Photo: Eddie Crimmins

Today, the bronze bull — that icon of the OWS movement — is the lone farm animal you’ll find in the financial district. And the barricades are back, but only to keep Zuccotti Park’s mic checkers in check. That surprisingly fertile concrete plaza has yielded a bumper crop of grassroots activists, to the discomfort of (most of) the 1% and the shills who bill them. But the voices of farmers — a.k.a. the 1% that grows the food that 100% of us eat — have been largely missing from this movement to reclaim our democracy, despite the fact that food has become a commodity that enriches a few at the expense of the many.

That all changed this past Sunday, though, when a group of farmers from around the country marched to Zuccotti Park accompanied by their allies: food justice activists, community gardeners, and other advocates for a more equitable, ecologically sound, re-localized food system.

The march, organized by Occupy Wall Street’s food justice committee and Food Democracy Now, began with a rally at La Plaza Cultural Community Garden in the East Village, where hundreds of folks gathered to hear fiddlers and drummers give the event a festive kickoff, followed by a panel of urban and rural farmers.

Photo: Eddie Crimmins

Speakers included: Karen Washington, urban farmer and the founder of City Farms Markets, who grew up just blocks away from the community garden; Mike Callicrate, a Colorado rancher and a lead plaintiff in a lawsuit against the world’s largest beef packer; Severine von Tscharner Fleming, the filmmaker behind Greenhorns and a farmer who’s worked tirelessly to promote the young farmer movement; Jalal Sabur, a founding member of the Freedom Food Alliance, which unites black urban communities with black rural farmers; renowned permaculture expert Andrew Faust; Jim Goodman, a Wisconsin dairy farmer who organized a “tractorcade” to Madison earlier this year to protest Gov. Scott Walker’s anti-union legislation; and Jim Gerritsen, a Maine organic farmer who is president of the Organic Seed Growers and Trade Association and the lead plaintiff in a class action lawsuit against Monsanto.*

Gerritsen, who was recently named one of “25 Visionaries Who Are Changing the World” by Utne Reader, noted that he had “never had a reason” to come New York City before. Now, at age 56, he came to tell organizers that “Occupy Wall Street is the conscience of America,” adding that “rural America stands behind you.”

A movement that’s been denigrated by some as a motley mob of lazy, dirty hippies got a boost from hardworking Americans who’ve chosen one of the most demanding, least lucrative vocations imaginable — producing our food. Don’t tell these folks to get a job; the majority of small family farmers have to hold down at least two jobs just to make ends meet or get health care.

Jalal Sabar expressed his desire to foster a deeper awareness of the issues facing both urban and rural farmers:

A lot of times the farmer in Iowa doesn’t know that the kid in the hood is getting stopped and frisked every day … I understand that farmers can barely survive, that they have to work a job outside of the farm … We want to make sure that the foodies understand what the farmworkers go through.

Sabar also pointed out that land grabs, a problem seen as occurring mainly in developing nations, are happening here as well. He cited the recent raid on the Morning Glory Community Garden in the South Bronx by the NYC Department of Housing Preservation & Development. (On Saturday, a protest by Occupy The Bronx at the site of the ransacked garden resulted in several arrests.)

Severine von Tscharner Fleming addressed another kind of land grab that’s threatening our farmlands: fracking. In the wake of Hurricane Irene, which destroyed many local New York state crops, von Tscharner Fleming described the way representatives from natural gas companies had turned up promptly, checkbooks in hand, pressuring desperate farmers to lease their drilling rights. She echoed last week’s devastating New York Times exposé, “Learning Too Late of the Perils in Gas Well Leases,” by saying:

Those of us who are running farms in different parts of the region are having to compete with the drillers and are then surrounded by the tanks and the effluent and the pipelines and the huge rigs of trucks, the millions of gallons of contaminated, radioactive water that are pumped out of these wells and the fumes that are in the wind and when you’re trying to grow gorgeous produce it’s not so wonderful.

Photo: Eddie CrimminsDairyman Jim Goodman availed himself of the peoples’ microphone to explain his motivation to attend the march:

We were told in the ’60s that there comes a time when the machinery becomes so odious … that you have to throw yourself into the machinery and make it stop.

