[Sdpg] Food Facts/Eat Locally/DISCOVER Magazine

[sdpg-admin at arashi.com]

Hi everyone
         After attending the Ecovariety  Night in Ojai Friday at the Cook 
and the Farmer stoore and restaurant now open in Meiner Oaks and seeing 
what one farmer  Steve  and the community support can do to bring food 
directly from the local farmers to the store and to get the community support.
Read abelow the article forwarded from Deborah Boyer (thanks so much). A 
very timely article to explore and rethink the way we buy and grow food and 
the impacts.
                                                 wes

Half the vegetable servings eaten in 1996 came from only three plants: 
lettuce (mostly iceberg), potatoes, and tomatoes. And half of all fruit 
servings came from only four fruits.  Worldwide, only 10 to 15 species of 
plants and eight species of livestock account for 90 percent of global food 
production, and that range is narrowing. Of 15 breeds of swine raised in 
this country just 50 years ago, eight are extinct.

About 65 cents of every dollar spent on food goes into packaging, delivery, 
and marketing; 30 cents goes to the companies that make fertilizers and 
pesticides; and only 5 cents goes to the farmer.

The smallest farms, those of 27 acres or less, have more than 10 times 
greater output per acre than larger farms.


DISCOVER Vol. 22 No. 5 (May 2001)

After living well for a year on foods grown within 250 miles of his house, 
Gary Paul Nabhan sees a simple solution to the planet's environmental problems:

Eat Locally
By Gretel H. Schueller
Photography by James Smolka


The Avra Valley in the Sonoran Desert, just southwest of Tucson, Arizona, 
doesn't look particularly inviting, especially if you're hungry. The rubbly 
soil bristles with spiny shrubs and thorny cacti, the trees have small, 
leathery leaves, and the animals have names like Gila monster and bark 
scorpion. But to Gary Paul Nabhan, that caustic exterior hides a veritable 
smorgasbord. Sidestepping some thorns and burrs, he walks up to a squat 
prickly pear cactus and whacks off a slice with his machete. After cooking, 
he says, it will taste a lot like green beans.

Nabhan is no Tex-Mex Martha Stewart, no hippie visionary hoping to feed the 
world fried grasshoppers and roasted moth larvae, although he likes to 
snack on them himself. He is director of the Center for Sustainable 
Environments at Northern Arizona University and the recipient of both a 
MacArthur "genius" Fellowship and a Pew Scholarship, as well as the author 
of acclaimed books on conservation. His most recent, to be published this 
fall, is titled Coming Home to Eat: The Pleasures and Politics of Local 
Foods. It describes his one-year culinary quest to eat foods only from 
within a 250-mile radius of his desert home not to test his survival 
skills, but to make a devastating point: Our eating habits are destroying 
the planet.

Little more than a century ago, nearly half of all Americans farmed. But by 
the 1997 U.S. agricultural census, only 2 percent still listed farming as 
an occupation. Americans now get nearly a quarter of all their fruits and 
vegetables and more than half of all their seafood from foreign countries. 
A typical morsel of food journeys 1,400 miles before it reaches a mouth 50 
times farther than it did 20 years ago changing hands at least six times 
along the way.

The virtues of this global goulash are obvious: Food is relatively cheap, 
and almost any food can be had at any time of the year. Yet to Nabhan, the 
drawbacks are costly: The more global our agriculture, he says, the less 
varied our food; the more mechanized our farms, the poorer our farmers; the 
more abundant our crops, the less healthy our landscapes. Worst of all, 
we've grown blind to the bounty in our own backyards. To prove a point, 
Nabhan stoops over another cactus and says, "This little one here is the 
one we get the flower buds off of. They taste like asparagus tips." A few 
steps away, he stops in front of a withered-looking creosote bush. Its 
leaves make a great medicinal tea, he says. Even those mesquite trees are 
good for a snack or two. Their dried pods taste a little like chocolate, 
and they can be ground to make a flour rich in soluble fiber.

