When Sadie Scheffer decided to start her own vegan, gluten-free baking company, the logistics were not her top priority. Like many small food companies without retail spaces, she started Bread SRSLY by delivering her breads and muffins on a bike, using a makeshift online ordering system through email and Etsy, and taking cash on delivery. Scheffer’s system worked when she was fielding a few orders at a time, but when it came time to scale up, it was less than ideal.

Enter Good Eggs, a San Francisco-based startup that provides online tools for small and sustainable food producers. Now Scheffer’s orders come through the Good Eggs online platform, and on top of taking orders from house to house, she now also drops off a lot of product at once at community pickup spots arranged by the company. She sells three times as many loaves of bread as she did before Good Eggs. Scheffer admits that she’s had trouble keeping up with orders, but adds: “That’s the fun part, the scary part, and the only way I’m going to grow.”

When Good Eggs was founded in the summer of 2011, co-founders Rob Spiro and Alon Salant knew they wanted to build “a product and company to serve and grow local food systems,” even if they didn’t know what it would look like. But Spiro and Salant are no amateurs: Spiro is an original co-founder of Aardvark, which sold to Google in 2010 for $50 million, and Salant is a co-founder of a software design company called Carbon Five.

The pair quickly set out to figure out how they could use technology to boost the local food community. They discovered that most small food businesses were built by food people, not tech people, and they were often missing the software they needed for even the most basic operations. Many, they found, were spending time they could be baking, pickling, or curating filling out charts on Google Docs by hand and taking one-off email orders.

As Good Eggs handles the logistics, its vendors are watching sales climb. But whether or not Good Eggs — and other sites like it — will be able to truly enable small sustainable businesses to scale up over the long term (after the trend factor dies down) is an open question. The costs of labor and quality local ingredients are still incredibly high, and while Good Eggs offers some solutions, it’s not a one-stop shop for all local food producers’ problems.

“One of the earliest surprises was that the food industry is not one industry, it’s a dozen industries,” Spiro told me. “So the way that a baker is selling their fresh bread subscription through Good Eggs is totally different than the way a ranch is selling a quarter of a cow.”

Click to see the invite.

Good Eggs launched its own site today, but for the past several months, the team has been building and running online storefronts on 40 San Francisco-based vendors’ websites. For 3 percent of each transaction, the Good Eggs team works closely with each to build a personalized online marketplace. “Our strategy is to align our incentives with the food producers,” says Spiro. The company also helps with marketing and promotion through what it hopes will become a large social media network of its own.

Take the Mission Community Market, a San Francisco nonprofit farmers market. It uses a Good Eggs platform to sell its Chef’s Market Box — a box of locally sourced ingredients with recipes from local chefs — but it also gets the company’s help writing and testing recipes, doing photo shoots, and handling delivery. It’s unclear which of these services will be available to Good Eggs clients in the future, but for Jeremy Shaw, executive director of Mission Community Market, it has made a world of difference. According to Shaw, “Without Good Eggs, the box wouldn’t be possible.”

Good Eggs is neither the first nor the last of the food-related startups scrambling to fill this space. Farmigo was one of the first of its kind when it was founded in 2008, and has since grown to provide 3,100 communities with farm-direct produce and CSA shares.

Plovgh similarly connects consumers with farmers, but gives buyers more flexibility and choice than a typical community-supported agriculture (CSA) box.  The New York-based site, FarmersWeb, offers an ordering system for local produce in bulk at wholesale prices. And because customers have to pay in advance, farmers no longer have to track them down and demand payment. Sarah Teale of the Adirondack Grazers’ Cooperative says working with FarmersWeb is “like having an agent.” “I really don’t want to be the one calling the restaurant saying, ‘pay up,’” she adds.

Technology has long played a role in advancing the food system — but that has usually meant the use of chemicals, hardware, and machinery to improve efficiencies. Now, says Danielle Gould, the founder of the website Food+Tech Connect, “technology is becoming increasingly focused on information flow. The internet, software, and low-cost hardware are making it easy for everyone along the food supply chain to connect and coordinate logistics.”

Gould’s hope is that this shift will infuse more democracy into the food system — through access to more information and much more choice in the kinds of foods available.

After all, no matter how ethical and pasture-based the ranch or how local the grains, food companies are only sustainable so long as they can stay in business, and the hope is that new technology will also offer stability.

Of course the irony is that maintaining a diversity of online services isn’t easy. And with all tech bubbles, it’s likely that one or two companies providing infrastructure for local food will outlast the others. But with a growing consumer base for organic food, and farmers frequently faced with more supply than they can sell, these new distribution solutions likely have plenty of room to grow.

As Spiro sees it, “We have a theory that local food as a whole is poised to grow 10 times over. So all ships rise with the rising tide. Farmers markets, food producers, and customers should all win.”  So who loses? “Safeway.”

Yesterday, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) released what it’s calling the “2.0 version” of its Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food Compass. For those not in the know, the Compass is a map of all of the local food projects — including farmers markets, food hubs, infrastructure, and producers — the USDA funds.

The Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food (KYF) initiative itself is the brainchild of USDA Deputy Secretary Kathleen Merrigan — possibly the highest ranking supporter of sustainable agriculture we’ve ever had at USDA — as a way to highlight efforts to aid local foods.

I’m a big fan of mapping as a visualization tool and the Compass certainly provides lots of data. That said, it’s not really much of a consumer-focused tool compared with private efforts like RealTimeFarms.com, which not only maps farmers markets and farms, but also shows the links between particular restaurants and their local artisanal and farm suppliers.

Instead, the KYF Compass is a way to illustrate what Merrigan and her team are accomplishing. The Compass demonstrates the national reach of USDA-funded local food products; there are little dots all over the country and in every state. Similarly, the KYF website has new local food “case studies” that spell out the department’s recent work. Here are some examples:

•  Calling Local Meat Processors: USDA is Here to Help
•  In Remote Sections of Rural Nevada, Healthy Food Grows Locally
•  Local Food Drives Small Business Growth in Southwest Wisconsin
•  A New Business Model Proves Lucrative for Grass-Based Dairies
•  Building a regional food system in Wyoming, a “value-added desert”

The Compass also proves that local food isn’t just a coastal phenomenon; it’s thriving in Nevada, Wisconsin, and Wyoming, too (and also, you know, Micronesia).