They tell me I must feed the world. But I’m not going to. I want to feed you. I want the world to feed itself. And they can. They’ve been farming longer than we have. They’re smarter, they’re younger, they’re stronger, they’re women, they’re people of color.

The corporations want them out, they want the good land. They give them the poor land. And then they say, “See? They can’t feed themselves.” A self-fulfilling prophecy.

… Take the power away from Wall Street! Remake Washington.

The rally culminated in a seed swap with farmers and gardeners exchanging packets of heirloom, open-pollinated seeds, including some donated by the Hudson Valley Seed Library founders, who’ve done so much to revitalize New York’s regional seed trade and inspired similar endeavors around the country.

Kneeling on the pavement there at Zuccotti Park, sorting through the seeds under the glow of the twinkly holiday lights, we couldn’t help feeling that the Farmers’ March was marking the beginning of a greater affinity between city and country folks. Here’s hoping the farmers won’t wait another few centuries to come back to our neck of the woods.

* Speaking of taking action against Monsanto, the folks at Occupy Big Food are organizing a protest on Wednesday in Times Square, where Monsanto’s CFO will be speaking at the Bank of America/Merrill Lynch conference.

The man himself, James Beard

Seriously? This epicurean epicenter housed in an elegant West Village brownstone with eternally well-tended window boxes, wants to stir up something more culturally significant than mouth-watering meals curated by celebrity chefs?

Well, yes. And it’s a logical move, if they don’t want to see their legacy (or their democracy) go down the toilet. After all, as Mario Batali once pointed out on CBS Sunday Morning, “When you think about it, all my greatest work is poop, tomorrow.”

Ah, but not all excrement is created equal. On the one hand, intensive pork production’s given us vast pools of lethally toxic pig shit known as manure lagoons, more akin to radioactive waste than organic manure. On the other hand, there are worm castings, the highly fertile poop extruded by earthworms that looks like coffee grounds and smells pleasantly earthy.

The respective hazards and merits of various manures has not, historically, been the province of the JBF. This highly influential culinary center, founded after the legendary chef and cookbook author James Beard’s death in 1985 at the age of 81, is better known for its awards honoring outstanding chefs, restaurateurs, and writers.

But with the current American diet in such a dire state, the JBF folks are not content to simply celebrate culinary and literary excellence. Eager to play a more proactive role in reshaping our food system, the JBF has come down squarely in favor of a future that features more worm castings and fewer manure lagoons.

The JBF promoted that vision last week with its second annual JBF Food Conference, How Money and Media Influence the Way America Eats. In conjunction with the conference, the JBF also held its inaugural JBF Leadership Awards [PDF], which honored 10 “visionaries in the business, government and education sectors responsible for creating a healthier, safer, and more sustainable food world.”

Fittingly, one of the honorees was vermicomposting genius Will Allen, whose internationally acclaimed nonprofit Growing Power flourishes on a foundation of worm poop.

And while the JBF’s newfound fervor to reform our food chain may seem like a radical departure, it’s really more like a homecoming. James Beard, whose influence led Julia Child to declare him “the Dean of American Cuisine,” was advocating pure, regional, seasonally based home cooking half a century before Alice Waters and Michael Pollan sought to popularize that ideal.

Beard despised the prepackaged convenience foods that had already begun to displace real meals in his heyday. In a letter to his friend Helen Evans Brown in September of 1954, he wrote:

The food editors’ conference is going full tilt and we hear the results are horrifying. Soon, we are told, there will be no fresh foods on the market — just canned or frozen (this came from the lips of the Secretary of Agriculture).

The JBF Food Conference, co-hosted by Good Housekeeping at their conference facility in the LEED gold certified Hearst Tower, brought together chefs, scholars, entrepreneurs, economists, writers, advocates, and representatives from nonprofits and corporations to examine the financial underpinnings of our food system and the media’s role in shaping our food choices.

The goal was to find common ground among people with diverse agendas, and “establish a set of guiding principles around which we can organize and move forward together,” as the conference’s facilitator, Joseph McIntyre, announced at the outset.

McIntyre, president of the California-based think/do tank Ag Innovations Network, came to town a few days early to make a pilgrimage to Zuccotti Park.