And all this in a desert, he seems to be saying. Just think what the rest 
of you are missing.

Nabhan and I visit a supersized supermarket in Tucson. There, we wander 
down aisles flanked by heaps of fruits and vegetables from all over the 
world: mangoes from Brazil, lemons from Argentina, tomatoes from Canada, 
bananas from Guatemala. The variety is both dazzling and predictable all 
this produce is always available. "We can pick and choose from the 
planetary supermarket without any contact with local fishermen or farmers, 
let alone any responsibility to them," Nabhan says, eyeing a can of boiled 
baby clams grown in aquaculture farms along the coast of Thailand.

A few aisles over, we pass tins of orange breakfast drink and box after box 
of cake mix. Processed foods or "marginally edible gobbledygook" as Nabhan 
calls them are the fastest-growing sector of the food industry, and their 
genesis is even harder to trace. When I called a representative at 
Campbell's Soup, she couldn't say where the tomatoes in their tomato soup 
had been grown, much less where the corn syrup in it came from.

The hidden costs of supermarket convenience begin with seeds. Historically, 
Nabhan says, farmers had no choice but to grow plants adapted to local 
environments flint corn in the northern plains, for instance, and 
drought-resistant flour corn in the deserts. But when modern transportation 
and mass production allowed all the corn we need to be grown in the 
Midwest, seed companies started to consolidate. Nearly a third of all 
vegetables found in U.S. and Mexican supermarkets are now grown from a 
single company's seeds. "We pretend we don't need drought-adapted corn in 
the deserts of the Southwest anymore," Nabhan says, "because we can take 
federally subsidized water from the Colorado River, divert it 200 miles to 
a place that has no water, and then give that crop as much water as we give 
it in the Midwest."

Gary Paul Nabhan has spent 30 years working in the Southwest long enough to 
see even its bleakest deserts as ocher foodscapes. The saguaro cactus 
behind him, for instance, bears red fruits prized by Native 
Americans.Ironically, such heroic efforts only make crops more vulnerable. 
Monocultures are an ideal target for pests, to which they offer only a 
single source of resistance. And because most commercial crops have been 
bred for high yields, many of the genes for disease resistance have been 
lost. So pesticide use in the United States has grown 33-fold since 1945. 
Corn farmers alone spray 30 million pounds of insecticides each year to 
protect their 80 million acres of grain from rootworm beetles and borers. 
"Heterogeneity once protected us from epidemics and plagues," Nabhan says. 
"Now we substitute chemicals."

Like most conservationists, Nabhan has long seen the dark side of modern 
agriculture. But it took a trip overseas to shift his sights to the 
benefits of eating locally. He was at an exclusive restaurant in Beirut, 
Lebanon, when he noticed something odd about the menu: "French champagne, 
caviar from the Caspian Sea, shrimp from the Sea of Cortés, Sicilian 
capers, Argentine beef, Chilean wine. Not a single item came to us from 
Lebanese soil." Yet later, in the village where his cousins lived, he was 
served a feast worthy of an area once known as the Fertile Crescent: goat 
and lamb that had grazed on nearby slopes, home-cured olives, fresh-baked 
pita, tomatoes, eggplants, and squash all grown in local gardens. That 
experience, he says, "sprung me loose" from complacency about food.

Once back home, Nabhan rebuilt his diet from the ground up. His garden was 
already a desert oasis, covered with prickly pears, heirloom grapes and 
pomegranates, mesquite trees, wild beans, a pollinator garden, and a peach 
tree. He added tomatillos and several varieties of squash, peppers, herbs, 
onions, and native shallots. He installed a drip irrigation system and 
planted under shade trees, lowering his water needs even in a desert to 
less than what a typical grocery uses to mist vegetables. Indoors, he 
purged his kitchen of processed and packaged foods. Instead of cereal from 
a box, he and his wife ate crepes made of panic grass flour, with a sauce 
of wild wolfberries.

