By Robert Marino
Come to the Table: Food Summit South Puget Sound was held on October 14 and 15 in Olympia. The Summit, organized by volunteers, began on Friday with a giant potluck dinner outside of the Washington Center for the Performing Arts. There were expo vendors such as Olykraut and the Olympia Beekeepers Association.
On Saturday, the Summit moved to the Thurston County Fairgrounds for several brainstorming sessions with the 175 participants. The long-term goals of Summit organizers include more locally grown healthy food, more access to healthy food, treating the environment better, and strengthening the local economy.
[disclosure: I’m very biased. I want the food movement to succeed.]
Food is about the easiest place to start fundamentally solving many of the systemic problems in our world. Everyone needs to eat. We can address hunger, obesity, and other health issues like diabetes by improving access to healthy food. We can heal the environment locally as well as tackle global climate change.
Healthy farm practices are good for the health of farmers and farm workers and the general public, since many pesticides eventually spread through an ecosystem. Food is the basis of an economy necessary for life. Lastly, the act of putting one’s hands in the soil and growing food connects one to the mystery and beauty of life and in so doing connects us to each other.
TJ Johnson, lead Summit organizer, defines a food summit as “part celebration, part education, part advocacy.”
“But mostly,” he adds, “it’s thinking about our future as a community and working together to create the kind of food system that we think will serve us in the future.”
One central theme of the food summit is sustainability – a popular word that is often loosely defined. I asked TJ to define “sustainability” in relation to the food summit. “Producing and consuming food today in a way that doesn’t impact people’s ability to produce and consume food in the future. Our current industrial food system is not sustainable because we’re degrading topsoil, poisoning our land with chemicals; we’re using fossil fuels which are running out. We have to change that and create a situation where our actions today don’t close opportunities for people in the future.”
So what exactly is a ‘food system’? A food system includes soil inputs, growers, processing, transportation, distribution, the eater, waste, and environmental impacts. The circle starts again with inputs. It can be international in scope or just involve your home garden. Organizer Dani Madrone points out that, in a healthy food system, waste at one end becomes an input on the other end. This is how Nature works: no waste.
Participants got down to the meat and potatoes of the Summit on Saturday. A panel of speakers introduced the Whole Measures for Community Food Systems, a toolkit that focuses on six areas of a food system. Summit participants broke out into corresponding groups to identify needs in each area.
1. Justice and Fairness in a food system ensures availability of food for all and creates equitable food system structures. There are approximately 37,000 people living in poverty in Thurston County, and 1 in 4 residents are “low-income”.
Last year, there were over 150 thousand visits to the Thurston County Food Bank, an increase of 120% since 2005. About 10% of the County is food insecure, meaning that residents have reduced the quality and possibly the quantity of their food and may live with real hunger and uncertainty as to their next meal. Eleven million more meals are needed annually county wide to feed everybody three meals a day.
These data suggest clear opportunities for improvement in our local food system in the areas of access and distribution.
2. Strong Communities build equitable relationships and leadership at the neighborhood level.
Ron Shultz, Policy Director of the Washington State Conservation Commission noted that there is a cultural and political divide between the urban North and rural Southern parts of Thurston County. The North wants to buy fresh local food; the South has a viable market in its neighbors to the North.
Increased dialogue could foster this market opportunity, and the resulting strong economic relationships could help bridge the divide.
3. Vibrant Farms are the natural consequence of both supporting local family farms to be economically viable, and protecting farmers, farm-workers, and farm animals. Between 1950 and 2008 Thurston County lost 90,000 acres of farmland (75% of its agricultural lands).
The underlying issue is that farmland brings in more money when sold for real estate development than when preserved for producing food. In addition, more than half of young farmers lease their land, so they are less likely to invest in soil or infrastructure improvements due to their insecure land position.
Agribusiness subsidies and the cheap food mindset distort the food marketplace for shoppers and make it difficult for small farmers to recover the real cost of growing food.
Changes in land use policy, incentives for improvement of farmland, redirection of subsidies toward small farms, and education for consumers are all possible ways to address this issue.
4. Healthy People means good health and healthy food for all, regardless of race or class. It connects people to the food system and to the land.
Panel speaker Ayadejha Turner, a junior at Black Hills High School spoke about her participation in Voices of Youth. The project surveyed more than 1,000 Thurston County students asking what they needed to be healthy, the second most common response? Access to healthy food. She implored the audience to “get us involved.”
“People doubt youth. We are passionate. You’ve got to get us involved taking a stand for these things.”
5. Sustainable Ecosystems depend on a healthy environment, enhanced biodiversity, and food distribution practices that mitigate climate change, among other things.
Panelist Pat Labine asserts that healthy ecosystems mean organic farming. With each 1 degree (Celsius) rise in average global temperature, agricultural productivity decreases 10% and global temperatures are expected to increase 3-7 degrees this century. That is an estimated loss of 30-70% of agricultural productivity.
Locally produced and distributed food may help to reduce temperature increases.
6. Thriving Local Economies create local jobs, build economic vitality within the food system, and promote sustainable development and infrastructure. TJ Johnson says that Cleveland, Ohio, which lost half its population in the past several decades, is “revitalizing [it’s] economy through the local food system. They have urban farms and urban gardens. They’re getting that food into institutions like hospitals and schools. They’re making it easier for people to start businesses to produce and distribute and manufacture food in downtown Cleveland. They see the food system as a ticket to sustainable economic recovery.”
Now that the brainstorm ideas have been captured on paper, students from Evergreen’s Ecological Agriculture program will spend the next two quarters synthesizing the data. The hope of Summit organizers is to use the data to create a “Regional Food System Action Plan” that can guide future food policy decisions.
Here are three suggestions that I think would help strengthen the local food movement moving forward:
1. Pro-actively expand and sustain relationships with people across race, class, and other differences. Similar movements have often failed in this respect. People with the least resources, those most negatively impacted by the current food system, have the biggest stake in the success of a healthy food system. They are among the strongest allies for foodies and those for whom healthy food is a given, and can be among the strongest advocates when room is made for them at the decision making table.
2. Participate in ongoing anti-oppression education, and name privilege directly in order to be more welcoming. The Growing Food and Justice For All Initiative in Milwaukee, Wisconsin identifies “dismantling racism as a core principal which brings together social change agents working to bring about new, healthy and sustainable food systems and building multicultural leadership in impoverished communities throughout the world.”
3. Offer free brainstorm sessions throughout the county, and remove barriers to participation by offering free childcare and food.
There will be a Food Summit debrief at Evergreen, 7 pm in Seminar II, room E-1105. Additional steps toward a “Regional Food System Action Plan” will be in January. Until then? Stay tuned. For more info: www.sustainablesouthsound.org/programs/local-food-systems-program/