I wanted to go down there and see what was going on. And you know what they were talking about? Money and media. I would argue that our friends in the Tea Party are talking about the same things. Underneath the great debate in America today about food, about finance, underneath the polarized positions between Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party, lie common aspirations for the future. How many of you do not want a world that’s better for your children?

The JBF’s Leadership Awards, which offer prestige but no monetary prize, personified the paradoxes that bedevil the good food movement. Michelle Obama, Alice Waters, and the aforementioned Will Allen were obvious shoo-ins, as was Fedele Bauccio, whose Bon Appétit Management Company has been the gold standard when it comes to sustainability in the food service industry.

Other honorees whose bona fides were impeccable included Debra Eschmeyer, the dynamic co-founder of the just-launched FoodCorps; the venerable Fred Kirschenmann, of the Leopold Center For Sustainable Agriculture and Stone Barns; and author/professor Janet Poppendieck, whose books Sweet Charity and Free For All: Fixing School Food in America offer thoughtful analyses on the root causes of hunger in our society and how to reform our shoddy school lunch program.

But the inclusion of executives from Costco, Unilever, and Sysco no doubt surprised some folks. Forbes writer Nadia Arumugam was pleased to see them included. She said:

… witnessing three high-level executives from three large corporations receive awards for their tangible and results-driven efforts to further the sustainable food movement, was surprising, but extremely heartening.

This is where the pragmatists and the purists collide. As Naomi Klein told Civil Eats, “The food movement is inherently anti-corporate and it is inherently about rebuilding a real economy.”

In honoring corporations who are making incremental changes that merit our support, the JBF challenges that assumption. And what are we to make of the partnerships that two of the honorees, Michelle Obama and Will Allen, have forged with Walmart?

It’s a dilemma that James Beard would have understood. As David Kamp noted in The United States of Arugula, Beard labeled himself a “gastronomic whore” after entering into an endorsement deal with Green Giant to tout their Corn Niblets and wax beans in his recipes:

In his heart, Beard knew that lending his name to processed foods was a betrayal of his core beliefs in seasonality and regionality … but his cooking school required a lot of money to operate, and his ever-increasing number of writing commitments required a full-time retinue of testers and gh
ostwriters.

Where does compromise end and co-option begin? As Walt Whitman famously said, “Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.”

Photo: Charlie Samuels

Now our current round of layoffs and foreclosures has unceremoniously transferred millions of folks from the “affluent” to the “afflicted” category, exiling them from Brooks’s mythical exurban Eden.

But instead of setting up tents, these newly poor live in a perpetual state of nestlessness, couch-surfing, or flitting from one basement rec room to the next. And rather than revisiting Hooverville, they’ve given our national landscape the barely-lived in, already abandoned suburban ghost towns I call Kunstlervilles, in honor of my favorite peak oil prophet, James Howard Kunstler.

Less scrappy than crappy, the derelict condos and subdivisions of Kunstlerville were built for buyers who never materialized — erected with marginally better building materials than a Hooverville, but doomed to house pigeons before a decorator ever had the chance to breeze in and decree, “Put a bird on it!”

Kunstler has long warned of the horrendous hangover we’re going to wake up with after our “cheap oil fiesta,” but he’s not gloating as global instability and climate destabilization become the new not-so-normal. Unlike some dystopians, he’s motivated less by the desire to say “I told you so” than by the hope that we might still manage to reinvent the American dream on a scale that better suits our current circumstances.

I caught up with Kunstler recently when a conference took me to his hometown of Saratoga Springs, and afterward followed up via email. (Our conversation has been edited for space and style.)

Q. In your 2005 book The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century, you gave high-rises low marks, and declared that you’re “not optimistic about our big cities.” You maintain that towns and small cities are far better equipped to adapt to the post-cheap-oil future.

Now, we’ve got economist Edward Glaeser talking up skyscrapers in The Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier and Happier. David Owen made a similar case with Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less are the Keys to Sustainability.

Do you find yourself swayed, even a little, by these defenders of urban density?

A. I am completely on board with compact, dense urbanism. It’s a mistake, though, to think that’s the same as an urbanism of mega-structures — either skyscrapers or landscrapers.

A lot of this misunderstanding derived from David Owen’s 2004 New Yorker article, “Green Manhattan,” which declared that stacking people up in towers was the ultimate triumph of urban ecology. Owen is a very nice fellow, but this thesis was a crock.

