Category Archives: Eating locally

I won the Jeff Fairhall Local Food Hero award! You can read about it at Eat Local Now. This was my acceptance speech.

A few weeks ago I met Wayne Carpenter who is doing great things to create a local brewers and distillers supply chain in starting the Skagit Valley Malting and Brewing Company. He grew up on a farm and we were discussing predators. He shared with me some sage wisdom that his father shared with him when he was a boy. Around their farm coyotes would periodically become problematic and he asked his dad if they should take up arms. His father said, “Wayne, shooting isn’t the best way to get rid of coyotes. If you shoot a coyote there will always be another. The best way to stop coyotes is to give them free hamburger every day for six months. Once they’ve become accustomed to free food they stop hunting. And when they stop hunting, they don’t pass that important survival skill down to their young. Then after about six months, you simply stop giving them free food. Having forgotten or never learned how to hunt, the coyotes begin dying off.”

At this point in our food culture we’ve become like the coyotes around Wayne’s childhood farm. We’ve become accustomed to buying processed food designed to utilize corporate waste, or produce grown to look pretty at the expense of nutrition. We haven’t passed important skills like cooking from scratch down to your young. Convenience and thrift have dictated our eating habits and this has allowed the food chain to centralize until it’s now literally owned by just a few companies, who in turn are owned by Wall Street.

This model of corporate America owning our food chain will never be optimal because it’s designed to maximize profits for shareholders. And before we are too quick to blame Wall Street, we need to remember that WE are the shareholders making decisions with our buying dollars and feeding this system that is in turn feeding us.

Here in Washington state we have an astounding number o f small farms, growing real food – nutritionally dense food – by focusing on healthy soil because of groups like Cascade Harvest Coalition, Tilth Producers, PCC Farmland Trust and biodynamic inspirations like Jubilee Farm.

Everyone in this room who could afford to attend this event understands the importance of supporting these small local food producers. You probably are already shopping at local farmer’s markets. But what about those who couldn’t afford to come tonight, and can’t afford to shop at farmer’s markets? We need to remember that if this local food movement stops with us, it stops.

So what’s next? Well I know that my next step is making local food both appealing and affordable to the masses. Not just the foodies, and not just the chefs, but the casserole makers and the birthday cake bakers and the super bowl snackers. We need to teach people of all income levels forgotten food skills like keeping and processing backyard chickens, or baking bread, or growing some of their own food. We need to both lead by buying example and volunteer our time to communicate, to educate, to share. It could be as simple as sharing a recipe to teaching grade school kids a new skill like baking homemade crackers or planting a container garden. Getting children excited about good food can have a trickle down effect on their families, both present and future.

I want to challenge each and every one of you to go home, look through your cupboards and refrigerators and pick out one thing to try and make from scratch. Involve your kids and your family as much as possible, and begin sharing your infectious appetite for a thriving local food economy by gentle example.

I’d like to thank Eat Local now for the opportunity to attend tonight, but mostly I want to thank Tyson, Monsanto, Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland for becoming so heinously greedy and criminally neglect that we eaters have finally woken up and realized there is more to eat than just the free hamburger they are serving.