Looking Forward to More Healthy Local Food from Healthy Local Foodsheds (LF³)

Our New “Looking Forward” Project is a positive, yet serious, proactive look into the future. We look forward, with hopeful anticipation, to more and more good local food. We look forward into the future at increasingly serious challenges, especially the connections between the climate and biodiversity crises and food. We look forward to a bright future for our children and our planet as we take the necessary actions now to ensure it, starting with food in our case and extending to all aspects of a sustainable future.

Interest in local food continues to grow, and presents a wide range of opportunities to capture multiple benefits and deeper sustainability. This interest in local food is always a positive, but sometimes can be relatively shallow and subject to complacency if not harnessed for greater good. It can, with some strategic awareness-building and support—which we are committing to in this project—lead to multiple, robust, deeply sustainable outcomes in our food system, and beyond.

The First 100 Days, the Next 100 Years: At the beginning of this year, there were a number of calls to action to address fears of what the new administration might do. I struggled to determine exactly what we should commit to—what should be our plan for the first 100 days? While many organizations in our area were ready and able to set some wonderful responses into action, I knew our local food work could contribute, but it took an extra couple hundred days to articulate a longer-term comprehensive response. We don’t have time to waste waiting for a new administration, but must do what we can on more local levels while keeping pressure on the federal government. And for us, that action starts with food—but doesn’t end there.

The Intersection of Food, Climate, and Biodiversity: Once the connection is made in the public’s mind between the health of our food and the health of the soil it is grown on, a progression of increasing levels of concern can be set in motion. How can the food be healthy without healthy soil, without healthy ecosystems in gardens and on farms and ranches? And how can they be healthy if not surrounded by healthy natural ecosystems—a healthy regional landscape, or “foodshed” as we call it?

As we look at the health of our local foodsheds, we see a number of challenges—air, water, soil, pollutants, and more—many of which are being addressed by some excellent agencies and organizations. Yet, we see that the climate and biodiversity crises are not being addressed at a level that their importance, irreversibility, and urgency demand of us. Try as we might, these two crises cannot be separated. Climate change has become the primary threat to biodiversity. Many if not most strategies to combat biodiversity losses due to agriculture will address climate change as well, and vice versa. Biodiversity is absolutely essential to the type of biologically based agriculture that our climate’s health requires. In terms of public engagement, addressing biodiversity can be an easier starting point for those people who find climate action difficult.

Our “Looking Forward” Plan: As we look to the future, we wear several lenses: that of local food as a multi-faceted tool for good, that of the necessity of healthy foodsheds, and that of biodiversity and climate being two of the most critical things, among other critical things, to address. We plan to do our part working toward a bright future, using local food as our tool to add to the efforts of many other groups and initiatives by focusing our promotion, resource development, and support efforts on four areas:

• Gardens for the Future: Not only gardens for all kids, for all backyards, at all institutions, and in all neighborhoods, but gardeners who are continually adapting to the changing climate while working to reduce further climate change, protecting and monitoring biodiversity, incorporating climate-adapted seeds/trees/growing techniques, and reducing food insecurity for all.
• Observing Foodshed Health: Observing indicators of foodshed health—by farmers, ranchers, gardeners, school children, and the community at large—is critical to building awareness of the challenges producers face and the urgency for us all to address climate and biodiversity. Citizen Science observing of weather, pollinators, beneficial insects, birds, and the like can help scientists monitor issues and actually develop solutions.
• Local Producer Support: Producer support in the marketplace, the community, and the voter booth as well as public awareness of the need for healthy foodsheds and climate adaptation should help producers provide healthy local food into the future in the face of a changing climate and biodiversity losses—both domestic and wild—among other challenges.
• Wild Farming & Ranching: Farms and ranches that are compatible with wildlife and with the natural ecosystems that surround them can be powerful forces in combating not only the biodiversity crisis, but climate change as well. These sustainable producers need public financial and technical support to implement wildlife-friendly practices, but loyal customer support as well to stay in business.

Beyond Food: Whether you start with food to address climate change and biodiversity, or with another strategy involving transportation, renewable energy, land use conservation, energy efficiency, water use, etc., it is critical to move on to the other sectors in our pursuit of long-term sustainability. It is our firm conviction that local food can be an effective entry point for many people in this overall effort—one that can be very positive, engaging, nurturing, therapeutic, and effective. We hope you will join us!

