CHAPTER 20

How the Local Food Revolution Can Unfold

Since the U.S. food supply is currently fed by a global foodshed and almost totally dominated by an industrialized system, in the near future, virtually every region in the country will need to undergo a process of localizing its food supply to the greatest extent possible. Local food supply chains will need to help consumers make healthful, informed choices. The emerging local food industry will need to increase efficiency and improve market connections. Eaters will need to learn more about the human connections to food. Farmers will need to produce food for local consumption. Numerous entrepreneurs and organizations are already working on these challenges—or aspects of them—but the process is often chaotic and disorganized.

Food localization can result in a stronger community economy, ecological sustainability, better nutrition and health, and more civic engagement. But the transition to a localized system means that nearly every aspect of the way we feed ourselves must be redesigned and rebuilt. Getting there will require the involvement of entrepreneurs, farmers, chefs, restaurateurs, retailers, distributors, and others. Local government will need to be involved too, but at the right time. And the general public of eaters—all of us—needs to be involved as well. How can all this happen?

When our organization formally began working on this in Boulder County, we naively proposed a goal of 25 percent food localization over a ten-year period. We saw it as a man-on-the-moon project that our community could embrace together. It seemed doable, but nine years later, I can’t say that we have moved very far in the direction of local food, either in Boulder County or in the state of Colorado. We’re currently still somewhere between 1 and 2 percent local food (no definitive data is available).

We worked for years before we seemed to have much impact locally. On the surface, it appeared that there was a great deal of activity, because the movement was already gaining momentum on its own—there was an explosion of interest in permaculture and reskilling. But eventually we realized that we were facing deep structural problems—the demand for local food, which we had helped to increase, was far outstripping the local production capacity.

We found that we were confronting at least four major overlapping challenges. We had to

• increase and support demand for local food, especially among commercial buyers, wholesalers, and retailers;

• increase production capacity;

• rebuild the infrastructure (aggregation, processing, storage, distribution, and marketing); and

• scale the entire localization effort.

Just being able to identify these four arenas was a breakthrough in our understanding. Suddenly, they were obvious. When we spoke of these four areas to others, it became obvious to them as well. We soon realized that we were developing a common language that might make it possible for us all to see and think together about food localization. We even found a suitable name for the process, thinking like a foodshed.128

The challenge we saw running through all four of these arenas—especially rebuilding infrastructure and taking the whole effort to scale—was the need for an enormous amount of capital. We understood from Michael Shuman’s study that approximately $1.8 billion in capital investments would be needed to get to 25 percent localization in Colorado. And while we also knew that 25 percent localization could ultimately produce massive economic development for the entire state, we had no idea where that investment capital could come from.

The scope and complexity is intimidating, far beyond the capacities of any organization or coalition or government. It looks as daunting as trying to fix climate change or trying to overcome poverty and hunger in the world. Food localization is what’s known as a wicked problem, and the solutions seem well beyond our reach. Once we begin to comprehend the institutional, governmental, economic, and social structures that hold this problem in place—and their tendency to powerfully resist our efforts toward localization—we can feel completely overwhelmed, that this is just too hard.

Well, it is hard. It’s almost impossible. But it needs to happen.

We need to remember the context for our predicament. Our society is held in the grip of a global food system that controls something like 98 percent of our food supply. This system is controlled by the Unholy Alliance of Big Ag, Big Food, and Big Pharma, and is powerfully supported by Big Banking and Big Government. The Unholy Alliance doesn’t want us to localize our food supply, because it runs counter to their values and their plans. In fact, food localization runs counter to our entire export-oriented economy.

But the Unholy Alliance—and the economic system of which it is a huge part, as the largest industry in the world—has grown to the point that it is now the single largest contributor to global warming. It is a primary factor in precipitating the sixth mass extinction of life on this planet. Together, the global industrial food system and the global industrial economy are a disaster in terms of their impact on human health and well-being, on the environment, on our local economies, and on our communities. And now they are heading straight toward their own cataclysmic disaster.

It may be that the most significant result coming out of the 2015 climate talks in Paris is that for the first time, the nations of the world (195 of them) agreed that we must end our dependence on fossil fuels as quickly as possible. I don’t think we can take to the streets in celebration just yet, because this is not news that the Unholy Alliance or Wall Street will take lying down, for they are deeply dependent on fossil fuels. Nevertheless, the agreement in Paris—even though it doesn’t have much in the way of teeth yet—may be the closest thing we’ve seen to a global declaration of war.

In any case, the global economy and its food system do not have a happy future ahead. We’ve known for quite a while that they are profoundly unsustainable; but now they are increasingly unstable, heading toward steep decline or even collapse. It will be a bumpy ride down for them, and they are not likely to go quietly into that dark night.

Localizing our food supply is revolutionary, and for those of us who are involved, it is a formidable challenge that will not be made any easier by the turmoil and chaos that the Unholy Alliance and Wall Street will be going through in the coming years. And it will not be made any easier by the growing realization that the need for localizing our food supply is becoming urgent.

Not only do we need to build regional food systems almost completely from scratch, which is hard enough, but we must simultaneously begin the process of reversing the damage caused by Wall Street and the global food system. We need to heal and rebuild our soils, our souls, and our communities. If we do not tend to this deeper task, if we do not recover our connection with the sacred and with all of life, then whatever we might create together will only add to the massive destruction that modern civilization has wrought upon this planet and upon our hearts and minds and bodies.

This will require a revolution—a deep revolution.

This work is far bigger than merely building our own regional food system here in Colorado. We should allow ourselves to remember that this has never been done before anywhere in the world—at least not in a region with an already established (and growing) population. So let’s agree that we’re doing this not just for ourselves but also for emerging foodsheds everywhere.

We should also remember that nowhere in the United States has the process of food localization gone very far. Vermont consistently leads the Locavore Index and is considered the mecca of local food (Colorado was ranked twenty-sixth in 2015).129 But even after fifteen years of concerted and well-organized effort, Vermont today is at no more than 7 percent local food.130

It’s possible that the pace of emergence of regional foodsheds could greatly accelerate as the effects of Peak Everything—especially climate collapse—become more painfully obvious. It’s possible that whole nations (or even alliances of nations) will take up the challenge, when they realize they must, much as Cuba was forced to do when it lost its primary source of fossil fuels (after the collapse of the Soviet Union) and quickly shifted to organic agriculture to prevent mass starvation.

It’s equally possible that the Unholy Alliance will, at some point, perceive food localization as a threat and seek to retaliate. We could see the breakout of what we might call “food wars.” Since most governments are driven primarily by economics, and since the Unholy Alliance is a pillar of the economic system, we would then likely see governments react strongly against food localization. The efforts by Congress to block country-of-origin labeling and GMO labeling are early indicators of this reaction.

This will be a difficult struggle. But as foodshed catalysts, evolutionary catalysts, or even as revolutionaries, it is important to remember that we are not responsible for ultimate outcomes (although we are deeply implicated). That is, we will likely never see the full fruits of our labors or even learn whether this effort ultimately succeeds or fails. Our responsibility, meanwhile, is to be faithful to the underlying evolutionary impulse that called us to food localization in the first place.

Many of us are giving our lives to this, our all. We are like the abolitionists dedicated to the freedom and equality of all people at a time when slavery was the dominant economic paradigm. The struggle of the abolitionists lasted for centuries; ours may as well. In fact, in some ways, we’ve inherited their struggle. It is in the local food revolution that we perhaps have an opportunity to fulfill the underlying evolutionary impulse that inspired the abolitionists in the first place. At the heart of the local food revolution is nothing less than the reclaiming of human freedom and dignity.