The stories themselves are pretty cool, but it’s also worth considering the Compass as a very conscious effort to paint a picture of KYF as benefiting a broad range of regions and businesses.

For example, the local-meat case study in Seattle features a librarian-turned-sausage-maker who wanted to open a USDA-inspected sausage factory in his garage. And, with the help of the right folks at USDA, he succeeded. The Wisconsin story describes a virtuous circle that begins with hoop houses on small farms to extend growing seasons, which led to an increase in so-called “value-added food business” (i.e. artisanal products like jam and pickles), which led to jobs and higher incomes.

It’s worth noting that KYF itself doesn’t provide any new funding — it has simply drawn a connection between preexisting projects run through an alphabet soup of USDA divisions in order to strengthen the message that the agency supports local and regional food. And while it might seem that KYF would be entirely uncontroversial in Washington, it’s not. In fact, almost from the moment of its inception, the effort has raised the ire of Republican lawmakers, who see it as a distraction from USDA’s “real” job of supporting industrial agriculture.

Indeed, the House GOP tried to kill the KYF program last year, along with other attempts at reform. It was an effort that mostly just involved attempts to force USDA to take down the KYF website. KYF survived — but not without a requirement to submit a report of its work to Congress; the Compass is very clearly a part of that reporting.

Not that the GOP was content to leave things there. As we reported back in March, when the Compass was first launched, Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), the top Republican on the Senate Agriculture Committee, quipped that the whole KYF effort was not “‘steeped in reality’ … since most food Americans consume isn’t grown locally.” Of course, I could argue that continuing to plant millions of bushels of corn in regions that grow more and more drought-prone every year isn’t exactly “steeped in reality” either, but I digress.

The point is that the KYF Compass and the case studies that the KYF website highlights are directed as much at congressional legislators as they are at small farmers and consumers. I’d even go farther than that — the Compass is part of an effort of build a permanent and self-sustaining infrastructure for federal support of local food at USDA, an agency that has, for some time now, lacked it.

Kathleen Merrigan will not be deputy secretary forever — nor will Democrats forever control the White House. And we have seen how quickly a determined effort can dismantle years of regulatory progress (case in point, the George W. Bush EPA). But by demonstrating to Congress and to her own officials and workers the broad reach and significant economic benefits of the local and regional food efforts, Merrigan is likely betting that KYF won’t be so easy to kill.

We’ll have to wait and see how this plays out — but there’s no question that Merrigan knows her way around institutions like USDA. After all, she is the person who not only helped write the USDA organic legislation, but then turned around and implemented it successfully as director of the USDA Agricultural Marketing Service under Bill Clinton, despite industry efforts to water it down to nothing. It may be that she’s attempting to perform a little bureaucratic jujitsu on a rigid agency. Here’s hoping she succeeds.

Community-supported agriculture (CSA) households know the cries.

“So many sweet potatoes!”

“Tomatillos again?”

But “Oh, man — more whole wheat flour!”? Not so much. Yet that may be coming.

On the East Coast, Virginia’s Moutoux Orchards is growing and milling wheat and barley to nestle beside produce, dairy, eggs, and meat in its Full Diet CSA. To the west, Windborne Farm of northern California offers a grain CSA featuring not just wheat and barley, but also rare grains like teff and millet raised using a pair of draft horses.

All over the country, small grain farmers like these may soon place the last piece in the local-foods puzzle.

There is no question that fruits and vegetables have been the backbone of the locavore movement. The number of farmers markets in the U.S. has increased 400 percent since 1994, while CSAs grew from a handful in the 1980s to an estimated 6,500 today. Eggs, meat, fish, and dairy have joined produce in market stalls and CSA boxes, but grains often lag behind.

“There are more small grain growers than a decade ago, but [the] trend here is growing quite slowly and is far behind small-scale produce, meat, and dairy growers,” says Erin Barnett, head of the local food directory Local Harvest. Out of more than 18,600 small farms listed on the website, fewer than 600 grow wheat, and an even smaller number offer oats or rye.

For generations, large-scale agribusiness has been seen as the most efficient way to produce commodity grains, such as corn, wheat, and rice (a fact that may be changing thanks to climate change). Big Midwestern farms churn out enough to feed every American 8.2 servings of grain a day. Farm subsidies (and, increasingly, crop insurance) have also given large farms an advantage for years. Buoyed by this system, large farmers and processors can grow grains at a price much lower than small producers can even imagine.

But as Big Grain has taken over, the variety of seeds available and the wisdom about growing grains sustainably have diminished. Until recently. Now some small-scale grain farmers have stepped back into the fray. They approach it not as direct competitors to commodity grain growers, but as an alternative for eaters in search of healthier, more sustainable options. Such producers claim a corner of the market with sustainable growing methods, value-added products, or specialty crops that customers choose for flavor. In fact, most successful local-scale grain farming relies on all three.

Photo by Elizabeth Dyck.

A new wheatail market

“This is the absolute opposite of large farming systems,” says Eli Rogosa, who grows grain for seeds and retail in western Massachusetts, and who directs the Heritage Grain Conservancy and coordinates the Northeast Organic Wheat initiative, funded by Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education.

Most small grain growers just got rolling in the past 15 years, but already consumers are smitten. A gluten-sensitive customer of Rogosa raves about an ancient wheat so pure and free of the allergenic protein that she could eat pita again. Grass Valley Grains of northern California ships whole wheat flour to a customer in Waikiki who will bake with nothing else. A San Francisco chef has gushed over cornmeal from South Carolina’s Anson Mills that “made love to buttermilk.” And the Moutoux Orchards CSA? It sold out with its 2011 debut — even with a price tag of $250 per person per month.

“There is a growing contingent of people who put a lot of importance on food quality and safety,” explained Mark Sorrells, chair of the Department of Plant Breeding and Genetics at Cornell University. “Also, people want to support local economies and businesses that give back to the community.”

Before farmers can add grain to the local foods picture, farmers have to address some problems unique to these crops. That is where people like Ragosa and Sorrells come in.

For one, thanks to industrial agriculture, the array of available seeds has been winnowed down to very few varieties. And most of these varieties are patented. “This is a global, silent crisis of loss of biodiversity,” says Rogosa. And that biodiversity has only gained in importance as farmers face the increasingly brutal results of climate change.