The experiment began officially on the day after Easter, 1999 ("I didn't 
want to upset my mother, who was making ham and scalloped potatoes"). From 
then on, 80 percent of Nabhan's food would come from within a 250-mile 
radius of his home about as far as he could drive (and drive back) in one 
day or walk in 10. "It seemed like an area within which, historically, you 
might have some cognizance of your neighbors," he says. He wanted at least 
90 percent of what he ate to be native to the Southwest, but he kept his 
goals realistic he continued to drink coffee for a few months, for example. 
Now he's an herbal tea drinker. "I had to keep telling myself that this 
would be an extended ritual," he says, "like a marathon runner who lumbers 
at first until he gains momentum."


The daunting pads of the prickly pear taste like green beans when cleaned 
and cooked.  Severed from the supermarket, Nabhan had to adapt to the 
seasons and their shifting resources. Spring brought cactus buds, which he 
could eat dried, pit-baked, or pickled, and squash blossoms that could be 
stuffed. Summer meant gathering wild desert greens, berries, and saguaro 
fruit. In the fall, he planted winter greens, onions, and legumes, gathered 
acorns and piñon nuts, and killed his flock of five turkeys, which he 
smoked in a backyard stone oven. One bird, prepared with home-brewed beer, 
mustard, garlic, lime juice, and a piñon nut dressing, served as the main 
course for Thanksgiving.

The most humbling parts of the experiment, Nabhan says, were crop failures. 
Hornworms chewed through his tomato plants, for example, and a rare snow in 
March led to a slim harvest of cholla cactus buds in April. But he had 
never planned to live from only a garden. Just a few blocks from home, he 
could shoot quail and doves. And although some days he'd come home 
empty-handed, on others he had a bird shot and dressed within minutes, 
ready to be stuffed with garlic and wild oregano, then glazed with prickly 
pear syrup.

The easiest part was finding other people who were doing the same thing. 
Every two weeks, for instance, Nabhan would travel 28 miles to see Miss 
Soto, a.k.a. the Egg Lady, to buy duck, goose, and turkey eggs. At a nearby 
roadside stand, he met a woman willing to exchange tortillas for some of 
his mesquite flour. And his neighbors chipped in to buy sides of beef from 
a local ranch.

Nabhan's new diet was less of a stretch for him than it would be for most. 
This is a man, after all, whose cookbooks include Unmentionable Cuisine and 
Dining with Headhunters; a man who doesn't mind eating roadkill quail, 
dove, and the occasional rattlesnake as long as it's "fairly fresh." Still, 
many of his family members and friends were skeptical. "When I put 
something out on the table," he says, "they usually let one person taste it 
to see if he would die."

As it turned out, Nabhan's diet became remarkably similar to what local 
Native Americans once ate and therefore a good deal more varied than the 
typical American's diet. According to the U. S. Department of Agriculture, 
half the vegetable servings eaten in 1996 came from only three plants: 
lettuce (mostly iceberg), potatoes, and tomatoes. And half of all fruit 
servings came from only four fruits.  Worldwide, only 10 to 15 species of 
plants and eight species of livestock account for 90 percent of global food 
production, and that range is narrowing. Of 15 breeds of swine raised in 
this country just 50 years ago, eight are extinct. And just two kinds of 
peas account for 96 percent of the U.S. harvest. Corn may be transmogrified 
into bread, beer, and even frosted flakes, "but it's the same basic thing," 
says Solomon Katz, a professor of anthropology at the University of 
Pennsylvania. "We re-create variety by processing a handful of plant foods 
in a million different ways, and there're all kinds of consequences of that 
increased processing."

As early as 1974, a study led by John Steinhart, then at the University of 
Wisconsin at Madison, concluded that the U.S. food system had quadrupled 
its energy use between 1940 and 1970. It now takes between 10 and 15 
calories of energy to deliver one calorie of food to a U.S. consumer. A 
head of lettuce, for instance, requires 2,200 calories of energy to produce 
when it's grown in California and eaten in New York, yet it provides only 
50 calories of energy. By contrast, subsistence societies use about four 
calories of energy to produce one calorie of food.

