"You can't understand urban growth if you don't understand the globalization of food," Theresa Marquez said last week at Verdopolis. Marquez is marketing director with the U.S. organic farmer cooperative Organic Valley. As she describes the disconnection between urban and rural and how it contributes to worldwide corporate consolidation of food production and distribution, a guy in the row in front of me is checking the world news on his laptop--Haarez, Der Speigel--then editing some photographs from the Wednesday night fashion show.
Okay, this is fairly cheap as observations go, but does seem like an ironic illustration of the phenomenon Marquez is describing.
There's a lot to like about Organic Valley's operation--joint decision making by over 600 nationwide member farms, commitment to sustainable agriculture, determination to get organic dairy into the mainstream American food marketplace.
In terms of the future green city, I like how it strikes a balance between large scale and localism. Joining the coop gives the farmers financial stability and incentive to stay in agriculture, in the face of tremendous pressure from the corporate food industry, and gets their foods directly to people nearby--saving energy that would be wasted transporting it further away, and cycling local dollars back to local farms.
(more...)
The national scale of the OV cooperative also gives the farmers a stake in what's happening beyond their own regions, and the power to create greater social impact. It's a good contradiction to the parochialism I've heard lately in the localism movement.
Marquez is an evangelist for more connection to the land, citing a 2004 Roeper survey showing that Americans want "more hands-on work" in their lives. She's eloquent on what she conceptualizes as a problem of marketing and information: "How do we convey that what's complex is actually simple," how food is produced and arrives on our city tables, "while what we think is simple is actually quite complex?"
The systems that make up a city--electricity, water, sewage, transportation--are complex. If anything, they're likely to become more complex in the future green city.
And there are already plenty of projects proving how much the quality of what we eat is improved when the simplicity of the farmer-to-city dweller food connection is revealed: farmer's markets that maintain the vitality of local producers and cuisines, innovative programs that bring farm produce directly to low-income communities that are generally beset with fast-food outlets, while lacking supermarkets.
But my question is: assuming we can't evangelize most urban dwellers--now the majority of people on Earth--to join a community-supported agriculture program or a local food coop, take an active interest in where their food is grown, or even go out of their way to buy organic milk, how are we going to improve the food system anyway?
In WorldChanging terms: Can we make organic milk sexy enough to get onto the cover of Plenty?
Sure, says Marquez. Earth Day's never taken off as a holiday because it doesn't include a meal, so why not turn it into Earth Dinner: a feast where you can say where each and every thing on the table comes from, and share stories and learning about farms and how food is grown.
It's a good idea. But it's not quite an answer to my question.
This Verdopolis panel winds up with some positive words from moderator Stuart Gannes of Stanford's Digital Vision Program. We all want to food to keep us healthy, and to eat well. Maybe organic food, community supported agriculture, and Earth Dinner holiday feasts are ways for politically polarized Americans--the more-rural red and the more-urban blue--to find some common understanding.
Kind of like your family's Thanksgiving dinner.