For Rogosa, farmer-saved seeds — also known as “landrace” seeds — offer economic benefits as well. “Unique varieties help small-scale farmers earn a living and have a niche market,” she says.

Sorrells is focusing on farming wisdom. He noticed a problem when retailers like New York City’s Greenmarket reported that local grain was flying out of market stalls faster than they could stock them. Simply put, Sorrells says, “they can’t produce enough to meet demand.”

Sorrells and Cornell post-doc Julie Dawson started to talk to growers and organizations like the Organic Growers’ Research and Information-Sharing Network and the Northeast Organic Farming Association of New York. Across the region, farmers found that growing local, organic grain posed unique challenges. Three of the biggest challenges were identifying the hardiest varieties, finding enough seeds to fill their fields, and managing their grain crops organically.

The scientists are now working, in part, to find the best seeds in the right quantity, as well as improve knowledge about management — the side of farming focused on fertilization, density of seed planting, and combating pests.

Grains as food, not filler

 Reed Hamilton of Grass Valley Grains on a tractor.

Another challenge stems from the price factor. Once grain farmers supply specialty markets, they have to face the same reality as all local producers — namely that mainstream consumers balk at the price of most of small-scale, sustainably produced foods. While seasonal herbs or vegetables can compete with supermarket prices, shoppers are unlikely to find local flour below $1.25 to $2 per pound.

Perhaps the biggest problem, though, lies in the food system itself. To truly fix grain production, Americans must change the way they farm and eat in a number of ways.

For one, says Glenn Roberts of Anson Mills, we may have to eat more actual grain ourselves. “Ninety-plus percent of all the grain grown in North Carolina goes into the mouths of animals,” Roberts says. “It doesn’t actually [feed] people.” If we return to the model used by beloved agriculture pioneer Thomas Jefferson, who saw meat as a condiment, then local grains might sound more affordable. When we see grains not just as cheap fillers, but as unique foods, they become worth a little more investment — both of our money and our culinary attention.

We also have to recognize the power of landrace species. Roberts, who has started giving farmers grants to test such seeds, confirms that they are hardy enough to stand up to erratic weather. “They adapt, that’s what they do,” he says proudly.

And finally, research must appeal to large funders just as much as rogue researchers. This has already begun. Monsanto may not shell out for heritage seed testing any time soon, but the USDA has supported Rogosa’s trials and the research at Cornell.

Will we ever see local grain production scale up like meat and produce have? The next few years will tell. What is certain is that the small-grain influx has refreshed the idea that growers, scientists, and consumers can all play a role in tackling established behemoths and move into a new frontier.

Pamela Hess:

I am a local food advocate for many reasons:
Taste: An heirloom tomato picked that morning runs circles around a hybridized tomato picked two weeks ago in Florida and gassed so it turns red en route
Quality: the better the soil and the farmer, the better the food.
Nutrition: food sheds nutrients after it is picked. The longer it takes to get to market, the less nutritional value it has, comparatively.
Transparency: I like knowing how my food is grown and harvested. I visit my meat producer; try that at a CAFO.
Environmental: A minimization of the use of chemicals that wash into waterways, creating algae blooms, choking out life, or kill beneficial insects, including honey bees.
Sane stewardship: I like to support farmers who create more naturally fertile soil, which is better able to resist pests, floods, and droughts.
Pleasure: I buy local food at my farmers market because it’s more pleasant to do so than going into an air conditioned grocery store. I see neighbors, chat with farmers, taste before I buy.
Economic: I want my food dollars to support my local economy
Humanity: Animals and humans are treated better on the small farms I know than they are on the large ones.
I value green open spaces — Supporting local farms with my money encourages those farmers to maintain those green open spaces rather than selling off to developers.

And, so we’re clear, I don’t have much money. The money I have I spend on good, quality food — for the reasons above.

jessiesunship:

In response to “if you know your farmer and want to help him, that’s fine, but that’s charity.” Well, I know my farmer and I want to help HER. Call it charity if you want, but I chose this and I get awesome food at a bargain price. Agricultural subsidies, on the other hand, are corporate charity and yet, I am forced to support it.

Michael Bulger:

[In response to] “The problem I have with local food activists is that they seem to want to go beyond what’s reasonable in terms of local food. They want to force school boards, hospitals, prisons, government bureaucracies, military bases, and universities to buy more expensive, and often lower-quality, food, just because it’s local.”

Buying direct from the farmer has been shown by researchers to be less expensive or the same price as buying non-local food. (See Iowa State Univ. research, or USDA.)

Additionally, money is retained in the local rural economy. Furthermore, farmers’ markets stimulate neighboring businesses. This has also been demonstrated by researchers in peer-reviewed journals.

tawster:

The great majority of the world is poor and eats fairly locally.

Captivation:

… not to mention the issue of monocultures (both the genes of the crops and our social monocultures too.)  Basically monocultures are more vulnerable to disease. That’s why nature favors diversity. Eating local allows genetic and social experimentation to take place. Your town might grow better cabbage while mine might grow better carrots. But both of us will be better off if diversity is encouraged.

Sewassbe:

Buying something just because it’s local is almost as silly as buying something just because it’s conventionally grown. Everyone should take into account quality, taste, and sometimes even price (though quality and taste often trump price with me). And with local food, at least you know where your dollars are going and that they are almost certainly going to be reinvested in the local economy, instead of going into the pockets and investment portfolios of far-away corporate executives.

GreenHearted:

I think another one of the problems is that people are still picturing that their future diet will be the diet they’re able to eat now. No, their diet will consist of whatever some locavores have determined will adapt best to the changing climate in their local soils. Where I live, a farmer is discovering that a diet of fava beans, kale and eggs might survive the ravages of our changing microclimate — until we let the global temperature go so high that nothing survives.

Locawhore:

Let me see if I understand — since the Japanese are dependent on the rest of the world to ship food to them we all should be.

Since there are occasional droughts and crop failures we should burn a whack of petroleum moving cheese around the world just in case there is a local cheese shortage.

Tubbercurry:

Desrochers wants to defend Japanese honor? This is entirely unnecessary. Japan gave the world Masanobu Fukuoka. Desrochers would do well to read Fukuoka’s One Straw Revolution and Sowing Seeds in the Desert to learn about what local sustainable food, specifically Japanese, can and does look like.  In 1988 Fukuoka received the Magsaysay Award (often referred to as the Nobel of Asia) for Public Service.

