PROLOGUE

For some time, in the local food movement, we’ve been hearing that our food system is broken and that we need to fix it. This idea gets much enthusiastic agreement, and in fact, there are many people who say they are indeed working on fixing the broken food system. This has long made me feel uncomfortable, but I could never quite explain why. Eventually, I began to understand that the very idea of a broken food system is the result of a particular kind of thinking, one that has helped to create our collective predicament, our evolutionary crisis.

Witnessing how nearly everyone in the global industrial food supply chain has been trained to believe and declare with near-religious fervor that their collective mission is to feed the world, I came to see that this is a system that has been carefully engineered, constructed, and managed. It is a brilliant enterprise; in fact, it is the largest industry in the world.

Gradually it became obvious to me that the global food system works exactly the way it has been designed. Its purpose, however, is actually not feeding the world or contributing to the health and well-being of our people. Instead, its fundamental purpose is to produce corporate profits and to consolidate power through ruthlessly exploiting the human need for food. Over the last seventy years or so, this system has become extremely successful, extremely efficient, extremely profitable, and extremely powerful—and very good at externalizing costs. It now controls at least 97 percent of our food supply in the United States, and it is moving aggressively toward 100 percent control. They want it all, and they consider the natural, organic, and local food “segments” to be trivial niche markets that they will soon subsume.

Along the way, I’ve also noticed that people who devote themselves to “fixing” this system often wind up somehow becoming part of it, or their energies are completely consumed to the point that they are left with nothing real to contribute to building local food systems.

Our food predicament today is not unlike pre-Revolutionary America toward the end of 1775, when all discussion and debate in the colonies centered on reconciliation with the British Crown. Of course, the Crown had no real interest in reconciliation, though they may have occasionally given it lip service.

These days we hear from proponents of Big Ag that we who stand for local, wholesome food production must accept coexistence with their fossil-fuel-based, genetically modified, monocropping approach to agriculture. But as nearly any organic farmer will tell you, coexistence is ultimately impossible, for accepting such terms of engagement guarantees the inevitable disappearance of organic farming. The Unholy Alliance of Big Ag, Big Food, and Big Pharma is relentless in its push for total domination of the food supply, and it is even willing to risk contaminating other farmers’ non-GMO crops to achieve its ends—so that the meaning of “organic” is finally obliterated.

Big Ag proudly proclaims that there is only “one agriculture” (as if all farming is equal in value), but of course, what they’re pointing to is their own favored form of agricultural and economic practice. They seek to have this system institutionalized as the only agriculture. This amounts to nothing less than tyranny, unjust and oppressive, unrestrained by law, effectively usurping legitimate freedom and sovereignty. In this context, their slogan, “We must feed the world,” can be appropriately translated as “No one but us shall be allowed to feed the world.” We should understand that we are being asked to accept food slavery.

We watched in horror here in Boulder County, Colorado, when one of our most highly venerated local organic farms lost its entire fall harvest (worth some $250,000) to an incident of “pesticide drift” from a field of sunflowers more than a mile away—difficult to prove in a court of law, but undeniable to those who were witness to the destruction. This event contributed to that farm’s untimely demise, long before any token legal or insurance settlement could be reached.

Such experiences, and the educational process they stimulated, ultimately led me to articulate what has been building within me for the last few years.

The idea that all farming is equal, that all farmers should be respected and revered, is preposterous. But there is a robust taboo against stating the obvious: that modern industrial farming amounts to one of the most destructive enterprises on the planet. We need to lose the romantic notion about the essential goodness of all farming and all farmers. It’s simply not true.

Some farmers have told me that, because of my public stand against the use of GMOs, they consider me to be “anti-farmer.” Well, I stand for farmers who work to feed their communities, who build soil, who regenerate the land, and who are dedicated to contributing to the health and well-being of the people whose lives they touch. Conventional commodity-crop farming is not about these things. It is essentially all about the money. Let’s not romanticize it and pretend it is something other than the disaster it has become. We are easily confused about this, and we need to become clear about our priorities at this moment in human evolution.

I’ve long understood that food localization is radical, even revolutionary, and I’ve been saying so over the last few years. I did not quite realize what I was saying, but I did notice that my calling it a revolution seemed to make many local food activists and policy makers uncomfortable. I nevertheless persisted, experimented, and kept looking deeper.

Finally, in June 2015, after participating in a conference of the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE) in Phoenix, Arizona, I shuttered myself in a motel room in Tucson for three days to attempt to pull my thoughts together. I felt what was needed was a compelling manifesto for a local food revolution. The best I could do, I suspected, was to pen a sort of interim communiqué—a step along the way, a building block. I didn’t know then that I was writing the beginning of this book and that the book I thought I had been writing for the previous three years would be utterly transformed in the process.

Since June, I’ve been asking myself just what a local food revolution actually means—what it looks like, how it might unfold, and how we might support it. This book is, first of all, an attempt to begin to answer that question and to challenge us all to become local food revolutionaries. But the book is also an invitation to explore what I am now calling deep revolution, which will be the subject of upcoming workshops, presentations, and perhaps a subsequent book.