The food consumed by each person in the United States takes the energy 
equivalent of 400 gallons of oil a year to produce, process, distribute, 
and prepare 17 percent of the total energy supply. By contrast, Africans 
and Asians use about 40 gallons per person for all their activities. "We're 
using 10 times the amount just for food," says David Pimentel, a professor 
of agricultural sciences and ecology at Cornell University. Why? Because we 
eat about 3,800 calories a day, or about 2,200 pounds of food per year 
twice as much as people in China.

At the very least, one would hope that farmers benefit from all the energy 
and expense lavished on their crops after all, yields per acre have roughly 
doubled since 1950. Yet net returns on farming have remained relatively 
constant. Large, vertically integrated companies and cooperatives now 
handle almost all agricultural processing and production, from seed to 
supermarket shelf, leaving ownership and control in few hands. In the beef 
industry, for instance, four firms control more than 80 percent of the 
market. About 65 cents of every dollar spent on food goes into packaging, 
delivery, and marketing; 30 cents goes to the companies that make 
fertilizers and pesticides; and only 5 cents goes to the farmer. Last year, 
the USDA distributed a record $28 billion in direct subsidies, yet some 
farmers still couldn't compete with overseas labor. Chinese imports, for 
example, have devastated the apple industry in Washington State.

Years ago, Nabhan got a glimpse of a different kind of agriculture, and the 
intimate ties to food that it can build. In Gary, Indiana, where he grew 
up, his grandfather was a fruit and vegetable peddler and his neighbors 
were Greeks, Swedes, and Lebanese to whom preparing a meal was as important 
as eating it. Nabhan often went hunting for small game with his father and 
uncles, and after high school he took inner-city kids on field trips to 
nearby Amish and Mennonite farms, where they helped plant potatoes and 
fruit trees. When he came to the Southwest in 1971, he delved into local 
agriculture, visiting remote farms in search of heirloom vegetables once 
grown by the Hopi, Apache, Tohono O'odham, and other tribes. A year or two 
later, so many farmers were asking after the seeds he had found that he 
helped establish a native seed bank in Tucson. It now houses nearly 2,000 
varieties of corn, chilies, beans, melons, and other heirloom crops, and 
distributes them to Native American farmers free of charge.


At the Café Poca Cosa in Tucson, Arizona, more than half of all the food is 
grown locally. This "carne asada à la Mexicana" contains local cabbage, 
zucchini, onions, and garlic and is served with roasted prickly pear cactus 
pads.  One morning, Nabhan takes me to the village of San Pedro, an hour 
west of Tucson, where some 20,000 Tohono O'odham members live on a 
reservation. It is an unseasonably cold and gray day, with a steady mist 
that sends a chill into our bones, and the area around the local church 
looks as barren as the moon. But nearby, inside a shelter of waist-high 
walls and a corrugated tin roof, the mood is almost festive. Several women 
are busy preparing lunch over four wood fires, next to a large wooden table 
covered with woven baskets and blackened pots filled with native foods. 
Nabhan spoons a broth of brown and white tepary beans the most heat- and 
drought-tolerant legume in the world, he says into a tortilla made from 
floury, fast-growing native corn. The tortilla is soft and flaky and the 
beans, spiced with a pungent wild oregano, are almost buttery. Tender 
cushaw squash, cholla buds, and a freshly steamed salad of wild desert 
greens fill out the meal. For dessert there is yellow watermelon and a 
tropical-tasting drink made with wild chia seeds.

The O'odham farms are "mosaics of microhabitats," Nabhan says. Here, 
desert-adapted varieties of corn, beans, and squash grow side by side, 
complementing each other: The corn provides a trellis for the bean vines, 
which provide nitrogen for the corn and squash. The large leaves of the 
squash form a living mulch, keeping the soil cool and moist. Compared with 
nearby conventional farms, Nabhan and his colleagues have found, the 
O'odham farms have fewer cotton rats and other pests and many more 
pollinators, such as carpenter bees and hummingbirds. According to a 1996 
study in the Journal of Agriculture and Applied Economics, the average 
small farm devotes 17 percent of its land to woods, compared with only 5 
percent on large farms. Small farms also allocate nearly twice as much land 
to soil improvement projects, such as cover crops that reduce erosion.