Japan is also one of the birthplaces of the Community Supported Agriculture movement. In 1965 mothers in Japan who were concerned about the rise of imported food, the loss of arable land, and the migration of farmers into cities started the first CSA projects called Teikei (提携) in Japanese.

Scott Sklar:

They [doubt] that local food can actually feed the world, yet until 50 years ago, that’s what it did. And while I have nothing against importing bananas and coffee (i.e. those that are sustainably grown), vegetables, dairy products, and meats can be year round. I have grown tomatoes in greenhouses in Montana in winter without a problem. The idea is to maximize regional grown and local grown first, and fill in the gaps thereafter — not the other way around. This practice results in lower carbon emissions, lower energy inputs, and lower water utilization — critical global issues that I believe this book ignores.

Dregs:

“Small Farmers Creating a New Business Model as Agriculture Goes Local“

I found myself wanting to include so many excerpts from the above article that it just makes more sense to recommend it. Just don’t tell the authors of this book there are agricultural economists (you know, people with expertise in this area), who aren’t down on local food. Notice that small farmers are already figuring out they should band together to increase their clout, even in the presence of subsidies …

Marcy:

The author also seems to argue that only trade gives us the diversity of foods we need, but there have definitely been plenty of examples of isolated systems working just fine. The pre-contact cultures of Polynesia for instance worked out pretty well. It’s true that in case of war, a sudden switch to a local economy is probably not going to work out that great, but then Germany had a lot more going on when it was forced to switch over.

Suzi Wallace Fire:

I think the quote that bothers me the most is …”Maybe it is unrealistic to believe small, local producers can literally feed the world —” … EACH small local producer doesn’t HAVE to feed the world, they feed their small local area … that’s the whole point … In doing THAT they DO feed the world. Now , I’m going out to pick my tomatoes & zucchini, can some & share some with the neighbors who don’t have a garden … THAT’S the way it works …

Jake Claro:

I did the research for the following pricing study, and I have to say, the “more expensive” argument is trotted out with reckless abandon. In Vermont, with a very strong local food economy, competition is very strong—particularly for produce, and this shows in the prices.

Deroscher’s comment about not having the extra $0.50 is patently absurd for an economist to make.  Dollars in that economic world would be static, but we know that they circulate in an economy and this phenomenon can be represented by multiplier effects.

Anyway, a link to the pricing study: http://nofavt.org/pricestudy

Laura:

The local food movement takes away the demand for factory farms and beyond any of his points, ending factory farming … is why I will continue to be a locavore!

sophie:

As a “local food activist,”… I wouldn’t ever suggest a 100% 100 mile diet. I suggest that if a food does grow locally, consume the local varieties (in season and do some putting by). If a food does not grow locally, choose responsibly.

As I’ve been doing this for a number of years, I’ve discovered a farm type that I prefer and may choose food from a farm 110 miles away rather than one 15 miles away because their farming practices are more aligned with my values. I developed these values by beginning locally and learning about food, farms, and farmers.

ianlogsdon:

So, are they suggesting the solution is mass monoculture? Because that doesn’t survive a warming climate and tightening water supply, nor does it solve agricultural runoff or myriad other problems. The solution to the food system is a mix, yes, but massive farms run on non-renewable nitrogen and phosphorous aren’t the answer either, which is part of the world of non-local produce.

Jeffrey Anderson:

I shop at a store that focuses on local organic products called New Seasons (a small chain around Portland, OR). My grocery costs have only gone up about 20% and my food is insanely better quality, doesn’t have pesticides on my produce and the meat isn’t going to go bad in 2 days because it was shipped from Canada. So in that respect, it’s also more economical — I don’t throw away as much food.

Pierre Desrochers and Hiroko Shimizu say they know what’s wrong with the food system: local food purists. In their new book, The Locavore’s Dilemma: In Praise of the 10,000-Mile Diet, the husband-and-wife team (a University of Toronto geography professor and an economist) argue that the excitement over this movement is misguided to the point of having “utterly disastrous” effects. “If widely adopted,” they write, “either voluntarily or through political mandates, locavorism can only result in higher costs and increased poverty, greater food insecurity, less food safety and much more significant environmental damage than is presently the case” [emphasis theirs].

Desrochers and Shimizu are not the first vocal critics of the local food movement. James McWilliams is well known for his early contrarian views on local food (and a resulting book about it), as is Stephen Budiansky, whose 2010 New York Times article prompted an in-depth debate here at Grist. Like these folks — and a whole array of others — the authors of Locavore’s Dilemma argue mainly that food miles are a misleading and often incorrect gauge of the sustainability of one’s food.

We don’t entirely disagree. A dogmatic approach is rarely a good idea, and questions about where food should be grown and why are indeed complex. But does that mean things are great the way they are?

Most of us eat local food for a combination of reasons — from taste, to personal health, to food-chain transparency, to concern for workers, to a desire to see a stop to industrial farming practices that damage soil health and biodiversity, to an interest in keeping small farmers in business. And, realistically, most of us compromise for reasons of cost or convenience. Yes, there are Portlandia-level locavores out there who take it a little too seriously, but the vast majority of us see local food as one piece of a much larger shift. Maybe it is unrealistic to believe small, local producers can literally feed the world — but does that mean we shouldn’t support their efforts at all?

I sat down with Desrochers when he was in town last week to see if there was something to the anti-locavore argument. As you might guess, there’s a lot he and I don’t agree on. But at Grist we try, when we can, to challenge our views.

Q. Why did you decide to write The Locavore’s Dilemma?

A. To save my marriage. My wife and I attended a meeting in 2007 where a prominent academic came to my university who took the idea of local food to its logical end and said if you live beyond your local foodshed, you’re essentially a parasite. He said the most parasitical people in the world are the Japanese — look at all the food they import. My wife was born and raised in Tokyo. She made me promise that I would do something about it. My original goal was to write a four-page memo explaining comparative advantage and that when people don’t have land to grow food, like in Japan, it makes sense to do something else and then trade that with people who have enough land to grow food. Then I realized there’s a lot more to the local food movement than that, so maybe I should address food security and those other issues. So the four-page memo became a 25-page policy paper, and eventually a book offer came along. So that’s how I got into it — to defend my wife’s honor.

