A Call to Sow

Great problems call for many small solutions
---Wendell Berry, American farmer, writer, and philosopher

Our Great Food Problem and Several Small Solutions: A Call to Sow
Our current food system is a great problem. Like nearly all Americans, we, in West Contra Costa County, subsist on products from a highly-industrialized food system. As a community, we currently do not have even a small capacity to sustain ourselves without the food from this industrialized system. Below are examples of specific problems with this food system, followed by a few ways we can work locally to develop small solutions to begin solving our great food problem.

GREAT PROBLEMS
Study after study documents the negative environmental, public health, and social effects of our current food system.

•Environmental Effects: Pesticides in our water---A US Geological Survey study of more than 1,000 streams in 51 different watersheds across the country detected agricultural pesticides more than 90% of the time in urban, rural, and mixed-use areas. Sampling of more than 5,000 wells detected pesticides more than 50% of the time in rural, urban, and mixed-use areas[1]. Based on these nationwide samples, it is reasonable to assume there are pesticides in many of our streams and wells here in West Contra Costa County. Our current food system pollutes our water.

•Public Health Effects: Obesity epidemic--- Here in West Contra Costa County, 42% of 5th graders tested in 2002 were overweight or obese. A study by the Bloomberg School of Public Health found that if the rate of obesity and overweight continues to climb at its current pace, by 2015, 75 percent of American adults will be overweight or obese.[2] A California Department of Health Services study estimated that overweight and obesity among adults cost Californians more than $8 billion dollars annually due to medical costs, lost productivity, and worker’s compensation claims[3]. Our current food system contributes significantly to one of the greatest threats to our public health---the obesity epidemic.
•Social Effects: Shaping impressionable minds A key component of our industrialized food system is a strong marketing campaign by food companies. The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) reports that in 2000 food companies spent a total of $26 billion dollars in advertising, a 65% increase in just 10 years[4]. According to the Institute of Medicine, in 2002 food companies spent between $10 and $12 billion dollars on advertising aimed specifically at children[5]. What has been the result of all this investment? American children ages 8-12 on average see more than 50 hours a year of food advertisements (or 7,600 individual ads), nearly half of it for snacks, sweets, and fast food and virtually none of it for healthy produce[6]. In other words, American 8-12 year olds now spend, on average, more than 0.25% of their lives being programmed to consume unhealthy foods. Our current food system turns agricultural products into consumer products; food marketers then train our children to become voracious consumers of unhealthy products.

As these three examples illustrate, the American food system is indeed a “great problem” in need of reform. But what are we, in West Contra Costa County, to do about this situation? Recent Congressional developments suggest exactly what NOT to do---we should not look for big solutions to our great problem.

Do NOT Expect the Federal Government to Initiate Food System Reform: The federal government has been one of the primary architects of the current food system, shaping it with billions of dollars of federal spending. Over the past 10 years, for example, the USDA has encouraged farmers to produce a surplus of commodities like corn, wheat, rice, and cotton by paying out more than $100 billion in subsidies. These payments indirectly subsidize the agricultural chemical industry and the cost of unhealthy processed foods products like Coca-Cola, Doritos, and Big Macs. In this year’s Farm Bill, Congress will outline USDA priorities and spending through 2012. At this point, it appears likely that the 2007 Farm Bill will continue to invest tens of billions of dollars into a food and agriculture system that makes our children sick, degrades our environment, and erodes our self-reliance while pushing us towards thoughtless over-consumption. We have no reason to expect “great solutions” to our food system problem here, nor anywhere else in the country.

SMALL SOLUTIONS
There are a great many small solutions for West Contra Costa County food system. The 5% Local Coalition has already started building a sustainable, healthy, and just food system by developing local food production. We need your help to turn our backyards, parks, schools, and other public open spaces into a local foodshed producing healthy fruits and vegetables.

Edible Landscaping Everywhere:
If we, as a community, value healthy, fresh, affordable, chemical-free produce for our children and all members of our community, there is something simple and radical we can do. We can grow it ourselves. We can surround ourselves with tantalizing fruits, berries, and nuts.

We already spend millions of dollars every year in West Contra Costa County building or rebuilding schools, parks, churches, community centers, libraries, and government offices. Each of these projects includes significant up-front expenditures for installing ornamental landscaping, as well as ongoing landscaping maintenance costs. For little or no additional cost, we could choose beautiful plants which also produce delicious, healthy foods---blueberries, raspberries, citrus, plum, and passionfruits could be planted instead of lindens, arbutus, and multiflora roses. A single mature fruit tree could provide hundreds of pounds of fruit a year to an office, school, or hospital. Once established, olive trees require little irrigation and are nearly indestructible, producing food for hundreds of years. Raspberry, blackberry, and blueberry bushes planted anywhere a child regularly passes by will be picked clean, providing children with valuable phytonutrients. Edible landscaping would bring healthy food choices closer to us and reconnect our communities and culture to the cycle of the seasons.

You can help embed the value of fresh produce in our community and physical environment by planting food-bearing trees, bushes, and vines at your home and at your workplace. You can also join the 5% Local Coalition on Saturday, August 11th at our second Berryland workday on the Richmond Greenway as we install more planters and fill them with raspberry bushes for youngsters to enjoy next summer. Edible landscaping is one of the many small solutions to our great food system problem.

