Changing Diets, and Lives
Grassroots, community-driven efforts may prove more effective in transforming diets than any federal policy. The Los Angeles-based Community Food Security Coalition represents 325 organizations in the U.S. and Canada dedicated to "building strong, sustainable local and regional food systems that ensure access to affordable, nutritious, and culturally appropriate food to all people at all times."
Unlike the USDA and other pieces of the federal bureaucracy, groups like CFSC tend to view food as part of a broader economic-development effort. "Not only are people in low-income communities getting sick from the food they have access to, but the economies are sick, too," says Hank Herrera, a pioneer in the community food-security movement who has served on CFSC's board. Herrera runs the Rochester, N.Y.-based Center for Popular Research, Education, and Policy and the New York Sustainable Agriculture Working Group. "You can't separate community-level economics from food advocacy."
Herrera became active in food politics in 1993, after the only supermarket in his northeast Rochester neighborhood burned down. Median household income in the neighborhood hovered below the poverty line; its economic profile resembled that of the South Bronx. The chain that owned the store opted not to rebuild, and residents faced two options familiar to people in poor neighborhoods all over the country: travel to a wealthier neighborhood to buy food, or shop at corner stores, where the prices are high and fresh food is scarce.
Herrera helped found North East Neighborhood Alliance. Although the group put the numbers together to convince the Dutch multinational supermarket chain Tops to open an outlet in the area, residents weren't satisfied. "We realized it was great to have a supermarket in the area. But the profits leave the neighborhood, and local farmers and producers are ignored," Herrera says. So NENA kept organizing. Today, the group oversees a 2.7-acre tract that houses a working organic farm and a restaurant. "There was a pent-up demand for consistent access to fresh fruits and vegetables, and we delivered it," Herrera says. "And we created not only jobs, but capital formation. The profits stay here."
Ken Meter has seen the same dangerous patterns in less populous places. "The situations in rural and urban areas aren't that much different," says Meter, of the Minneapolis-based Crossroads Resource Center. "Most farmers in the Midwest are producing for a global commodity market, not for their neighbors or even themselves." Not only has that model helped lead to rising obesity rates -- according to a recent study by the University of Pittsburgh Center for Rural Health Practice, 20 percent of rural seventh-graders qualify as obese, versus 16 percent for their urban peers -- it has also been disastrous for local economies.
In one study in southeastern Minnesota, Meter found that between 1997 and 2003, local farmers sold an annual average of $912 million into the global commodity market, but spent an average of $996 million each year -- an average annual loss of $84 million. Meanwhile, area residents spent $500 million per year buying food from outside the region. Combined, that makes an outflow of $1 billion -- or more than the area brings in by selling into the commodity market.
"Our food system doesn't build wealth in our high-producing areas, it extracts wealth," Meter says. He says area's economy benefits not local farmers or consumers, but large operations like Archer Daniels Midland and Cargill, which thrive on low prices for commodity inputs. The federal government picks up the tab for a failing economy; between 1997 and 2003, the feds gave $98 million in subsidies per year to southeastern Minnesota.
Meter reckons that if the region's consumers were to buy 15 percent of their food from local sources, it would generate as much income for the region as two-thirds of farm subsidies. He says the Southeast Minnesota Food Network, an organization formed in 2001 to refocus area farmers on producing for the local market and encourage consumers to buy local, has been using his data to recruit new members.
As the federal government dithers with its food pyramids and ruinous cheap-corn policy, low-income communities are organizing to gain control over the quality of their food supply. Meter's work in the Midwest and Herrera's in the Northeast represent the rumblings of a growing real-food underground -- an upsurge that challenges not just the hegemony of processed food, but also the social relations that allow it to thrive.
Tom Philpott is a Gristmill blogger.
This piece first appeared in Grist. For more environmental news and humor sign up for Grist's free e-mail service.
