Month: June 2013

I decided to take the “Slavery” quiz during my lunch break at HOPE. It took a little longer than I expected—the survey almost crashed my computer. I guess the Windows 98 operating system we food shelf interns get the privilege of using wasn’t equipped to handle such advanced technology. At one point, in order to let the survey load a bit, I walk away to go throw something out, only to come back and see the question in bold on the screen, “How many times have you paid to have sex?” I glance around, hoping my coworkers didn’t see that pop up, freak out and moved the virtual zipper trying to get to the number zero, no numbers appear and so I frantically skip to the next question. The screen freezes, as it had at every question before. I try to open a new tab but am unable to. I realize that by moving the zipper down (obviously unzipping the zipper) I inadvertently indicated a number over zero. I should note that the intern’s desk at HOPE is located smack dab in the middle of the main room. (Possibly to keep an eye on the intern and make sure they’re actually doing the work they are supposed to be doing?) So the chances of someone walking by at any given time are quite high. The chances of “Kim,” the lone “male” who works at HOPE, walking past are relatively low, but of course he walks by at that very instant the screen freezes. (At the time of my previous post where I noted that the entire staff was female, Kim had been on vacation and I’d only seen a written list of staff names). Not sure what he thought of my lunch break web-surfing activities but I assume he was very perplexed. Or amused. Or disgusted. Who knows.

I decided not to take the carbon calculator test after that. My results on the Slavery test were a bit exaggerated (38 slaves!?), likely due to my accidental response on the sex trafficking question. But also under “what affected my score the most,” I found that none of the items pictured I actually owned. Apparently that ambiguous drawing in the medicine cabinet was bodywash. And under electronics, it said my CD player, DVD player, CDs and DVDs were the most influential. I did not see there was an option to select fewer electronics that the “technophobe” setting—I actually only own 3 electronics that I can think of. I started a Seller account on Amazon a little over a year ago in an attempt to “declutter” my life (and make a little extra cash) and have sold mostly textbooks and electronics–my old iPod, camera, printer, iHome, PC…. I think I’ve made close to $1000.00 by now, so I highly recommend making your own seller account! It’s great having everything consolidated (who needs an iPod AND camera AND cellphone when you have an iPhone?) PLUS by selling my old electronics discount to someone who may not have been able to afford them otherwise, I not only would benefit them but also make myself feel better—less to keep track of, I made some [meager] extra cash, and am doing a good deed. I realized last week when I got a message from the person I sold my PC to that they wanted to return it since the touch pad was faulty—that it’s not actually the money that motivates me to sell electronics on amazon, although that incentive can definitely be used to motivate hoarders to declutter their lives (we have our fair share of those who frequent Retroworks adjacent to the food shelf). It’s the feeling you get from altruism. Even if that means there is no true altruism, in that I’m actually doing good for selfish reasons since it benefits ME by making me feel good (we learned about this in psych classes) I’ll take that over guilting people anyday. Screw carbon calculators and guilting people into doing good. Why use negative feelings to motivate when altruism can do exactly the same thing? I get the idea behind carbon calculators—inflict feelings of guilt that attempt to motivate people to change their lifestyle to reduce their carbon footprint and hope that they’ll then proceed to encourage friends and family to do the same. I jumped right on that bandwagon in high school, starting my school’s environmental club (you’d be surprised how many Environmental Studies majors at Midd did exactly the same thing), idealistic and optimistic that all it would take is spreading awareness to get people to change.  But I’m starting to think that whole approach is misguided.

People won’t change if they simply know they’re doing the ‘unethical,’ un-environmental thing—you have to show them how. Give them incentive. Make their efforts not seem futile. At HOPE I’m struggling every day with this idea, seeing people who are lost, on food stamps and unsure how to get back on the right track. We can’t possibly use the guilting tactic in this case–some people are here because of a difficult upbringing. Many of these people want to work but without a car they can’t get a job, and without a job they can’t pay their bills and get off welfare. It’s a tragic, vicious cycle. I think part of our job here at the food shelf is to try to provide that guidance. Talk with them, not necessarily change their attitude, but provide baby steps and encourage them not to give up hope that things will get better.

The most common and direct way consumers can get access to local foods is either shopping at farmer’s markets or purchasing a CSA. These two options are both expensive and exclusive which can lead to problems of access.

Farmer’s markets are a great tool for increasing the amount of local food for consumers because they are both centralized and plentiful; however, because farmer’s markets are a direct market for farmers, it allows them to set higher prices for their products. Also, because farmer’s markets tend to attract a certain demographic, typically those who are willing to pay a higher price for natural, organic foods, prices tend to be higher than they would be in a standard grocery store. At the moment, it does not seem like farmer’s markets are reaching a wider audience of consumers, particularly the middle and lower income groups, because of both affordability and exclusivity from the existing consumers.

CSAs share a similar trend of a barrier to access; while they provide local food to consumers from farmers directly, they are also only reaching a limited audience. CSAs can be expensive and they require consumers to pay upfront, which can be a limiting factor for some. In addition, CSAs attract consumers who have a certain level of flexibility in the way they eat and are competent cooks because the consumers often do not have a choice in the foods they receive. For many consumers, CSAs are not the right fit because of the commitment and price.