Such measures may now seem quaint. Yet in 1992, the U.S. agriculture census 
survey found that as farm size increases, the average net output decreases. 
According to Peter Rosset, executive director of the Institute for Food and 
Development Policy in Oakland, California, "the smallest farms, those of 27 
acres or less, have more than 10 times greater output per acre than larger 
farms." Where large farms have weeds growing between their endless rows, 
Rosset explains, small farms have secondary crops. "It might look like the 
large farm is more productive because they're getting more, say, soybeans 
per acre. But you're not getting the other five or 10 products that the 
small farm is getting."

Many agricultural economists still say that the small farm is dead no 
amount of loving care, heirloom vegetables, and clever intercropping can 
make up for the vast economies of scale available to corporate farms. But 
Nabhan believes that American agriculture has reached a turning point. 
Events over the past year, he says, represent "the equivalent of the Boston 
Tea Party for food." Thousands of farmers have refused to grow patented 
seeds; students have destroyed experimental fields and labs for genetically 
engineered crops; consumers have demanded better food labeling; and the 
Slow Food Movement, founded in Italy in 1986 to resist the homogenization 
of food production, has arrived in America after gathering more than 60,000 
members worldwide.

The strongest signs of this change may be the boom in farmers' markets and 
organic food sales. According to the Department of Agriculture, the number 
of markets nationwide has risen from a couple of hundred in the 1970s to 
2,863 today nearly one for every community in the country. At the same 
time, community-supported agriculture programs, known as CSAs, are helping 
more consumers buy produce straight from farmers. Just north of Santa 
Barbara, for instance, in the midst of suburban sprawl, the Center for 
Urban Agriculture at Fairview Gardens runs a 12.25-acre farm that grows 100 
varieties of fruits and vegetables and feeds about 500 families. The 
concept is simple: People sign up to pay for a share of the season's crops. 
In exchange, they get a load of fresh-picked produce each week. The farmers 
know in advance how much to plant, and they share the risks and rewards 
with their customers. If the early lettuce freezes, everyone has to wait 
for the second planting. If it's a bumper year for cucumbers, everyone gets 
extras. "One of the good parts of CSAs, over and above the fact that they 
may be cheaper, is that you have a greater variety of foods," Nabhan says, 
"and they enable you to understand the plight of people growing your food."

The century plant, or agave, contains a sap that can be fermented into a 
pungent alcoholic drink.  On my last night in Tucson, Nabhan takes me to a 
restaurant. He's worried that I haven't enjoyed his native foods. Actually, 
I have and I didn't have to sneak in anything. But we go anyway.

Inside the Café Poca Cosa, the walls are the color of chili powder, the 
floors are terra-cotta tile, bright paintings hang above heavy wooden 
furniture, and the only light comes from dozens of flickering candles. This 
is cheating, I think. But as we wait by the bar for a table and Nabhan sips 
some local tequila, he explains that more than half of what's on the menu 
can be traced to within a few miles of where we sit. The tomatillos and 
cilantro for the salsa, the mixed greens in my salad, and the peppers, 
squash, and eggplants in my roasted vegetable burrito were all grown at 
some of the same small local farms where Nabhan bought his produce. The 
shrimp he orders came from the Sea of Cortés, less than 250 miles away.

If a restaurant in Arizona can do this, anyone can, Nabhan says. "We get 10 
inches of rain a year. And Arizona has the lowest number of small farms per 
capita of any state." In fact, restaurants like Café Poca Cosa are catching 
on. A nationwide network of more than 1,500 chefs, known as the Chefs 
Collaborative, now advocates "sustainable cuisine" of just this kind. In 
the end, Nabhan says, finishing off the last bits of food on his plate, 
eating locally isn't just about eating well. It's about communities getting 
involved and returning food to its natural place at the center of our 
lives. "Each time we put something in our mouths," he says, "it's a moral 
act, whether we admit it or not."



