income communities with supermarkets. What else can the “buying local” movement achieve? Getting people more involved with food choices has proven to be one of the best ways to get them interested in a range of environmental and social issues—from the cleanliness of their water supply to the dangers of feedlot animal production to the abuses of global trade. Every day, certain crop varieties and food traditions go extinct. Oddly enough, the best ways to save them are by eating them. And that’s part of what makes this movement so enticing. It’s not about marching in the streets. It’s about reconnecting with the people who raise our food and rediscovering its pleasures.
 NEXT “FRONTLINES” ARTICLE: Food For Life Global on “The Power of the Plate”
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