Q. Was there anything that surprised you as you got deeper into the issues?

A. I was surprised by the number of local food movements I discovered in the past, but I was not surprised to see that they all failed. There was a local food movement in the British empire in the 1920s. And it turns out that even the British empire was not big enough to have a successful local food movement. The first world war cut Germany off from the rest of the world, so they had to revert to local food. And of course people starved there, and they had a few bad crops, and all the problems that long-distance trade had solved came back with a vengeance.

Nobody would bother importing food from a distance if it did not have significant advantages over local food. [In the book] we talk about food miles, but I’m sure you’re familiar with the arguments — transportation is a tiny thing [in terms of climate impacts], and if you try to cut down on transportation, then you need to heat your greenhouse as opposed to having unheated greenhouses further south. Then your environmental footprint is actually more significant.

Q. Most people who strive to eat locally aren’t motivated by food miles alone.

A. No, they do it for the taste and stuff, which is fine, but it’s an upper-middle-class movement. Don’t pretend that local food can help feed the world or help people of lesser means; it will remain a niche market targeted at the upper crust of society.

Q. I don’t know — there’s a growing effort to address problems of food access and insecurity by supporting urban farming in low-income communities, or connecting food-insecure areas directly with local farmers. It doesn’t look like an exclusively upscale fad to me.

A. The problem in the United States is not food deserts per se, it’s a problem of social policy. It’s terrible public schools, high crime rates — food is part of the broader problem, but as an urban analyst I would tell you you’d be better off teaching people in inner cities marketable skills, and they’ll be able to have a productive life and afford decent food whether it be local or [from] elsewhere.

Q. So do you see any value to supporting a local food system?

A. Good local food will always find a seasonal market. We don’t need a local food movement for that. The problem I have with local food activists is that they seem to want to go beyond what’s reasonable in terms of local food. They want to force school boards, hospitals, prisons, government bureaucracies, military bases, and universities to buy more expensive, and often lower-quality, food, just because it’s local. We’re in the business of educating students, not feeding them local food. It should not be the university’s role to keep inefficient local food producers in business.

Q. Many people value local food because of the transparency it provides; they trust a local farmer more than the industrial food system. What are your thoughts on that motivation?

A. You should not be naïve about farmers markets. A farmers market typically will only ask a signature of people [wanting to sell]. We don’t dispute that most people at local farmers markets are honest, but like everything else in life you have a few bad apples.

There are economies of scale in food safety, too. In a large processing plant they have safety procedures along the way. Small farmers, no matter how well-intentioned they are, don’t have the knowledge and the capacity to have safety measures at every step of the way. Sure, there are a lot of recalls [of industrial agriculture] that we can track through the news. But it’s not that things are getting worse; it’s that we’re better able to track the problems with large firms.

If you know your farmer and want to help him, that’s fine, but that’s charity.

Q. What would an ideal food system look like to you?

A. It would be very diverse. Our model in the book is New Zealand. They almost went bankrupt in the early 1980s, and they had to scrap all their agricultural subsidies. If you scrap the subsidies, you will have small operations that will target niche markets, but mass commodities will either have very large privately owned operations or very large producers’ cooperatives made up of many small producers who agree to work together.

Q. So you’re not arguing we do away with local food altogether.

A. No. Good food has to be produced somewhere, and some of that could be in your neighborhood. But don’t make it mandatory, and don’t make a religion out of it, and understand that it often doesn’t make sense to have an extremely diversified local food system. You should stick to what you’re doing best, and then trade with others, and that way everybody will be better off. And don’t pretend that [local food] is helping the Earth — [it’s] just producing a niche product for upper-crust consumers.

So again, if [local food] was purely voluntary, we would not have bothered writing the book. But increasingly there’s a coercive element to it which we don’t like. And ultimately the Japanese are not parasites. They just don’t have enough room to grow their food.

Does local and organic food matter more to people in Maine than it does to other Americans? It’s possible, but Rep. Chellie Pingree (D-Maine) insists that’s not why she introduced the Local Farms, Food, and Jobs Act, a small but encouraging set of legislative reforms meant to accompany this year’s farm bill.

And while the “marker bill” has yet to be embraced entirely, some parts of it have clearly influenced the Senate’s draft of the larger farm bill, which is said to be about to hit the Senate floor this week. Most sustainable food advocates have seen it as a welcome push for small-scale agriculture, after decades of federal support for industrial farming.

We spoke with Pingree recently about bill, the work behind it, and her motivation to get a farm bill passed before the last one runs out in September.

Q. You’re on the Armed Services Committee. Do you have any thoughts or ideas on how food security and national security are tied together?

A. One of the challenges of conventional agriculture — whether it’s the use of chemical fertilizer, pesticides, or how food is grown and distributed — is that it’s energy-intensive. There’s a general agreement, at least among people like me, that national security is better served if we’re not so dependent on foreign oil and other sources of energy. The more you can localize your food system the better off you are.

Q. So what can Maine gain from the Local Farms, Food, and Jobs Act?

A. There’s a huge growth in interest on the part of people in buying more food locally, whether it’s going to farmers markets, shopping directly at a farm, or joining a CSA [community-supported agriculture program]. The average age of our farmers [in Maine] is going down because more young people are engaging in farming or staying on the farm. And the number of farms under
 cultivation is actually increasing. We see this trend in Maine as a huge opportunity. It’s allowing a lot of farmers to come back. The market for organic milk, for example, has completely changed over the last 20 years.

Tourism is our largest industry. People come to Maine to eat our lobsters, but they also want to eat our spinach, sweet corn, and tomatoes.

Q. What does that have to do with shortening the supply chain?

A. Basically by creating more opportunities for accessing your food locally. 
One such program is the Farmers Market Promotion Program, to promote greater awareness of local food production. So you can meet local farmers, look them in the eye, ask questions, and eat samples. We have other programs to improve distribution and aggregation — making it easier for small-scale farmers to sell their produce.

Q. You mean like food hubs?

A. Yes. And there’s a lot of conversation about that. We have some examples of food hubs in Maine and we’re anxious to see that model replicated elsewhere.

Q. We’re in the middle of an election cycle. Does Congress really have an incentive to pass a farm bill this year given the level of divisiveness between both parties? 

