The Slow and Local Food Movement

The world wide Slow Food movement was founded by the Italian Carlo Petrini in an attempt to overcome the degradation and loss of diversity of the worlds cuisine caused by the world wide influence of western corporate food giants. The replacement of hundreds of foods and thousands of ways to cook them with a few dozen foods that these corporations can purvey at great profit, represents a destruction of cultural traditions that have taken thousands of years to develop. It would be a sad world indeed to lose that rich heritage and be left with nothing to eat but hamburgers and pizza.

The local food movement began as a desire for; fresher food; food that wasn’t responsible for the consumption of thousands of gallons of fuel due to having been shipped thousands of miles to get to its destination; food that the buyer could purchase directly from the farmer to the financial benefit of the farmer who labored to grow the food – verses commercial foods which tend to line the pockets of middle men who capitalize on opportunity to the degradation of farmers; food that was grown by people who the purchaser could get to know; food that wasn’t contaminated by chemical farming practices.

As the primary representation of the local food movement, the burgeoning farmers market phenomenon has provided a way to buy fresh, locally grown produce from farmers that you can shake hands with so you know where your food comes from and how it’s grown. Typically these are small farmers growing food products in careful rotation cycles to avoid pest build-ups (avoiding the need for pesticides). Any additional soil amendments are usually locally derived organic materials (often right from the farm). These small farmers usually market their products to local restaurants, health food stores and at farmers markets. Also, small farmers are better able to derive their operational needs from the local marketplace so their expenditures tend to stay in the local economy, helping to lift all local boats.

Conversely the corporate approach to food production is for farms to become very large and disconnected from their community and its economy, selling their products to “middle men” who tend to drive up costs by processing food to the point that they are often so bereft of nutrition that nutrients have to be added back in – and then selling the food in “ready to eat” formats. The corporate “middle man” is usually represented by food giants whose intensive energy/distribution systems are behind much of the recent rise in food prices. This corporate model of food production and distribution – using lots of big machinery that consumes vast amounts of fuel to grow and process crops with millions of tons of energy intensive chemicals that pollute the earth and our bodies, then ship said food thousands of miles to get it to your table – puts us all at the mercy of middle eastern oil states and rising fuel prices. It also makes that well traveled food much more susceptible to terrorist attacks. This also means that the food that the local corporate farm produces will be shipped out of the local community to be processed elsewhere, thus depriving the local community of the economic compounding effect of turning that food into products for sale in the local market.

Just about any way you look at it, the small local farmer provides us with a much saner and safer means of acquiring our food.

A word on farm subsidies. Subsidies to grow specific crops are problematic because they encourage farmers to grow an excess of the subsidized crops resulting in a loss of diverse food production. They often provide no guarantee that the farmer will come out ahead at the end of the year. In addition, subsidized food then becomes so abundant it becomes very cheap on the open market making it a lucrative target for food giants who will process it into various components (corn is a good example, corn oil, high fructose corn syrup etc.) and resell it for huge profits. That leaves the person who did all the work – the farmer – with little or nothing.

On the consumer end, subsidies result in artificially low prices at the grocery store that do not reflect the true cost of producing food. We enjoy the lowest percentage of food expense of any developed nation in the world, thanks to artificially priced food production. More insidiously, subsidies result in more of our food being processed into nutrient poor “ready to eat” food that from a health view point, helps no one.

Perhaps the saddest result of our skewed corporate food production system is the negative impact it has on our farmland, the true source of our wealth and sustenance.