This blog post is part of our new series, Perspectives on Food Insecurity in Wisconsin, in support of the Sesame Street program Growing Hope Against Hunger, and WPT programs Wisconsin Foodie (airing Thursdays at 7 p.m.) and Wisconsin Gardener (airing Thursdays at 6 p.m.).
Sesame Street Food for Thought: Eating Well on a Budget is a bilingual, multimedia program designed to help support families who have children between the ages of 2 and 8 and are coping with uncertain or limited access to affordable and nutritious food. Contact WPT to request a free Food for Thought tool kit with tips, strategies, and tools to help families with limited resources eat healthy.
by Aly Miller
CSA basket. Credit: Scott D. Moose, Flickr.
“Eating local” is an emerging moral code that foodies, grocers, farmers markets, and food labels proclaim as “right” and “just,” enacted through campaigns of “voting with your fork” to fight industrial farming and global food networks. For Wisconsinites, “eating local” means consuming cheeses, dairy, eggs, and meat for most of the year. My own dietary shift away from these products, coupled with a winter’s worth of researching and critiquing Madison’s “local food movement,” leads me to wonder, are we exaggerating the importance of proximity when we limit our consumption to ”the local’? Furthermore, what’s lost when we elevate proximity over the more glaring injustices surrounding consumption and hunger?
Answers to these questions begin to surface in situations where people make the decision to purchase either “local” or “organic” produce. Growing Power Inc.’s Market Basket program offers an affordable delivery of groceries (distributed by Growing Power Inc in Madison, Milwaukee, and Chicago), and serves as an exciting case in point. The program intends, first and foremost, to provide the USDA’s fruits and vegetable serving recommendations. For the past year at UW-Madison, the program has received positive attention in Madison Magazine, and a modest amount of student participation.
Some of the regular participants are members of Slow Food-UW, a group of students committed to providing “good, clean, fair food.” Most students order baskets that include both organic, local greens and conventionally-farmed wholesale produce. An even smaller group of students opt for the “sustainable basket,” which includes exclusively organic and sustainably grown produce. Despite this information, students regularly ask me about the sustainability of tropical fruits in terms of ”food miles,” – or the distance from farm to plate.
Last spring, for example, one customer informed me that the bananas and oranges in her market basket are “unsustainable” because they have to be shipped “half way around the country/world.” This critical response reveals an uneven concern and suspicion for “placeless food” that is delivered to them without labels or markers of Wisconsin’s “terroir,” – the special characteristics that our Midwestern geography, geology, and climate bestow upon particular foods. As a student of geography, I understand that shipping fruit around the world certainly contributes to global warming, but I question whether “food miles” should take the top priority when deciding what to eat, especially when so many nutritious options are financially ‘out of reach’ for many in today’s grocery stores.
What’s at stake when some consumers equate “sustainability” with “local organics,” and even go as far, – as current trends in local food-lore suggest, – to equate “local” with “socially just”? I argue that affordability and health are at stake.
Dandelion Greens at Growing Power. Credit: Lisa O., Flickr.
Growing Power runs with the same logic in distributing baskets of produce from both conventional and small scale farmers across the US. Their “good food revolution,” in effect, de-centers “organic” and brings consumers of all walks of life to the table. In recognizing that nutritional needs can trump “food miles” “seasonality” or “organic”, the baskets strive towards inclusivity.
Every day, we decide “what to eat” based on a myriad of taste, time, dollars, emotions, and morals. But for many, decisions on what to eat are not so complex; often they revolve around questions of “what’s left in my cupboard?” I envision a future of eaters looking to their community gardens, grow houses, and market baskets to decide “what to eat.” Every bite of that “unsustainable banana” circumvents arbitrary boundaries of “the local” and even “sustainable.” In giving up some of our autonomy as consumers, we lend to the growth of new cooperative foodways. On a larger scale, this network of eaters and growers, urban farms, and rural, is one way we can “grow power”.
The paradox of organic/fair/local food surface in moments when realizing that the seeds of injustice and hunger that we set out to eradicate are the very seeds we’ve planted; the organic fruits which so nostalgically represent things good and fair can be grown and harvested through a chain of exploitative farm-to-grocery/pantry-to-table relationships. Though organic non-GMO and heirloom seeds may not be watered with pesticides, their produce may be farmed, cooked, and served by bodies barred from eating “the fruits of their labor.”
Taft Street Garden: Planting Day at the Boys and Girls Club. Credit: Genyea, Flickr
Opportunities for cooperative community-supported-agriculture, agricultural education, and the removal of financial barriers for farmers are churning the wheels of the “good food revolution.” Organizations like Milwaukee and Madison’s Growing Power, Inc, The Farley Center, Troy Gardens, and Milwaukee’s Fondy Food Center feed and enrich their communities. These programs are ‘more than local,’ and even ‘extra-local,’ serving up the fruits of a ‘food revolution’ right here in Wisconsin.
Aly Miller is a recent graduate from UW-Madison who studied geography and organized partnerships between Slow Food-UW, Growing Power, and the South Madison Farmers Market. She continues to support Madison’s local food system as a youth educator for farming and nutrition, as a caterer in Madison’s restaurant industry, and as a member of Madison Community Cooperative.
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