A. I have no crystal ball. That said, the Senate has moved the bill through the ag committee and the [House] chair has a commitment to bring that bill to the floor of the House. The Senate will likely take up the bill this month and we’ll know whether they can get enough votes to pass it. If not, we’ll start over next year.

Q. So which have the most impact, states with the most resident farmers or the states with the most farm lobbyists?

A. There are farm lobbyists working on every possible issue down to the most minuscule detail, and that includes lobbyists working on behalf of sustainable and organic farming and young farmers. There are good advocacy groups on all sides here. Admittedly some of the big interests have more muscle behind their lobby. But the truth is the farm bill affects all regions of the country in different ways. Over 80 percent of the dollars in the farm bill are for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program [SNAP] and hunger benefits programs. So the greatest impact will most likely be on low-income citizens who are scattered throughout the country.

Q. Are we getting to the point where food production and food assistance should be uncoupled from one another? They’re interrelated, but aren’t they separate sets of problems?

A. Linking food subsidies like SNAP benefits and farm procedures and processes has a lot of history in Congress. Changing that is one of the many reforms I’d be happy to see. But I don’t expect in this particular era we’re going to be able to. Frankly we’ll be lucky if we eke a farm bill out the door or even manage to extend provisions of the farm bill beyond Sept. 30 without radical change.

Q. Is there anything in the proposed farm bill that members of the food movement could get excited about?

A. One them is organic certification cost share, so if you’re a farmer that wants to convert from being a conventional farmer but you think, for instance, there’s a better market for organic milk, there’s a federal fund to help you make that transition. That fund is now at $80 million, a big increase over what it was before.

Q. You’ve served in the state House and now Congress. How much of an effort is it to pass legislation as big and unwieldy as the farm bill?

A. It’s an enormous effort. My staffer Claire Benjamin has done an incredible amount of work over the last two years basically to both write the title that we’re currently talking about and then to organize advocacy groups and to work with committee members. As much as anything, because I just joined the agricultural committee during this session, it’s been a big effort of getting to know my colleagues, and then finding like-minded members of the House both on and off the committee, and then working with 200 or so advocacy groups around the country that have endorsed our bill. So each one of those groups required a variety of conversations.

Q. Are you up for reelection this November and if so what role does the farm bill play in electoral politics?

A. Yes. Everybody in the House has to run every two years. So this is the election 
year for all of us. I may or may not be back. I will say it’s a popular issue with my constituents, but that’s not why I did it. I did it because it’s a great opportunity. I’m passionate about the topic and I’m an organic farmer myself.

Before I came to Congress I owned an inn and restaurant and we’ve added an organic farm to our operation. And I’m lucky enough to have help doing it. So when I do talk to people about actual issues of certifying a creamery or getting organic certification or any of the things farmers need to go through, I know what they’re talking about and I understand the process.

Ever since McDonald’s introduced a pair of Slow Food-inspired McItaly burgers last fall, the company has caused quite a stir on the boot-shaped peninsula. The international chain collaborated with Gualtiero Marchesi, one of Italy’s most renowned chefs — and the only Italian chef to date to receive three Michelin stars — to create the sandwiches. In the process it has also raised big questions about whether a fast food chain can ever truly adopt a Slow Food approach.

Although McDonald’s maintains a fairly consistent core menu around the world, it’s not uncommon for the fast food chain to tailor its restaurants regionally. In Japan, the chain serves ramen noodles, for instance, while the Indonesian menu offers the “McSatay,” and the Indian menu includes something called a “Veggie McMuffin.” Even proud McDonald’s France, otherwise known as “MacDo,” dishes out a popular petit dejeuner-cum-McBreakfast, composed of buttery croissants and cafe au laits, known as “McCafes.”

In Italy, home of the Slow Food movement, the new sandwiches were named Adagio and Vivace (names that Marchesi says represent an integration of two competing philosophies: slow and fast). They were both made with some local and traditional products, such as eggplant, spinach, and the Italian cheese ricotta salata. Several of the products were DOP certified, an acronym that stands for Denominazione di Origine Protetta, a widely recognized certification of regional authenticity.

The two sandwiches were a hit. Due to customer demand, they appeared in the stores for nearly two months longer than the initial three-week “limited time offer.” But their popularity among Italians has also reinvigorated the debate among the Slow Food advocates who criticize the fast food industry’s wanton neglect for local food communities and traditions.

In fact, Slow Food International, a global grassroots organization founded in 1989, made a public statement against the McDonald’s partnership with Marchesi, rebutting the product’s slogan “Fast food has never been this slow” with its own version, “Fast food has never been or will be slow.” Roberto Burdese, president of Slow Food Italy, told the U.K.-based Independent he saw the new menu as “a cynical marketing ploy.”

An ad for an earlier incarnation of the McItaly burger promised Italian beef.

“I don’t really see any kind of change in McDonald’s approach,” says a Slow Food employee who requested that his real name not be used (for understandable reasons). We’ll call him Dario Altieri.

“Their sandwiches are mainly still made with poor raw materials, the working conditions are extremely bad, and even more important their sandwiches are extremely unhealthy. So maybe they’re trying to refresh their image but they’re definitely not changing their approach.”

This is not the first time the Golden Arches and the snail have crossed swords. In fact this most recent clash recalls Slow Food’s own dramatic debut 25 years ago, in response to the McDonald’s entrance into the Italian market. When the chain opened on the Spanish steps in Rome, the newly formed Slow Food took a stance by organizing a highly popular protest in the form of an eat-in in front of the restaurant. And thus this crucial debate for food-loving Italians began.

Although Slow Food differs greatly from McDonald’s in both values and approach to food, it has grown into a major cultural force in the last two-and-a-half decades. And while McDonald’s may now have 419 restaurants in Italy, and employ 14,500 people, Slow Food has over 100,000 members in 150 countries.

To hear chef Marchesi talk about the collaboration, you might think that he was changing McDonald’s from the ground up. In a McEurope press release he said:

… when I began to observe closely, without prejudice, the young, I wondered ‘Where are they going to eat? What do they eat?’ … If it’s true that the haute cuisine changed the taste, now it’s time to present this change to everyone, starting with the youngest. The real news is that with these two sandwiches I opened the doors of the burger kingdom with eggplant and spinach. It’s a big revolution!

