Every time you enter a grocery store, the labels that jump out aren’t just Kellogg’s Coca-Cola. Labels like “organic,” “natural,” “local” seem as pervasive as any others. Over the past several years people have become increasingly concerned with the contents of their food – entering scares over the smallest miniscule of hydrogenated corn syrup. Outside of the grocery store, farmers markets abound, and in the summer, backyard gardens seem extremely popular. But is this shift towards local food just a trend?

Karl Jacoby, a history professor at Brown University seems to think otherwise. “For most of human history all food was local food, it really isn’t until the last 50 years we have really profoundly changed our food systems and gotten our food from remarkably far away. So in certain respects it’s a really recent change that everyone is interested in local food, but if you look at it from the longer historical prospective we are just coming back to a pattern that has been with us for a very long time.”

Popular films like Fast Food Nation and Food Inc., as well best-sellers like Michael Pollen’s the Omnivore’s Dilemma are certainly causing people to think twice about their meals.

“I think that our food system is definitely under attack by major corporations. There’s been a conscious decision to shift policy. It’s really the last bastion of things that the public hasn’t gotten involved with making decisions about yet in this country.”
That was Matt Jennings, he founded Farmstead Cheese Shop and La Laiterie Restaurant in Providence. When Farmstead started in 2003, Matt explained that they were some of the first to buy cheese products directly from the farmers.

Farm Fresh RI, has made great strides to localize food in the Ocean State. Hannah Mellion, who works as an AmeriCorp VISTA, is Markets Coordinator at Farm Fresh RI. She is developing a farm-to-business distribution program that will make local buying easy, convenient, and efficient for restaurants, schools, grocery stores, etc. “Farms are basically small business, and I think having farms in your state is an incredible great resource. And there’s a lot of statistical data about what it means to spend money in your community. For every dollars that’s spent in the community, it gives back. Keeping money in our community supports everyone. Every time you shop in Rhode Island, you are supporting farmers who paying taxes and buying from other local stores.”

While keeping food local can be tough in urban centers, it’s getting easier all the time. Hannah says that she has made some efforts to do her own gardening. “The Fox Point Community Garden is great because it is actually a piece of land owned by the city and it provides people who don’t have access to land a place to garden. There are watering cans and water and gardeners trade stories and seeds.” Fox Point Community Garden was founded four years ago and now has over 100 plots.

CSAs, or community supported agriculture have also become popular in the state. Katie Miller who works at Scratch Farms, and Urban Edge in Cranston explains her thoughts on CSAs. “It’s amazing. I mean you could talk to other farmers that would have less great things to say about CSAS, but I think it’s absolutely the most wonderful thing for my business. We are able to see who’s taking our vegetables every week, we get to have relationships with them and meet their kids. It also means we know that we’ll have a market for all our vegetables before we’ve grown them.”

But buying local food, organic food, natural food can be pricy, admits Matt Jennings with Farmstead. “You have to have some money in order to eat right in the country every night, there’s no question about that. When you can go to a drive through at McDonald’s and pick up a meal for 5 that costs you $20 when that same meal is going to cost you $120 at a grocery store, that’s a no brainier for a lot of families. So I think then the goal becomes more at the policy level. I think that Farm Fresh has started a great thing with the local farmers markets in the state by providing the opportunity for a lot of low income families to shop at farmer’s markets with food stamps.”

However, while things seem pricy they are really costing us, says Professor Jacoby. “On the other hand a lot of so called cheap food isn’t really that cheap. One thing that makes a lot of our food cheap now is the byproduct of millions and millions of food subsidies.” Most of these subsidies go to fund only four crops – what, rice, soybeans, and corn.
“And in a way that system has worked tremendously well, food prices are very low for a lot of stable commodities in the US, but I think we are realizing cheap calories aren’t necessarily good calories. But the fact that we have this very powerful industry that has risen around this system it gets very hard to change. There are very powerful vested interests benefiting from the current system.”

So while it seems easy to just consider the toll the food takes on your wallet, the costs lie elsewhere. [Hannah Mellion] “Everyone eats. Everyone eats, every day, multiple times. That food is really important to our bodies and our health. It’s also really important where that food is coming from and what it’s doing to the environment.”

When we purchase food for ourselves, we are affecting the local environment and the local economy. With personal choices that have much greater repercussions, it seems that now, consuming food has become an ethical act.
For WBRU News, I’m Maggie Lange