And I’m confident that Ed Glaeser and his acolytes will be disappointed with how it all works out, too. We are entering a capital-scarce, energy-scarce future. The skyscraper is already obsolete and the architects and academic economists remain tragically clueless about it.

Oddly, the main reason we’re done with skyscrapers is not because of the electric issues or heating-cooling issues per se, but because they will never be renovated! They are one-generation buildings. We will not have the capital to renovate them — and all buildings eventually require renovation! We likely won’t have the fabricated modular materials they require, either — everything from the manufactured sheet-rock to the silicon gaskets and sealers needed to keep the glass curtain walls attached.

You cannot have a city of buildings unavailable for and unsuited for adaptive re-use. This final exuberant generation of skyscrapers built the past few decades — including the mis-named “green” skyscrapers — may be considered the architectural expression of the final cheap oil blow-off.

From now on, we need desperately to tone down our grandiosity. We will discover to our dismay that all these skyscrapers — amazing feats that they might be — are liabilities, not assets. Our cities are going to contract a lot and the process will be painful in terms of lost notional wealth (and probably other ways, too). They have attained a scale that is inconsistent with the economic and energy realities of the future. The optimum building height, we will re-discover, is the number of stories most healthy people can comfortably walk up.

Q. Is “smart growth” the antidote to sprawl, or just a developer’s disingenuous oxymoron?

A. “Smart growth” started as a polemical retort to the “dumb” growth of suburban sprawl. It happened that dumb growth was utterly entrenched in all our local land-use laws, and in the sectors that served them — especially the construction trades and our lending practices. The zoning laws mandated a car-dependent outcome, and the builders furnished it, exactly as specified.

By the way, it’s important to understand that suburbia was not dreamed up by the devil or any of his agents among us. It just seemed like a good idea in the America of the 20th century. We had the material and capital resources to build this empire of comfort and convenience, so we did. And all this implies a powerful cultural consensus — a broad agreement that this way of living is okay.

Eventually, of course, it became embedded in our national identity as a late incarnation of the American Dream. All well and good — and over! Because our circumstances have changed drastically now. We face the awful predicament of peak oil, and the global contest over the world’s remaining resources, and reality is telling us very loudly that we have to live differently — we have to get a new American Dream.

The resistance to this is ferocious, not because Americans are particularly dumb or wicked, but because of the massive investments we have already made in these suburban infrastructures for daily living. We can’t accept the scary mandates of reality, or begin the process of letting go.

Smart growth was a strategy undertaken by the New Urbanist reformers to offer an alternative template for land development in America — one based on the traditional walkable neighborhood. The New Urbanists were superbly skilled at drawing up clear graphical codes that might be used to replace the suburban codes around the country. The term “smart” growth was intended to be a selling point — though, unfortunately it often offended the very people it was aimed at by making their own codes look dumb.

Personally, I regret that this moniker was adopted, because it inadvertently provoked so much push-back. But by default the New Urbanists have basically won the argument, even if victory hasn’t been officially declared. The housing bubble bust has seen to that. It represents not just a transient economic fiasco; it is the end of the suburban project per se. We are finished with suburbia. We’re stuck with the residue of it. And now we’ll see how this all sorts itself out in the face of $100+ per barrel oil.

We will probably come to see a long era of little-to-no-growth. Whatever happens in terms of the human habitat from now on will involve the re-use of stuff that is already there, one way or another.

Personally, I believe the action is going to shift to small towns, small cities, and places that exist in a relationship with a productive agricultural landscape. The fate of suburbia is to become slums, salvage sites, and ruins. Human beings are very good at sorting out materials, and we’ll have to do a lot of that. I believe a great deal of all trade in the years ahead will be in material goods already made, re-purposed, as they say, and re-circulated.

Q. Walmart’s pulling out all the stops to set up shop in New York City, which has historically been far more hostile to mega retailers than most of the country. But you seem pretty confident that big box stores are destined to go the way of the dodo. Should we add mallrats to the endangered species list? Who’s in greater danger of extinction, walruses or Walmart?

