Academia, meet Blogosphere

As I sit at my laptop after a long, hard, weekend of procrastination, trying to decide whether it’s justifiable to write a blog post rather than work on my environmental studies thesis, I am suddenly struck with a brilliant idea. Why not break down my thesis, which examines food system localization as a route to sustainability in the Eugene area, into blog-able chunks that would help me develop my ideas and keep this space from looking completely dead?
I’ve worked around the issue of food policy for a while, and I think most citizens are now aware that our system of growing, processing, distributing of food is convoluted, irrational, and above all, unsustainable. It’s detrimental to the environment and our bodies, a path to almost certain disaster.
But it wasn’t always that way. Just prior to the industrial revolution and continuing through the middle part of the last century, farmers actually grew crops that people could eat (not acre upon acre of cow food) and sold them in local markets. Most housewives kept gardens. People knew how to cook and enjoyed tastier, more nutritious food.
The idea for my thesis topic came out of my work on food-related issues in India and a question I’ve been working around in my head since returning: is it really possible to recreate a localized food system like we used to have here and that “developing” countries like India still enjoy? How do we incorporate current food distribution and consumption modes – Walmart superstores, Taco Bell, processed cheese – into that model? Obviously, we’re not going back to a 19th century ideal here, where everybody lives on their five acres, grows their own food, and knows what to do with it. There’s not enough land to go around and most people aren’t interested in getting their hands dirty (farmers currently make up less than 1% of the entire U.S. labor force). Still, there’s an interest in at least mimicking this model, and the proliferation of farmers’ markets, restaurants advertising locally grown ingredients, and general public awareness about food issues says something. The question is, even if all of us give up Italian noodles and Australian wine, can individual locales – counties, states, regions – really feed the people who live there?
It depends on the place. Luckily for me, the Willamette Valley (the area between the Cascades and the Coast range in Oregon) has at least the potential to feed its own population. We have an abundance of small, organic farms and some systems in place to get that food to local consumers. Unluckily, no matter how progressive we like to think ourselves to be, we’re no different from the rest of America. We (especially college students) shop at Safeway, enjoy the occasional Dairy Queen stop, and indulge ourselves with January strawberries. And there’s good economic reason for those decisions. Yes, there’s a strong backing for local foods, but it’s still a niche market, with produce available only at high-end grocery stores and natural food marts with reputations (founded and unfounded) for being expense. Also, there are the frightening prospects of bulk bins and soy cheese to drive away most mainstream food buyers.
If the underlying goal in revamping our food system is to achieve greater sustainability – a slippery concept, but to summarize four pages of my thesis, the ability to continue on the current course for many generations to come – we might have to reexamine if local is actually better. For example, let’s take wheat, which almost everyone buys in some form or another. Soft white, the kind used to make pastas and tortillas, is grown in huge quantities in the Willamette Valley, and with a better system to store and process the grains, we could be enjoying a completely local supply. But, because of the global wheat commodity market, it’s a lot easier to sell that wheat at top dollar to a distributor who will ship it to Asia or Europe, which is what currently happens to 100% of the wheat grown in the Valley. Buy a bag of noodles anywhere in Oregon, and there’s only a miniscule chance the wheat came from anywhere within a 100-mile radius.
Is this a bad thing? It depends what you value. A network of small, independently run grain mills and storage facilities in the Willamette Valley might sound perfectly utopian, but is it really more efficient? It would probably require complicating the already dizzying web of producers, distributors, processors and retailers even further, involving huge amounts of effort and organization. Compared to this, a system in which all the wheat grown goes to a central location, is processed and re-distributed to where it’s most needed (ie where the price is right) sounds almost logical.
So that’s my thesis topic in a (lengthy) nutshell. Stay tuned for next week, when I’ll sniff out where food is being grown in my vicinity and who is actually eating it.