Altieri, on the other hand, didn’t see the menu items — or the marketing behind them — as a move toward collaboration. Let alone a revolution.

“It was a sort of counterattack against us,” he says. “It is pretty clear that Slow Food declared war on McDonald’s. The fact is that McDonald’s never did the same, simply because they know they are superior in terms of power and resources.”

That is, until now.

“Keep in mind that in the same month they proposed those sandwiches, they opened a selling point close to Bra [the hometown of Slow Food Founder Carlo Petrini and the organization's main headquarters],” Altieri adds. These combined efforts, he believes, “can be only considered as a provocation.”

But McDonald’s denies this. Agnes Vadnai, vice president and spokesperson of McEurope, says the plan to include more regional flavors isn’t new.

“A course [of action] began more than three years ago when the company offered recipes closer to the local taste,” she says.

“With the support and endorsement of the Minister of Agriculture, McDonald’s began to make a concerted effort to use local ingredients such as parmigiano reggiano and speck [prosciutto] that were IGP and DOP certified.”

This approach enabled the chain to expand to other parts of Italy. Vadnai says the goal has also “always been to bolster the local agrarian economy and assimilate to Italian food culture and traditions.”

As you might guess, Altieri doesn’t see the burger’s toppings as making a big enough dent in the fast food chain’s overall practices. And he points to the fact that, indeed, “fast can be slow” in some instances.

“I’m pretty sure that we’ve all misunderstood the concept of ‘fast food,’” he says, pointing to the fact that all over the world people have eaten real food on the run, on the streets, while working, etc. As examples he cites arancini — the fried rice balls served on the street in southern Italy — and sushi, which became popular in Japan when more people needed to eat on the go. “The problem,” he adds, “is that this kind of food has been exploited and impoverished by the economic politics of multinationals like McDonald’s.”

People in Alabama love to gather and, when they do, it’s usually around football or religion and it is always fortified with plenty of food and drink. What would happen, the organizers of a recent event called the Alabama All-Star Food Festival wondered, if you gathered people just for the eating and drinking — and elevated the discussion of local food in the region while you were at it?

Yes, there was pulled pork and white bread drowning in sauce, but the convention center where the recent All-Star Food Festival was held on account of rain was also full of Gulf shrimp and grits, local gumbo, crab cakes, and of course cold cans from Good People and Back Forty, two of the state’s three microbreweries. The building filled up with farmers, chefs, and food pioneers celebrating a new wave of Alabama food, and wafting over the sterile convention center air was the smell of a place regaining its culinary roots.

As agriculturally rich as Alabama is — both in soil and tradition — the state produces less than 5 percent of the food consumed there. In recent decades Alabama has moved far away from its small-scale farming roots toward concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs), raising large numbers of chickens and hogs, and families indentured to corporate agriculture. In fact, just this year, Gov. Robert Bentley (R) cut state funding to Alabama’s Farmers Market Authority, which runs 30 markets throughout the state (another 45 are outside of state control).

Edible revival

Panelists at a discussion of the local food economy at the recent Alabama All-Star Food Festival.

Just 10 years ago it would have been impossible to draw 500 participants and over 30 food vendors and producers to an event focused on local, sustainable food. And the Alabama Sustainable Agriculture Network (ASAN) has a lot to do with the grassroots movement behind the change. For a decade the nonprofit has been gathering small-scale farmers and ranchers throughout the state in an effort to organize, educate, and network producers and consumers.

“Most of us are contrary farmers. We like to work independently,” says Tom Simpson, executive director of ASAN. “So asking them to participate in an association is difficult. We recognize that and we don’t want to be making edicts to farmers out of Montgomery.”

ASAN has created a food guide (soon to be available online) to connect people to healthy food in the Huntsville, Birmingham, and Mobile areas. They’ve also recently turned their efforts toward policy in the state capital of Montgomery.

“We’re trying to pass a bill that offers restaurants a 4 percent sales tax rebate when they buy food locally,” says Simpson. “We’d like Alabama to follow North Carolina and incentivize state institutions to buy 10 percent of their produce from state farmers.”

Measures like that could keep millions of dollars in the local economy, rather than sending them to food distributors elsewhere. The bill, however, could hit a big, red wall in the state capital.

The energy and excitement in Alabama, for now, lives on the ground level. There are over 1,000 farmers in the ASAN network, and another new organization, Front Porch Revival (FPR), launched recently with the goal of identifying, celebrating, and promoting local artisans throughout the state.

Rob McDaniel, executive chef at Spring House Restaurant and a founding member of FPR, says he hopes to connect producers to restaurants with questions like: “I need [local] eggs, where can I get them?”

“Quality and commitment to sourcing locally are the key factors to this alliance,” McDaniel added, while speaking on a panel at the All-Star Food Festival. “We want beer makers, cheese makers, dairy farmers, beef producers. We’d love to have an artisan and urban farmer in every county.”

The panel made for an illuminating cross-section of the state’s new food revolutionaries. Opposite McDaniel sat Andy Grace, a young documentary filmmaker who grew up in Alabama and recently settled back in his home state, where he is now a film professor at the University of Alabama and the director of the new documentary, Eating Alabama. Grace recognized that in the largely rural, deeply conservative state, the “notion that local food is an elitist, urban luxury is an obstacle.”

Next to Grace sat Frank Randle, a barrel-chested, deep-voiced rancher reminiscent of John Wayne. He and his sons raise cows on pasture at Randle Farms. He emphasized the word “commitment” on the part of the farmer and the consumer in order to propel the state out of its industrial agriculture malaise. Beside him sat Mark Bowen, the education director at Hampstead Institute, a nonprofit that promotes sustainable growth through education, agriculture, and design in Montgomery. Bowen noted the if Alabamans consumed just 15 percent of their food from local Alabama sources they’d keep $980 million dollars in the state, and ultimately enable the farmers there to lower their prices with increased demand — a win-win.

A food hero

Hampstead Institute’s Director Edwin Marty was also a key organizer of the festival. Marty returned to his hometown of Birmingham after learning to farm sustainably on the West Coast and abroad. He founded Jones Valley Urban Farm (now Jones Valley Teaching Farm) on an abandoned lot near downtown Birmingham in 2001. That kind of tenure places Edwin alongside the state’s renowned chefs and farm-to-plate pioneers Frank Stitt and Chris Hastings, as Alabama’s original local-food revolutionaries.