A. The way we’ve come to do commerce in the USA the past 50 years — big box chain-store retail — is not a permanent fixture of the human condition, though for many it has been appended to the list of icons that make up our national identity: mother, apple pie, Walmart.

I maintain that any activity organized at the colossal scale will tend to fail in the face of the compound crises of energy, capital, and ecology (climate change). Giant governments, giant universities, giant retail operations — all these things will wobble and fail in the years ahead as reality compels us to downscale and re-localize.

The big box chain stores rely on economic formulas that have no chance of surviving under the new stresses loose in the world — procedures like Walmart’s vaunted “warehouse on wheels,” which relies on the incessant circulation of tractor-trailer trucks traveling vast distances on the interstate highway system (itself subject to failure in a capital-scarce economy).

Most truckers in America are independent contractors who have to cover their own costs, and as the price of diesel fuel rises, they will be battered. Likewise the conveyor belt of cheap plastic merchandise from Asia is also not a permanent arrangement, but rather a transient phenomenon of cheap oil and labor cost arbitrage. Consider, too, that the traumatic loss of jobs and incomes is impoverishing the very customers that the chain stores depend on. So the whole picture for these operations is rather grim.

Q. The news is filled with politicians and pundits hyperventilating over our apparent national debt crisis. But, as Time‘s ace environmental journalist Bryan Walsh reports in “The Natural Debt Crisis: Learning to Live Within Our Planet’s Means,”  our heedless exploitation and despoiling of our natural resources poses at least as great a threat to our future.

The problem, as Walsh notes, is that many of the people who are now in charge of our energy and environmental policies not only reject the reality of climate destabilization, but actually insist that God would simply not allow our country to ever “run out of anything.” So, they’ve got a green light from God to put a stop to any efforts to conserve, innovate, or otherwise address our over-the-top energy consumption.

Leaving aside the question of whether God even exists, or is stockpiling an infinite supply of finite resources just for us, how do you think this creepy cabal of Koch-ed up climate change deniers and enRaptured Republicans will cope as the cost of oil goes up, scarcity becomes the new normal, and biblical floods and droughts continue to plague us here and abroad?

A. I’ve said many times that we can expect delusional beliefs to rise in proportion to the economic hardships we experience. That is exactly what’s happening.

So, it’s necessary to remind people that life is tragic and history won’t shed a tear for us if we make poor collective decisions, or adopt beliefs that are inconsistent with reality. We are proud of declaring ourselves to be a “free country.” Alas, this leaves us free to pound our civilization down a rat-hole, which is what we’re doing.

Or to be more precise about it, we are mounting a foolish campaign to sustain the unsustainable, to defend our previous investments in things like suburban living, instead of making new arrangements. That’s what we do when we invest half a trillion dollars of “stimulus” capital in building new circumferential highways around our hypertrophied metroplex cities instead of repairing the railroad system.

There is, sadly, much truth in the old saying that people get what they deserve, not what they expect. We are an extremely demoralized nation, unable to construct a coherent consensus about what is happening and what we might do about it, and floundering as a result. Even at the elite environmentalist level, the conversation is ridiculous. For two years in a row, I attended the Aspen Environmental forum, which attracts the cream of the green-and-enviro community. Whenever the subjects of peak oil and our extreme car dependency came up, all they wanted to talk about was running cars by other clever means: electricity, biodiesel, etc. They showed a total lack interest in walkable communities or public transit. They were blind to the fact that their own techno-grandiosity left them in a position that only promoted further car dependency — which is suicidal, of course.

Q. In your forecast for 2011, posted on Jan. 3, you mentioned the “eerie absence of major disruptive events on the world stage” and noted that the Middle East, which you described as a “sorry-ass corner of the world, a neighborhood of camel-herders turned lottery-winners” has “the most potential for blowing up than any other region except Korea.”

Now that the dung has duly hit the fan, what do you think the ripple effect will be?

A. The Middle East blew up very impressively a mere month after I predicted it. The situation gives every sign of spreading and getting worse. Despots ruling resource-rentier economies are falling like dominos. As I write, Mubarak in Egypt is gone, Gadhafi is under siege in Libya, Yemen, Bahrain, Oman are in an uproar.

