Local Food and Really, Really Local Food (By Ian Santino, Summer 2012)

Local Food and Really, Really Local Food  (By Ian Santino, Summer 2012. Environmental Sustainability Consultant to the Center for Food and Culture. MS, Landscape Architecture/Ecological Restoration, University of Wisconsin, Madison)

Local food sure has been getting lots of attention recently, and for good reason.  Transporting food all over the place uses barrels and barrels of oil, which releases lots of that obstreperous little molecule we’ve heard so much about. Next these guys get into our atmosphere and keep radiation from escaping the earth, warming us up, causing what is inarguably the greatest current threat to human civilizations.

Additionally, food that is grown close to where it is eaten requires less processing and energy to ensure it will keep in shipping. Less processing means less food wasted and more nutrients retained; less freeze drying and refrigerated food trucking mean less energy spent and pollution released. That equals fresher, healthier food, and a cleaner, more resourceful environment.

Still the reasons for preferring a local food system continue. Because food is what we spend so much of our time and resources acquiring, when you introduce a local food economy into a community you create wealth. It’s for this reason that producing food locally “enhance[s] social equity and democracy for all members of the community.”^[1] When people have access to decentralized food systems, they become more self-sustainable, taking care of themselves rather than paying another to bring them what they need  – an empowering situation. Clearly local food is a rational response.

Eating locally is part of a slow realization our culture is having that wealth and sustenance aren’t just commodities that appear in the shelf of a store, but are sinuously tied to environmental conditions. When one environment can no longer sustain us, we import an environment from further away. This is precisely the case in American cities ­– we can no longer produce our food, clothing, and materials from where we live, so we ship them in from places where the land is still producing. However, such centralization of functioning ecosystems poses a dire problem. What happens when our dependency on imports leaves us without the skills to produce for ourselves, and we ­can not for whatever reason?

When I took a Permaculture Design Certification Course in 2008, I knew it was the solution.^[2]But I was a little uneasy with the over-reliance on domesticated animals and some over-used models for food. The first criticism is beyond the scope of today, and I will cover in later posts. The second is opposite.^[3] The apple guild and ‘chook’ (chicken) tractors were among the first designs given for most situations. These aren’t bad designs, but they do impose non-native species, and not a great variety of species, at the expense of the local environment in a sort of ecological imperialism. And when they are used extensively in each case and on a large scale, you end up replacing local, microenvironments with one singular system. What would the world look like if in South Carolina we had the same plant and animal communities as Maine?

So what’s really, really local food?  It is not only eating food that was produced locally, but food that is from local, native species. These local species evolved to the geography and chemistry of the surrounding environment.  They offer unique, interesting local flavors, and connect people to the history of the land they live on in a stronger way than wheat and pigs do.

And what happens when local agriculture uses more local species? Biodiversity increases, not only on a genetic or species level, but also on the level of ecosystems. Biodiversity is important because it offers more options and more back-up systems should one fail. Biodiversity is spreading your eggs out between multiple baskets.

Now, it’s not like we can all go out and start foraging, and the functioning ecosystems we have left wouldn’t be able to support such a large influx of consumers.  We won’t be able to stop using wheat, corn, oats, and soybeans either, but we can use them in conjunction with native fruits and vegetables to create a reliable but still locally unique agriculture, where local, edible species are planted in garden areas. This type of food culture gives different locales – literally – unique flavors. Visiting a new place becomes an immersive experience into the art of plant communities that nature has been painting for the past 2.5 billion years. Culinary Tourism^[4] becomes a way of sampling different bioregions and becoming intimate with particular ecosystems.

The implications of eating more native species are far more complicated than most other dieting fads. If you live in Ohio, you can’t just go to your local supermarket and buy paw-paws, serviceberries, elderberries, American hazelnuts and groundnuts. And it’s also a no-no to go into the wild and take all you can. Our ecosystems unfortunately can’t handle that right now. However, you can plant native, edible species on your property. I am currently working on a website to help people do just that – along the lines of vegan permaculture – which I will hopefully have up within the year. But for now? Plant a native fruit tree. And then share the produce with your neighbors.

To wrap up, adopting local agriculture is an important step for our cultures in order to mitigate environmental collapse and empower communities to sustain themselves. But rather than rely on a bland model of food production that relies on the handful of plant species that we are currently culinarily accustomed to, we can start eating local species. Attempting to do so will be a learning experience, as one can’t just plant and harvest trout lilies the way they do tomatoes, and it isn’t feasible to ship them across the country to new markets. But the experience of working with the trout lilly is fundamentally different than growing a tomato. You see its connections; not just tomato-honeybee-humans-pests connections but the trout lilly-bumble bee-crested honey creeper- orhid bee-sphecid wasp-eastern swallowtail-sphinxmoth-human connections. The trout lilly gives a new meaning to the word ‘home.’ It broadens the term to mean not just where we live, but where we eat and harvest, and we are connected to the environmental history of where we live. It’s like getting in touch with your grandfather; only it’s not your grandfather but your ecosystem’s great-great-great grandfathers.

(Photograph of Ian Santino, Thanksgiving 2016. With a bowl of Brussel sprouts.)

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^[1] Feenstra, Gail. “Local Food Systems and Sustainable Communities.” American Journal of Alternative Agriculture 12 (1997): 28-36.

^[2] Permaculture, in a rudimentary explanation, is a design method applied to agriculture that maximizes connections between elements and the uses of each cog in the blueprint.

^[3] To be fair, it was and is only some permaculturists that were guilty of this criticism. Permaculture does entirely support adapting agriculture to local conditions.

^[4] Thanks to Lucy Long, director of the Center for Food Studies and my life 1986 – present.