Good food revolution

To the Editor:

In response to David Lagerman’s article titled “It’s time to focus on the essentials,” it’s always good to see the “good food revolution” (as Will Allen put it) getting more press, but when Lagerman ended his article with suggesting the revolution include “a group of large industrial supporters” and stated that a vision of re-connecting with basic realities as something that could benefit “large-scale agriculture and factory farms,” Lagerman’s track laying led to a cliff that the good food revolution’s train does not want to go over.

What Will Allen has termed the good food revolution is many things. It is educational, economic, community building, environmental, and political. For Allen it is primarily about social justice and bringing jobs and nutrition to previously underserved segments of the population. More well-off communities may see the revolution as more philanthropic, but it is really much more than that.

It is “essential” as Lagerman appropriately termed it. The primary way a person can help to restore and protect not only nature, but the world as a whole, is through their food choices. The local and organic farming movement began as a response to the many injustices of industrial and corporate agribusiness. The revolution’s focus on home-grown or locally family-farm grown food is founded in sound socio-economic principles, as well as environmental and ethical ones.

Historically in the U.S., family farms have formed the backbone of our communities. Since 1935, 4.7 million farms have been lost; and as corporate agribusiness buys them out, families are displaced, communities weaken, becoming susceptible to higher crime, suicide rates, and poorer overall health. The buyouts occur due to the enormous amounts of taxpayer monies that are spent to subsidize the inefficient, wasteful, polluting, degrading and immoral operations of industrial agriculture.

The subsidies were meant for family farmers, who are at one of their lowest income levels since 1940; yet 75 percent of current farm subsidies go to corporate agribusiness, which has doubled its profits since 1990. If you read the list of lobbyists, you’ll see why. Dow Chemical. Monsanto Corporation. Con-Agra Foods. As the suppliers of our foods become increasingly concentrated into the hands of a few multi-national companies, it puts everyone at risk of food security issues. If corporations determine the rules of the trade, our access to safe, local, “good food” is significantly compromised.

Environmentally speaking, “factory farms” and the companies that exist to service them use up more land and resources and create more pollution and ecological damage on the planet than any other industry. Ethically speaking, the local food movement does not condone the “factorization” of raising animals in extreme confinement, compromising the welfare of the animal, in addition to the environmental impact and human health risks of such practices.

By choosing to eat organic, or “clean” foods, you are saying “no” to the chemical companies that make pesticides, insecticides, fungicides, herbicides, waxes, and other chemicals used on farms that pollute the land and water, damage wildlife, risk human health, and contribute to the gross abuse of migrant workers, animals, and land.

By choosing to eat locally grown foods from people you know, you are saying “yes” to your community, to strengthening your local economy, to improved nutrition, to supporting endangered family farms, to safeguarding your health, reducing pollution, protecting the environment, to more humane treatment of animals, and to creating a more equitable and sustainable planet.

Lagerman says he is just beginning to see how important the local food movement “may become.” Hopefully, he (and many others) will realize how important the good food revolution is, and become a committed “localvore” for the sake of personal health, the health of our families, our communities, the animals under our care, and our planet.

It certainly is time that we focus on these ”essentials.”
Elizabeth Eckhardt
Sheboygan