Egypt does not produce much oil but Libya does and production is shut down, including a substantial amount of the world’s available export oil. Algeria is rumbling, too, and they are significant oil exporters. The price of crude has gone over $100, so it’s entered the zone where it tends to crush economies in the OECD nations.

We have reason to fear that these uprisings will infect Saudi Arabia, which is ruled by a physically ill 87-year-old king with an even sicker 86-year-old successor. Good luck with that.

One thing we also need to be concerned about is that a lot of the oil production infrastructure could end up getting smashed as these people settle their hashes. Gadhafi explicitly threatened to blow up his refineries and pipelines. The trouble could well spread to Iraq and even Iran. While many idealists are trumpeting the rise of popular movements in these places, it’s important to remember that the outcome is completely unsettled and may remain turbulent for as far ahead as we can see.

The oil industry will not operate well in a turbulent situation. I believe this will lead to a permanent energy crisis, which would include gasoline rationing here in the USA and much more extreme economic distress in more ways than you can imagine. At the same time, we’re seeing the situation aggravated by food shortages connected to climate change crop failures.

I suspect that we have left behind the supposed normality of the past decade and have now entered uncharted territory of the long emergency. We have also seen the first stirrings of American unrest in the battles over public employee bargaining rights. I’d maintain that this is only the start of a very rough political era in the USA. The buildup of tensions is fantastic. You have a dissolving middle class watching their futures whirl around the drain, and an obscenely rich Wall Street banking class (abetted by a disgustingly bought-off political class) that has been allowed to evade the rule of law in running a set of ruinous financial rackets, swindles, and frauds, and this alone is, to me, a recipe for civil disorder. I’m amazed that the Hamptons have not yet been torched.

—–

Also check out:

• Kunstler on peak oil, sprawl, and upcoming catastrophes

Marlsanto: A persuasive combine-nation?Photos: Monsanto, Marlboro

Now that the Supreme Court has declared that corporations are people, too (happy birthday, Citizens United!), Monsanto is apparently out to put a friendly, slightly weather-beaten, gently grizzled face on industrial agriculture. The above ad (the lefthand one) is part of a campaign currently appearing in bus shelters in D.C., including just outside USDA headquarters, among other places. The link, Americasfarmers.com, forwards to a Monsanto page. 

This guy looks an awful lot like Henry Fonda playing Tom Joad in The Grapes of Wrath, which seems only fitting since Agribiz may be helping to create a 21st century Dust Bowl.

After decades of boasting about how fossil-fuel-intensive industrial agriculture has made it possible for far fewer farmers to produce way more food, Monsanto is now championing the power of farming to create jobs and preserve land. Does this attempt by a biotechnology behemoth to wrap itself in a populist plaid flannel shirt give you the warm and fuzzies, or just burn you up?

I checked in with Marion Nestle, NYU professor of nutrition and author of the good-food handbooks What to Eat and Food Politics, and most recently Safe Food: The Politics of Food Safety (University of California Press, 2010), for her take on the campaign.

Nestle: This is not a new strategy for Monsanto. Half of my book Safe Food is devoted to the politics of food biotechnology. I illustrated it with a Monsanto advertisement (Figure 17, page 182). The caption may amuse you:

In 2001, the biotechnology industry’s public relations campaign featured the equivalent of the Marlboro Man. Rather than cigarettes, however, this advertisement promotes the industry’s view of the ecological advantages of transgenic crops (reduced pesticide use, soil conservation), and consequent benefits to society (farm preservation). In 2002, a series of elegant photographs promoted the benefits of genetically modified corn, soybeans, cotton, and papaya.

Last year, Monsanto placed ads that took its “we’re for farmers” stance to another level:

9 billion people to feed. A changing climate. NOW WHAT? Producing more. Conserving more. Improving farmers’ lives. That’s sustainable agriculture. And that’s what Monsanto is all about.

That’s sustainable agriculture? I’ll bet you didn’t know that. Now take a look at the Monsanto website — really, you can’t make this stuff up:

If there were one word to explain what Monsanto is about, it would have to be farmers.

Billions of people depend upon what farmers do. And so will billions more. In the next few decades, farmers will have to grow as much food as they have in the past 10,000 years — combined.

It is our purpose to work alongside farmers to do exactly that.

To produce more food.

To produce more with less, conserving resources like soil and water.

And to improve lives.