Marty appreciates that others are following in his footsteps, seeing beyond the commodity crops and CAFO-heavy agriculture in the region and recognizing opportunity in the untapped market.

If Marty has his way, he’ll also find a way to lure other former Alabama residents back to rebuild the food system with him. “We’re a tight-knit community with a few local heroes,” he says. “But it’s wide-open territory. There are so few CSAs, so little competition, and so much opportunity to move back here and fill that void.”

Photo by Marisa McClellan.

Vanilla-rhubarb jam
Makes four pints

Ingredients

10 cups of chopped rhubarb (approximately 2 1/2 pounds of stalks)
5 cups sugar
1 cup Earl Grey tea (you could just use water; I happened to have some leftover tea around and it added a nice note to the finished product)
1 vanilla bean, split and scraped
1 lemon, juiced
Pinch of salt
1 packet liquid pectin

Preparation

Sterilize your jars in a large pot of boiling water. If you’re making refrigerator jam (it will keep nicely unprocessed in the fridge for two to three months), skip this step.

In a four-quart, non-reactive pot, bring the rhubarb, sugar, and tea to a boil. Add the vanilla bean, lemon, and salt to the pot and let it bubble gently for about 10 minutes (on my stove, this means I set it to medium-high). After 10 minutes have elapsed, add the pectin, stir to combine, and let cook for a few more minutes.

At this point, dip a spoon in the jam and see how it coats the back of the spoon. If you get a nice, even sheet, the jam is done. You can also taste at this point, to see if you like the balance of flavors. Add a little more lemon juice if you feel it needs additional brightening.

Pour into hot wide mouth jars, remove any spillage, and apply lids and rings. Process in a hot water bath for 10 minutes.

Remove from water and let cool.

It’s delicious on toast. If yours turns out more syrupy than jammy, serve with pancakes or waffles and tell everyone you did it on purpose.

It’s a dreamy combination of hipster clichés: an urban farming-themed pop-up store made of salvaged materials. In Brooklyn. Maybe that’s why, when Hayseed’s Big City Farm Supply opened at the beginning of April, founder Meg Paska thought, “We’re going to get mocked.” But mockery did not ensue; instead, an enthusiastic community response showed that Paska was on to something with this small, seasonal shop catering to the needs of people growing food and raising animals in the city.

Paska, who blogs about her own backyard garden, chicken coop, and beehive at Brooklyn Homesteader, started Hayseed’s with the folks who run Brooklyn Grange, a rooftop farm in Queens. The store will be around until early July in a space Paska rented from the design studio Domestic Construction. We chatted with Paska recently about the project.

Q. How did Hayseed’s Big City Farm Supply come together?

A. My business partners and I both kind of have our own urban farm things going on. We were talking one night over beers, and we both admitted that we had thought about opening a farm store. But we were concerned about retail spaces being really expensive. We kept our ears to the ground and hoped that something would present itself, and it did. A bunch of friends of mine had posted a Kickstarter campaign for a design studio a few blocks from my house. They were going to try and save the lot next to their studio and turn it into an urban farm. I asked them how they would feel about hosting a pop-up store, and they were really into the idea. Their studio is in a big mechanic’s garage. They rented out the front space to us and then actually built out a storefront with pallets and old wood. We didn’t spend a single cent on materials; they built it all with salvaged objects.

Most of the Hayseed’s store is made out of re-purposed objects like these shipping crates.

Q. Why did you see the need for a place like Hayseed’s?

A. As someone who raises chickens for eggs, I struggled to find quality feed at a reasonable price. I am really into a small feed company in Virginia called Countryside Organics, but when you have the feed shipped it doubles the price. There are a lot of other people who raise chickens in the five boroughs here, and they were experiencing that same thing. I started posting on the Just Food City Chicken meetup group’s message board asking who would want to go in on ordering a full pallet [of feed]. The response was overwhelming.

Getting straw and hay delivered to Brooklyn is nearly impossible. It’s difficult to find places to dump bulk loads of soil and stuff, too. Most people don’t want to have a big pile of manure-based compost dumped into their [yard]. We’ve been fortunate this season that the gals at Domestic Construction allowed the use of their lot to do this. We’ve gone through about 60 cubic yards of soil in the month and a half that we’ve been open.

Q. As someone who was doing urban farming on her own, what’s it like to connect to the community through this project?

A. When you’re in the store and you have people coming in asking questions all the time, it makes you realize how much you know, and how much you don’t know. It’s given me confidence, but it’s also given me an opportunity to spot areas where I could improve my knowledge, which is ultimately what I want to do — keep learning and getting better at what I do every day. I’ve learned quite a bit from being questioned on things that I’d never really considered.

Q. What range of farming experience do you see among your customers?

A. We get a ton of people who think they don’t have the ability to grow anything. We give them suggestions for things they can grow easily — foolproof crops with a really high rate of success. Most of the people around here don’t know anything about fertilizing, and we have a whole array of organic fertilizers.

We do workshops every week, on [everything from] beekeeping to raising chickens. We’re doing a small livestock workshop this week, we’re doing a gardening-for-flower arrangements class, we do some on basic container gardening, and then we have a really fun workshop coming up on vegan gardening techniques — using fertilizers that are not animal-based, low-impact gardening, and finding ways to control pests without spraying a bunch of stuff.

Q. What other projects do you have going besides Hayseed’s?

A. I’m writing a book on urban beekeeping. I’m starting an educational homestead in New Jersey at a place called Seven Arrows. We’re hoping to create a place where people can come to get away from the craziness of the city, but also learn more about growing food. We’re going to put all the infrastructure in place late this summer, and then by early 2013 we’ll be in full swing. The goal is to create a hub for learning in the region.

Q. What’s the plan for the store from here?

A. We’re open for another month. We’re going to end [the store] no later than early July. The last two weeks we’ll do a lot of sales and start doing workshops on how people can prep for their fall garden come late August, and then we’ll close up shop. If the numbers reflect a sustainable operation, we’ll do it again next year. All our overhead [for this year] has been paid off, so anything that we sell from here on out is gravy.

We’re just trying to get people pumped on growing their own food, and we want to give them the confidence to get started.