These two models have certainly helped provide a certain amount of local foods to consumers, but also reflect problems of access. One way for local foods to be consumed by more people and for farmers to continue receiving a fair price for their products is for farmers to expand to new markets besides these direct market channels. Other markets such as institutions, restaurants, grocery stores or natural foods stores can be different options for farmers to reach more consumers and also input more local foods into the food system. For example, putting more local foods in schools can get kids excited about local foods, many schools are taking note of the importance of local foods and educating kids on where their food comes from, so schools are making an effort to purchase more local foods. Shifting these buyers to increasing local food in their markets may lead to more access to local foods for consumers.

In the past two weeks, I have been learning about food hubs and how they can act as a facilitator in this process. Often farmers do not have access to these markets, or the infrastructure to carry it out (distribution). That is where food hubs can come in to connect the links, increasing the amount of local food for both farmers to sell, and consumers to buy.

During Sunday’s meeting, we discussed how bringing fresh fruits and vegetables to an impoverished area, like Detroit, isn’t necessarily enough to get the area’s residents to eat these foods. Fellow blog posters have highlighted that this might be the result of access. Local and organic foods are often grown on a smaller-scale and require more labor inputs, resulting in higher costs. Logically, a number of impoverished populations don’t have the financial resources to purchase more expensive food, even if it is available in their area.

However, in working with the Vermont Agency of Agriculture and the various stakeholders of the Farm-to-School and Farm-to-Institution initiatives I realized that in addition to access, education plays a motivating role in establishing the relationships that connect the farm gate to the dinner (or school) plate. The Farm-to-School initiatives across the state work to bring more healthful, local produce and foods into the cafeterias, while also educating the students on what types of vegetables exist and how they are grown, often through lesson plans and the creation of a class garden. This education component is critical to helping kids get excited about eating fruits and vegetables. This excitement will hopefully hold through the lifetime of the child and continue to motivate them to purchase healthier foods instead of more readily accessible processed foods.

In my mind, I see the intersection of access and education in farmer’s markets, food stamps and community kitchens. Increasing the number and quality of farmer’s markets ensures a community’s access to fresh, locally produced food. At farmer’s markets there is an increasing accessibility to healthful foods. Individuals with more substantial incomes can afford the higher sale prices associated with this type of food, but now those who are issued food stamps have a new way to purchase food at farmer’s markets at no additional cost to themselves. Using a government issued debit-like card, card holders can purchase wooden tokens from an ATM-like machine at markets, which can be used to purchase food from market vendors. Debit card holders can similarly use the machines to purchase wooden tokens if a conventional ATM is not available. These machines allow for increased access, but require that card holders be educated that they can use their food stamps at farmer’s markets and what health benefits this can confer. Similarly, community kitchens provide access to healthier and increasingly local foods through the donations of gleaned crops or donated produce. The community kitchen model is quickly replacing food shelter one, as community kitchens seek to educate lower-income families on how and what to eat rather than just providing them with non-perishable foods.

Like the Chinese proverb says “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime”. Establishing local and regional food access for all does require making the food available locally. However these efforts would go largely underutilized should those located near the new food systems go uneducated about the benefits of consuming such food and the ways in which they can procure it.

Remembering who grows our food seems, to me, the most forgotten aspect of recent conversations on local food. Without farmers, near and far, we would have no food. Though the high prices of good food are often maligned, we could do more to understand why farmers must charge these prices.

Food access for ALL people must be central to discussions of food, and fortunately, these conversations are happening with increasing regularity. But I think that food access for farmers is too quietly discussed. Even organic farmers, even farmers who charge $9 per gallon of raw milk or $5 per pound of tomatoes, have trouble making ends meet. Though it is easy to malign farmers for charging high prices, these prices are not pulled out of the sky. They go towards land, towards labor, towards food, towards family; they go towards the expenses each of us have, all components that we must consider when understanding “cost” in the food system and broader society. We must understand, and then change, this mismatched system where farmers must charge high prices, which cannot be met by all eaters, and still can barely recoup their own costs.

When we ask for cheap food, I think we must be specific about what we are going to sacrifice. Would we prefer food from farmers who don’t pay laborers, or who skirt protecting our water, soil, and sky? Feeding ourselves carries costs: monetary, social, and environmental. Like much of the food discussion, I don’t think there are simple answers to changing these costs. We need system change, everything and all of it at once.

To start understanding these costs, to place ourselves in a way that gives us the right to complain about them, we must ground ourselves in understanding. To start, I think that everyone should grow food. In a backyard garden, or at a farm, try it for just a day in order to understand the work that goes into each seedling. Preferably follow the full cycle through, from germination to harvest, because only then can everything (the labor, the love, and the cost) that goes into each plant be understood. Only then can we complain about paying $5 for a pound of brandywine tomatoes or $4 for a bunch of carrots. Only then we can start thinking about getting those carrots in the hands and mouths of everyone. Farmers included.