We do this by selling seeds, traits developed through biotechnology, and crop protection chemicals.

Face it. We have two agricultural systems in this country, both claiming to be good for farmers and both claiming to be sustainable. One focuses on local, seasonal, organic, and sustainable in the sense of replenishing what gets taken out of the soil. The other is Monsanto’s, for which “sustainable” means selling seeds (and not letting farmers save them), patenting traits developed through biotechnology, and selling crop protection chemicals.

This is about who gets to control the food supply and who gets to choose. Too bad the Monsanto ads don’t explain that.

A version of this appeared on Huffington Post

Grow for your supper: Forage patron and sometime supplier Sahir grows yellow limes in Loma Vista; the Los Angeles restaurant can now legally use ingredients such as hers in its dishes thanks to getting straight with the health department.  Photo: Forage LA

If some sort of natural disaster or terrorist attack were to shut down New York City’s food supply chain, our supermarket shelves would reportedly be picked clean within three days. Other U.S. cities aren’t any better prepared for such emergencies, thanks to our fuelish dependence on a globalized food system.

So my husband Matt keeps a bin filled with tins of sardines under the bed in our sardine tin-sized Manhattan apartment. Plus two cans of organic vegetarian chili, and a Kelp Krunch sesame energy bar. He’s on a self-sufficiency kick, too; makes his own vanilla extract, sauerkraut, duck rillette, and cat food. I guess we’ll be in pretty good shape if calamity comes a-callin’.

But how will our fellow New Yorkers feed themselves? Will they pluck purslane from the sidewalk cracks? Raid Annie Novak’s rooftop farm? Where will the freegans forage when the dumpsters are as empty as a Palin stump speech?

Matt and I aren’t the only ones stewing about our far-flung food chain. Evan Fraser, co-author of the new book Empires of Food: Feast, Famine, and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations, declared on NPR’s All Things Considered recently that our entire future is imperiled by a global food system “built on some very, very rickety pillars.”

Lettuce lead the way: San Francisco planted a temporary Victory Garden in front of its city hall as part of 2008’s Slow Food Nation; the city has since enacted a regional food policy. Photo courtesy of In Praise of Sardines via FlickrFraser warns that the U.S. is making the same agricultural missteps that brought down the Roman and Mayan Empires: degrading our topsoil; banking blindly on ever-higher yields at a time when unstable weather patterns and depleted resources will more likely bring reduced harvests; cultivating a monoculture that’s economically efficient but ecologically ruinous. And talk about a vicious cycle — our fossil fuel-intensive, forest-and-ocean-destroying farming methods worsen climate change, which makes it ever harder to grow food all over the world.

A relocalized food system, or “foodshed” (i.e., the path that our food travels to get from farm to plate) offers city dwellers a sustainable alternative to Agribizness-as-usual. Shorten your supply chain and you stand to reap a long list of benefits: increased food security; green space provided by urban farms and gardens; more fresh, wholesome foods and job opportunities where they’re needed most; less pollution and waste; and reinvigorated local economies.

A seismic shift toward greater self-sufficiency is rippling through every region. We’ve seen a dramatic rise in farmers markets and CSAs (community supported agriculture programs), and tremendous enthusiasm for community and school gardens and urban farms. Food policy councils are cropping up all over the country. From Sonoma to Chicago to Sheboygan, these coalitions have brought together policy makers, for-profit and non-profit enterprises, farmers, gardeners, and advocates to figure out how to go about relocalizing our food systems.

Vine specimens: Forage Growers Circle member Warren shows off the bitter melon, cucumber, chard, and Japanese eggplant he grows in Highland Park for the restaurant. Photo: Forage LAThe first link in this brave new food chain? Land tenure, zoning issues, and other regulatory hurdles that city folks have to contend with in order to grow food to feed themselves or sell to others. They’re also working on how to collect and compost food waste instead of shipping it to the landfill; how to increase the percentage of locally sourced ingredients in schools, hospitals, prisons, and other publicly run institutions; how to facilitate local food production and ease distribution bottlenecks; and how to support all kinds of urban agriculture, from school and community gardens to rooftop farms, aquaculture, chicken keeping, and bee keeping.

