Eat Local: Keep Yourself and Your Town Alive

Some days everything fits together: no sooner do I grumble about one of the hazards of industrial agriculture than SD Watch points us toward this excellent article from Rebecca Terk at Flying Tomato Farms on another reason Really Big Ag is bad for us.

The big scare about salmonella in tomatoes? We wouldn't have such widespread contamination scares if we were less dependent on consolidated growers and a far-flung distribution system. Local farmers, with their connections to their community, are a lot more likely to be responsible in their use of manure as a fertilizer and to engage in other practices to keep from putting poison on their neighbors' plates.

So, while at this point small, local farmers may not feed the world, there are certainly advantages to buying from someone local, someone you know. Not that it’s impossible for their produce to be tainted, but it’s a lot less likely because they have a lot more at stake in terms of producing a safe, quality product. They live in their communities, and they have to face their customers on the street — in their banks and restaurants and at their markets — every day.

If you are concerned about the safety of the food supply, you should encourage small, local farmers to produce more of the food you eat. You can shop at your local farmers market; you can organize with other concerned local citizens and form a Community Supported Agriculture coalition–hiring a farmer or farmers to grow food for you and your families. You can even try growing some of your own food [Rebecca Terk, "Salmonella Scare with Fresh Tomatoes," Flying Tomato Farms, 2008.06.11].

Depending more on local agriculture may do more than keep you from getting food poisoning; it may also be the way for your small town to survive the end of cheap oil. Bernie Hunhoff notes that rising energy prices are killing small towns:

Not so many years ago, a car was optional for people who lived in towns of about 500 or more people. That was enough to support a grocery store, a few cafes, a pub, a dentist and possibly even a family doctor. Not any longer. Today, people in towns three or four times that size are lucky if they have all of the above [Bernie Hunhoff, "Energy Crunch Hammers Rural SD," South Dakota Magazine: Editor's Notebook, 2008.06.10].

Towns basing their economic models on the affordability of driving an hour or two every week (or every day) to get groceries, go to work, and run errands may no longer be sustainable. You can't grow a dentist or a doctor in that backyard garden. But in a world of $150-$200-per-barrel oil, and in a world of corporate farmers selling us salmonella and E. coli, it makes economic and health sense to find ways to bring our economy back to a human scale and make more of what we need to eat and live right here in rural South Dakota.