These thoughts began in late July. I was in a “Trump-slump” you might say—healthcare, immigration, racism, environmental issues all showing further signs of an unraveling of core values of civility, caring, and responsibility. Worst-case climate scenarios were being actively debated (more on that another time). How did we get into this mess? More importantly, how do we get out?

I believe that we can get out of this slump, that we can restore these core values, and that local food is just one tool—but a very powerful and nurturing tool—for addressing many root causes of these current issues.

Caring: Perhaps the most important underlying cause of unsustainability is simply a lack of sufficient caring for other than ourselves—other people, other beings, the world around us. Sharing food is one of the most fundamental human acts of compassion and an enduring symbol of caring for other people. The more we practice this by first being willing to see that others are hungry, sharing—especially food we have grown locally, and then working toward food security for all people, the more we will reinforce this core value and extend it to areas other than food.

Bringing Culture Back into the Food System: Michael Pollan, Gary Nabhan, Winona LaDuke, and many others have underscored for me the importance of culture in diets, in growing food, and in our basic relationships to food. Cultural tendencies—for food and otherwise—can obviously be good or bad; not all norms from the past are good by any means. But if we critically choose and embrace those cultural tendencies that we know are good for us, it can add a richness to dietary guidelines that transcends lists of ingredients, vitamins, and minerals. For example, following Pollan’s admonition, “Don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food,” could completely transform—and perhaps simplify—your next trip to the supermarket. Supporting and honoring culturally appropriate foods of Native Americans and other cultural groups taps into nutritional wisdom acquired over centuries.

Confronting Fast-Food Values: Alice Waters has made the most wonderful comparison between fast-food values and slow-food values—that we are choosing between not only foods but values when we eat. My take on this is that we have the opportunity—three times a day—to confront our human tendencies for too much convenience, immediacy, cheapness, and consumerism (all of which I am painfully aware of in myself). Left unchecked, these tendencies hurt not only our health, but the health and well being of others and our future. Growing our food, seeking real food from nearby farmers, taking time to cook, and eating a bit slower and more deliberately surely run counter to our modern lifestyle and tendencies, but embody the slow-food values that can transform our lives and the world beyond the dinner plate.

Growing Food—An Overwhelmingly Practical Solution: Bringing attention to critical problems without suggesting solutions is pointless. Solutions abound, but one of our favorite “whole solutions” can give people something practical, nurturing, economical, rewarding, instructive, lifestyle-enhancing, and therapeutic to dig into, so to speak. Nearly everyone can grow at least a small amount of food, from a container tomato on the doorstep or sprouts on a sunny windowsill to a backyard garden or community garden plot. Next best, you can get to know and support one or more local growers—and visit their farms and ranches. Getting involved in growing food, one way or another, helps us make better food choices, be more supportive of local farmers and ranchers, and be more aware of the interconnections between food production and nature. Finally, growing food keeps us actively engaged in helping solve several of the more perplexing social, economic, and environmental problems our society faces.

Connecting Food Systems and Ecosystems: We at HCFS use the landscape-level concept of the foodshed to make this connection. Envisioning our local foodsheds as encompassing our food producing ecosystems and the surrounding more natural ecosystems forces us to see their mutual dependence—one can’t be healthy without the other. A local food system—all that is done to bring us local food—is healthy only when the foodshed is healthy. I see this as a test of our wisdom, of our ability to see the connection between our food choices, our agriculture, and the integrity of the natural world. I feel blessed to live in Southwest Colorado with plenty of wild areas surrounding a patchwork of gardens, farms, and ranches—a great place to observe, preserve, and restore healthy connections between agricultural and surrounding ecosystems.

Exploring Carrying Capacity or “Foodability”: If the people of an area wish to be more self-reliant for food, the question arises of how many people can the local area support in terms of food. Questions abound: How self-reliant can we be—or want to be? With what desired quality of life? How much natural area do we want preserved? How do we separate the footprint for food from that for all else we require—or desire? Then, what about land suitability, water, climate, diets, and market forces—and the fact that all of these are changing! The asking of these questions may be as instructive as finding an elusive “answer.” Again, in Southwest Colorado, we have much open land, a modest population overall, and people who care deeply about food and about our natural landscapes. The questions may be somewhat different elsewhere, but wherever you live and eat, exploring “foodability” can help guide the preservation, appropriate use, and stewardship of our land and our environment—and to find our “place in nature.”

Ultimately, our quest for localizing food can help us find our place in nature which in turn should inform our efforts toward overall sustainability into the future.