Zoning in on vegging out

There’s no shortage of places to grow food in even the most densely built communities. What’s in short supply, in some cities, is better access to these spaces, and more secure tenure. With all the sweat equity that it takes to turn a barren lot or a rooftop into an edible oasis, our community gardeners and city farmers deserve to have their cherished plots protected from being plowed under to make way for more condos. Here in New York, hundreds of community gardeners and urban ag advocates turned out at a recent hearing to voice their concerns about proposed regulations that would sow uncertainty like a pernicious perennial weed in their carefully cultivated beds. Even now, despite a development-dampening recession and the resurgence of urban farming, community gardeners can’t afford to let down their guard.

Detroit has become an international poster child for urban agriculture, with an estimated 40 square miles or so of open land and a mayor, Dave Bing, who’s eager to convert those vacant lots into productive farms. But Detroit’s current zoning laws “neither define nor set standards for community gardening or commercial agriculture,” according to the city planning commission’s urban agriculture draft policy. So, Detroit’s thriving farms are off the radar, officially speaking. Mayor Bing is being encouraged to move “quickly to change the city and state legal structure to accommodate them,” as the Detroit News reports; Grist’s Tom Philpott has more on the history and future of Detroit’s urban-ag scene.

Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn has declared 2010 the “year of urban agriculture“, as Tyler Falk reported for Grist, and he means it: the c
ity government this month approved new legislation that allows any would-be urban farmer to grow and sell food, increases the number of backyard poultry allowed from three to eight, and other urban-ag-friendly moves.

In Los Angeles, Jason Kim, the young chef behind a hot new Silver Lake eatery named Forage, had the novel idea of letting home gardeners trade their surplus produce for meals at his restaurant. As the word spread, Kim’s “Home Growers Circle” grew to include more than a dozen backyard farmers.

But four months after he launched the program, Kim was obliged to suspend it after the health department informed him that produce from unlicensed growers would be a liability risk should a customer become ill.

After doing a little homework, the folks at Forage and the backyard farmers discovered that the Home Growers Circle could receive the same certification that lets professional farmers sell their produce at farmers markets, just by paying a $63 fee and undergoing an inspection. So, as of July, the Home Growers Circle is back in action, equipped with Certified Producer’s Certificates from the county agricultural commission that permit them to sell their backyard surplus to restaurants and markets.

Front-yard farmers in Sacramento, meanwhile, are just grateful they’re allowed to grow any food at all. It took food activists three years to overturn a ban on front yard food gardens that dated back to 1941. Now, they just have to get to work on Sacramento’s mayor, who left food out of the equation when he recently announced a “Green Initiative” to make his city more sustainable.

It’s an all-too-common oversight. Mayor Bloomberg — famous for championing a soda tax, salt reduction, and calorie counts — mysteriously ignored food when he announced New York City’s sustainability blueprint, PlaNYC. So, Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer stepped up to the plate and collaborated with local good-food folks (disclosure: myself among them) to create FoodNYC, a comprehensive plan to relocalize New York City’s foodshed through such initiatives as an Urban Agriculture Program and an Office of Food and Markets. The FoodNYC team has met with the mayor to discuss incorporating their proposals into PlaNYC, but Bloomberg has yet to sign on.

Friend o’locavores: Mayor Gavin Newsom announces a regional food policy for San Francisco.Photo courtesy of mayorgavinnewsom via FlickrSan Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom needs no such prodding to put food policy front and center. In July, Newsom issued an executive directive which has the potential to “dramatically accelerate urban food production,” according to New School professor Nevin Cohen, an urban food policy expert who lauds Newsom’s specific mandates as a meaningful step up from the non-binding agreements and resolutions that typify so many food policy initiatives.

Newsom’s directive contains 16 mandatory actions that various agencies must take in the near future in order to implement its goals. Cohen cites several of the most significant:

• Within six months, every department with jurisdiction over property is required to audit the land under their control to identify sites suitable for food production
• All city agencies that purchase food for events or meetings must buy healthy, locally produced or sustainably certified foods to the maximum extent possible. Within two months, the Department of the Environment will draft a local and sustainable food procurement ordinance for City government food purchases.
• The Parks Department is directed to facilitate access to gardening materials and tools to support increased production of food within the City. 

Food waste: kickin’ it to the curb