The Fat of the Land

Thanks to modern agriculture, developed nations have leapfrogged the threat 
of famine only to land in the insalubrious pit of overnutrition. Simply 
put, we've become global gluttons. Last year, the average American ate 220 
pounds of meat and poultry, at least 14 pounds of seafood, more than 200 
pounds of flour and cereal products, nearly 740 pounds of vegetables, 
fruits, and nuts, more than 28 pounds of cheese, about 65 pounds of added 
fats and oils, and 150 pounds of caloric sweeteners such as cane sugar and 
corn syrup. We consume twice as much butter, shortening, oil, and sugar as 
our counterparts in 1909 did. We consume seven and a half times more 
cheese, five times more chicken (up to 54 pounds a year), 24 percent more 
beef, and 15 percent more pork. And while we eat just a little less fresh 
fruit than folks did in 1929, we make up for it by ingesting a lot more 
processed fruit.

The effect is all too obvious: More than half the adult population is 
overweight or obese, according to the third National Health and Nutrition 
Examination Survey, and diabetes has reached epidemic proportions. Every 
year, obesity accounts for 300,000 preventable deaths (second only to 
tobacco in that category) and, say the National Institutes of Health, 
obesity-related diseases cost the country $100 billion a year.
G.S.



Future Farm

While Gary Paul Nabhan is trying to curb our addiction to modern 
agriculture, Wes Jackson wants to reinvent it from scratch. For 10,000 
years, Jackson says, people have been planting crops like corn and wheat 
that survive only one season. But every time the ground gets plowed and 
reseeded, more topsoil is lost to erosion. Today the United States loses 2 
billion tons of topsoil each year 25 to 50 percent more than when the Soil 
Conservation Service was established in the 1930s. Yet a single inch of 
topsoil can take 500 years to form naturally. Plants do not grow well in 
rock or clay, which is about all that will be left when the topsoil is gone.

In 1976, a decade after earning his Ph.D. in genetics, Jackson set out to 
address the problem by founding the Land Institute in Salina, Kansas. 
There, he and other researchers study what they call "natural-systems 
agriculture." The idea is to farm more benignly by turning farms into 
something closer to what they've replaced. In central Kansas and much of 
the U.S. grain belt, that means prairie a mix of long-lived perennials that 
resprout every year, hold and even build soil, sequester water, resist 
pests, and fix nitrogen.

A native prairie is made up of warm-season grasses, cool-season grasses, 
legumes, and members of the sunflower family. To mirror that structure, 
Jackson and his colleagues are breeding perennial versions of wheat (a 
cool-season grass), sorghum (a warm-season grass), and sunflowers, and hope 
to begin work on a legume soon. They're also trying to domesticate wild 
perennials such as Illinois bundleflower (a legume). Their ideal perennial 
farm would never need plowing, and like a prairie, would run essentially on 
sunshine and rain.

Perennials have long been thought to devote too much energy to their roots 
to produce as much grain as annuals. But Jackson believes that perennials 
actually consume less energy than annuals: "A corn plant's got to do it 
from seed, bootstrapping all the way" and work at the Land Institute and 
elsewhere is beginning to prove him right. At Washington State University 
in Pullman, for instance, Stephen Jones has created a wheat/wheatgrass 
hybrid that produces nearly as much grain as annual varieties did 50 years 
ago and only 30 percent less than modern varieties.

Getting an annual to behave like a perennial going dormant in the winter 
and sending up shoots at the right time of year is a slow, tedious process. 
But Jackson is a patient man. In 25 years he expects to get some "really 
outstanding results." And agriculture has been around a lot longer than that.
G.S.


RELATED WEB SITES:

See the Web site of the Center for Sustainable Environments at Northern 
Arizona University: www.environment.nau.edu <http://www.environment.nau.edu> .


© Copyright 2000 The Walt Disney Company.

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