community supported agriculture

Oh, you car-crazy, meat-mad Americans, look what you’ve done now! Everybody else wants to live the way you do, wolfing down Whoppers behind the wheel. So they’re ripping up rainforests to grow more grains for cars and cows, and that’s just accelerating global warming, which is worsening the droughts that are ruining crops from Australia to Zimbabwe.

As Lester Brown, President of the Earth Policy Institute and author of Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization, told NPR’s Morning Edition on Monday, the current global food crisis wasn’t caused by some sort of temporary setback such as crop failure, but rather “systemic change” due to increased worldwide demand for meat and the fool’s gold rush to produce more biofuels, which Brown cites as the proverbial last straw:

Meanwhile, the subdivisions where so many of us park our precious cars--and our dreams--have proven, like Beanie Babies and Thomas Kinkade paintings, to be a less than stellar investment, leaving millions of Americans looking for a new bubble to float their boat while Wall Street and the rest of the world blanches at the prospect of a global recession.

But though our carnivorous, fossil-fueled lifestyle’s inadvertently worsened a worldwide shortage of grains and other staple crops, it’s also created some terrific investment opportunities! As the UK website everyinvestor recently declared, “Buy Food…It’s The New Gold:”

My unequivocal answer is yes! But not in the conventional, commodity crop sense that everyinvestor meant. Forget about corn and soy shares; buy yourself a share of the harvest from one of your local family farmers instead.

It’s called a CSA--Community Supported Agriculture--and in return for an investment of a few hundred dollars upfront this spring, you’ll be rewarded all summer and fall with fresh-from-the-farm produce picked each week at its prime and packed into a box just for you.

Good as gold? I’d argue that it’s even better; after all, when food’s in short supply, you’re better off with carrots than carats. You can’t make stock out of bullion.

Here in the land of milk ‘n’ honey, milk prices are soaring and the honeybees we need to pollinate our crops are all going AWOL. The Washington Post reports that the cost of milk’s shot up so high that one school district in North Carolina’s gone back to serving its kids Yoo-hoo drinks, “which had been taken off the shelf in favor of healthier options…Sure, officials would rather the kids chugged milk. But each Yoo-hoo sale brings in 36 cents of profit.”

American institutions and individuals alike have been addicted for decades to cheap processed foods, aided and abetted by our own agricultural axis of evil: Agribiz, Big Food, and bottom-of-the-pork-barrel politicians. But with higher food and fuel costs looking likely to be the new normal, we may finally be ready to shed the shackles of this corrosive food chain.

Community Supported Agriculture offers an alternative model of farming that nourishes us, the land, and our local economies. It produces fresh, healthy food, preserves open space, and enables small family farmers to actually make a decent living. In short, it’s the one bright spot in an otherwise bleak food forecast.

Ironically, uber-urban New York City’s at the vanguard of this pastoral phenomenon; we’ve got 60 CSAs right here in NYC and another 120 elsewhere in the state, giving New York the highest number of CSAs in the nation.

You may have only just started to hear the buzz about CSAs, but this grass-fed, grassroots movement’s been growing for more than twenty years now, as one of its pioneers, Columbia University nutrition professor emeritus Joan Gussow, noted at the recent CSA in NYC conference held at Columbia and hosted by Just Food, the powerhouse non-profit that’s done so much to promote the growth of CSAs in New York.

Gussow, author of This Organic Life: Confessions of A Suburban Homesteader and a mentor to Barbara Kingsolver, Michael Pollan and the rest of us progressive foodie activist types, calculated that currently, a CSA feeds one out of every 727 New Yorkers, prompting Just Food’s executive director, Jacquie Berger, to reply, “Yeah, but we’re aiming for one out of 7.”

The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik described Berger as “startlingly young-looking” in a piece last fall on the local foods movement, and she is, but as Gussow’s anecdote illustrates, Berger and her colleagues at Just Food are also wildly ambitious--and rightly so, according to Gussow, who’s been living La Vida Local for decades.

You might expect Gussow to be just a bit weary of fighting the good food fight after all these years, but she may in fact be more optimistic than she’s ever been about the prospects for our food culture shifting to a more sustainable model. As she told those of us who gathered for the Just Food CSA in NYC conference:

And hope, as we all know, is a hot commodity these days. Maybe even hotter than corn and soy. So log on to Local Harvest or the Eat Well Guide and find the CSA nearest you! Your investment will be rewarded with some of the sweetest dividends ever.

We’re a nation of Purell Puritans, determined to sanitize ourselves—and our surroundings--from head to toe. Maybe cleanliness really is next to godliness. After all, without dirt, we would all be DEAD, bringing us that much closer to heaven (if such a place exists.) Do you seriously think we can feed ourselves without soil?

You probably do. And why wouldn’t you? After all, our food comes in plastic packages purchased from big concrete boxes sitting on top of acres of asphalt. It doesn’t exactly grow on trees.