The producers of high quality food are widely diverse as well. Many of the producers who were selling produce at the farmer’s markets yesterday in Louisville were native Kentuckians who seemed fairly well-off, while there are also many farmers and farm laborers in the region who are immigrants. My supervisor was introducing my roommate Vanessa and me to different vendors at the market and told us that several of them used to sell their produce at a farmers market in a low-income area of Louisville because they wanted to help increase access to fresh produce in those areas. However, the farmers were not earning enough at that market and had to start selling at the Douglass Loop market which is in a higher income area of the city. The farmers wanted to make their high-quality local foods available to a diverse population, but the prices were still too restrictive which limited the benefits for both producers and consumers.

The non-profit New Roots seeks to bridge this gap between farmers and low-income communities by delivering affordable market shares of local produce to areas where it is hard to find fresh food. People who qualify for SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) or WIC (Women, Infant, and Children) benefits pay twelve dollars for a box of produce worth twenty-five dollar.  New Roots then delivers the food to three different low-income neighborhoods to reduce the commute for poor populations. Additionally, the payment occurs a week in advance, which helps the farmers because they receive the payment ahead of time to help transport the local food. I am looking forward to learning more about the success and challenges of New Roots when I start volunteering with them at the Shawnee Fresh Stop this coming week. Their model is an innovative way to reconcile the differences between the producer of fresh, local foods and the people with the most limited access (but arguably most need) for those foods by making the delivery of local foods more economically viable for both producers and consumers.

Additionally, I met some of the members of La Minga this past week, which is an immigrant cooperative farm. Like Jen mentioned in her post, the people who are producing our food are often the most food insecure. La Minga strives to allow immigrant farmers to have access to land and resources where they can produce food, and share that food with others in the cooperative. This allows immigrants to produce and consume the food they are cultivating, while also cultivating relationships and knowledge at the same time. New Roots and La Minga are just two examples of ways to address the disparities of food access in Louisville. I am looking forward to learning about other models that strive give everyone the privilege to enjoy fresh, local food.

“Is it ultimately food for all or just a select few?”

This question recalls a discussion that arose at the young farmer’s panel at Middlebury this spring. Corie Pierce from Bread and Butter Farm spoke with no small amount of passion about the idea of sustainable food being unaffordable. In her experiences at the farmstand and the farmer’s market, she found herself constantly interacting with potential patrons who eyed her products longingly but left empty-handed, saying that they just couldn’t afford it. But these were not people struggling to find decent nutrition on food stamps, nor even people who–like her own family–she knew to be on subsidized healthcare. Many times, she said, these were people she knew to be faculty members at the College. While there are people for whom her food is simply and objectively prohibitively priced, for most people buying food from a place like Bread and Butter is a question of realigning priorities. The “select few,” then, are self-selected. But they are members of a socioeconomic swath that could also elect to prioritize locally-produced raw milk, organic eggs, and heirloom chicken.

There are many obstacles that need to be overcome to make sustainably grown food accessible to people for whom it is simply out of reach, either for economic, cultural, or geographic reasons. The most frustrating thing for me, though, is looking at people who could choose to redistribute their budgets to afford the food at their farmer’s market but who, for reasons that remain opaque to me, choose not to. Unpacking the misconception of un-affordability among people who could technically afford sustainable food seems to be a key step in making the select few into the select many.

In assessing the disparity between local foods producers and consumers, I think it is important to remember that sales support farmers’ livelihoods, and for many of these individuals farming is a business. Yesterday Nicole and I visited the Douglas Loop Farmers’ Market. While there, Stephen Bartlett, of Sustainable Agriculture Louisville (SAL), explained to us that many farmers who previously worked in the Smoketown/Shelby Park Farmers’ Market had moved their operations to Douglas Loop. Shelby Park is located in a low-income area of Louisville, and Bartlett explained that farmers simply were not earning enough revenue to justify holding a market in that location. In this instance demand was not high enough to justify the continued presence of the farmers’ market. In contrast to Shelby Park, Douglas Loop is located in the Highlands, a much more affluent neighborhood. Farmers have unsurprisingly experienced better business since the move.

I am sure many farmers selling local foods are strong proponents of food equity, but at the same time they must remain realistic about the economic viability of their operations. Though I tend to shy away from pure economics as an answer or justification, I do not think anyone would contest the fact that markets in low-income neighborhoods will not perform as well as markets in more prosperous areas. This trend has obvious implications for the availability of local foods and the reality of the “by whom/for whom” distinction noted by Ackerman-Leist. In fact, the distribution of farmers’ markets throughout Louisville confirms this pattern–the West End, another low-income area, has two markets, while the Highlands has four.

One initiative in Louisville I am particularly interested in is the use of the Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) system in farmers’ markets. I believe that allowing welfare benefits to be used at farmers’ markets has the potential to partially reconcile Ackerman-Leist’s “by whom/for whom” division. Some markets in Louisville accept state benefits, such as those provided through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), as payment, which could increase low-income families’ access to local foods sold at farmers’ markets. I am looking forward to exploring whether or not the use of the EBT system at markets has actually increased access among low-income demographics in Louisville.