Oh, wait, maybe it does! But by the time it’s been processed and packaged, every trace of nature’s been eliminated. Those pre-sliced apples, as easy to eat as potato chips? Before they got bagged in plastic, they had a core, full of seeds, and a stem that connected them to a branch on a tree, which was once a seed itself, which sprouted up out of—are you ready for this?--soil. You know, dirt.

So, really, soil is the source of all life, and as such, ought to be revered. And the people who toil in it deserve our devotion.

But we think dirt is just, well, dirty. And our palates prefer the pasteurized pablum of “reality” shows to true stories unenhanced by added sugars or artificial flavors.

Oh, and by the way? We only want to watch people who look like us, apparently, which is why HBO plopped a half-white protagonist into their version of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, Dee Brown’s historical Sioux saga, as a “hand-holder” to walk the white man through this particular trail of tears. The writer who adapted the classic book for HBO offered the following rational:

But sometimes even a white man can’t get a break, if he’s different, or dirty. Consider the case of John Peterson, aka Farmer John. The poignant and powerful documentary of his life, The Real Dirt on Farmer John, hasn’t made any inroads at the box office despite being declared “unbelievably special” by Al Gore and reaping bushels of rave reviews.

The NY Times called it a “fascinating documentary about loss and reinvention,” offering “one man's extraordinary life as a gateway to a larger history of tragedy and transition.”

The movie follows an odd fellow’s odyssey from local-boy-made-bad to a buy-local-maverick-made-good. But this intensely personal story, filmed in rural Illinois and woven into a glorious patchwork of home movies and new footage held together by Farmer John’s endearingly quirky narrative, also highlights two pastoral plagues that infect every region of our nation: sprawl and bigotry.

If you’ve ever been bullied for being different or had people spread nasty, unfounded rumors about you, if you’ve ever mourned the sight of ticky tacky houses sprouting up on former fields, this film will touch you whether you’ve ever given a thought to the way our food is grown or not. The Real Dirt on Farmer John is a true tale of how a handful of wild and woolly idealists, faced with fear and loathing from a hostile community, turned the other cheek and sowed the seeds for an agrarian revival after the advent of industrial agriculture nearly bled the family farms to death.

Newsday’s review noted that “very few folks have the eloquence and force of personality to portray their own story on screen, at least not in the peculiarly winning combination embodied by John Peterson,” but if Peterson is the star of the film, his extraordinary mother is its anchor, holding things together through decades of hardship with a perpetually sunny outlook undimmed by disease and disaster.

Our news is flooded with tales of toxin-tainted foods from China and near-biblical catastrophes brought on by climate change, from fires to floods to record drought. It all seems so discouraging, but there’s an antidote to these scourges—the community supported agriculture that Farmer John pioneered with his Angelic Organics farming venture.

Community supported agriculture gives those of us lucky enough to live near a farm that participates in a CSA program the opportunity to buy healthy, locally grown food that’s untainted by toxins, so it’s fresher, it tastes better, it’s better for you, and it doesn’t waste fossil fuels racking up food miles from Peru to Peoria.

The trouble is, most Americans have never heard of CSAs. The Real Dirt on Farmer John could change that, doing for community supported agriculture what An Inconvenient Truth did for climate change. At least, it could if it played in enough theaters. But the movie is struggling to gain traction despite all the accolades. Why? My theory is our culture has grown so disconnected from the soil and the souls who nourish us that the words “dirt” and “farmer” are a turn-off to prospective movie-goers.

And that’s a tragedy for all of us, because Farmer John and his fellow CSA farmers hold the key to our nation’s salvation in their callused, dirty hands. The commodity crop growers are tripping over each other to plant more top soil-depleting corn and bring on another dustbowl/depression—see Timothy Egan’s best seller, The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl—or, the way things are going, just wait a few years and you’ll get to relive it.

As Egan pointed out in a great NY Times op-ed on Thursday, entitled “Red State Welfare,” our current system of agricultural subsidies “sets the rules for the American food system and helps to subsidize obesity. It rewards growers of big commodity crops like corn, soybeans and wheat — the foundation of our junk food nation. So, a bag of highly processed orange puff balls with no nutritional value is cheaper than a tomato or a peach.”

Egan notes that “the American Farm Bureau, which represents some of the biggest corporate welfare recipients, is terrified that a motley mix of peasants are now at the door with pitchforks. On their Web page, the bureau warns members that “forces outside of agriculture” are demanding change.”

Are they talking about me? ‘Cause I’m doing just that. We populist bloggers haven’t got pitchforks, but we can sharpen our pitch to the rest of you to help us support folks like Farmer John, who are growing fruits and vegetables in a healthy, biodiverse eco-system, instead of planting millions of moncultured acres of chemical-dependent commodity crops destined to become high fructose corn syrup or bogus faux green bio-fuels.

So, please, call your local indie theater and ask them to show The Real Dirt on Farmer John. Just because it’s a film about dirt doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t clean up at the box office.