A Farmer for Every School:
Twice in our nation’s history, during each of the World Wars, American schoolchildren have contributed significantly to the American food supply by tending food gardens at schools. This strategy is even more appropriate today. As a community, we can explore ways to establish a funding stream to support a farmer at every school. School farmers could engage students in growing food to improve our local food system. Not only would a school farmer program increase the amount of healthy, organic produce available in our community, but would most likely increase the amount of healthy produce our children actually eat. In 2000, a survey of California teens by the California Department of Health and Human Services revealed that teens who had grown food in a garden ate, on average, more than 20% more produce than those who had not[7]. The 5% Local Coalition is already developing two models by which school farmers can help children improve their own food supply:

•Student Farmers: A school farmer can mentor small groups of student farmers developing and tending their own garden beds. Working just three hours a week under the mentorship of a school farmer, student farmers could easily tend 150 square feet of garden bed space. In our climate, gardens easily yield between 1 and 2 pounds per square foot of bed space annually. This means each student farmer could realistically grow and take home 150 to 300 pounds of fresh, organic produce each year. This amount of produce represents between 46% and 93% of the total produce intake recommended by the World Health Organization. On average, California kids currently consume just 186 pounds of fruits and vegetables a year so many students could grow the equivalent of their entire intake of fruits and vegetables a year.

A pilot version of this program, the Lincoln Farm Project will start this fall with 20 Lincoln Elementary afterschool students who will build and tend approximately 50 garden beds along the Lincoln Greenway. Check future 5% Local Coalition newsletters for periodic updates on this pilot project and to look for ways you can contribute to it.

•School Produce Stand: Tending individual garden plots may not be the most effective strategy to engage students in food production in all situations. For some schools, it makes more sense to have communal garden space in which large numbers of students can work with a school farmer, teachers, and volunteers to produce healthy, nutritious food. These communal school mini-farms can improve the local food system by hosting regular produce sales after school at the school site.

In April of this year, the Verde Partnership Garden at Verde Elementary School in North Richmond began just such a program, launching the biweekly Verde Market. The Verde Market sells almost entirely produce grown onsite and is one of the only sources for fresh produce in North Richmond. In the past four months, the Verde Market has contributed hundreds of pounds of organic produce to the North Richmond food system. As the garden staff and students fine-tune their production methods and improve their soil, the Verde Market will eventually provide thousands of pounds of produce to North Richmond annually.

A CALL TO SOW
A recent study by the Associated Press revealed that of the 57 federal nutrition education programs (costing well over $1 billion dollars), only 4 successfully improved student nutrition. Exhorting schoolchildren to improve their nutrition, without addressing the underlying systemic factors for poor nutrition has proven largely ineffective. By filling our communal spaces with edible landscaping, we can take direct action to surround ourselves with healthy, delicious food. By establishing school mini-farms under the direction of school farmers, we could stop talking to our children about nutrition and instead empower our students to produce their own healthy food. As a community, we, in West Contra Costa County, do not have to wait for the federal government to improve the food system. Heeding the advice of Wendell Berry, we can work locally to find the many small solutions to our great food problem. Please join the 5% Local Coalition by registering online at http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/5percentlocal/ or by contacting Park Guthrie at (510) 691-5051. Or just go out and sow something healthy and delicious to eat.




[1] From Pesticides in the Nation’s Streams and Groundwater, 1992-2001. USGS Circular 1291, March 2006 at http://pubs.usgs.gov/circ/2005/1291/pdf/circ1291_chapter1.pdf
[2] From Obesity Rates Continue To Climb In The United States in Medical News Today, July 11, 2006 at http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/76484.php

[3] From The Economic Costs of Physical Inactivity, Overweight, and Obesity in California Adult:Health Care, Workers’ Compensation, and Lost Productivity. At http://www.dhs.ca.gov/cdic/cpns/press/downloads/CostofObesityToplineReport.pdf

[4] From Food Marketing Costs at a Glance by Howard Elltzak at
http://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/FoodReview/septdec01/FRv24i3g.pdf

[5] Advertising, Marketing, and the Media Institute of Medicine Fact Sheet, September 2004 at http://www.iom.edu/Object.File/Master/22/609/fact%20sheet%20-%20marketing%20finaBitticks.pdf

[6] Food for Thought: Television Food Advertising to Children in the United States by the Kaiser Family Foundation, March, 2007 at http://www.kff.org/entmedia/upload/7618ES.pdf

[7] http://www.dhs.ca.gov/ps/cdic/cpns/research/calteens2000.html

E-Newsletter Correction and Elaboration

ECOVILLAGE FARM LEARNING CENTER WORKDAY

SATURDAY JUNE 9th

Correction: The foundation for the greenhouses should be complete. Saturday's workday will be to work on the above ground structures of the greenhouse.

Please consider stopping by that day if you can. EcoVillage Farm is located at 12 Laural Lane, just off May Road/San Pablo Dam Rd. (right behind Sheldon Elementary School)For more info, you can e-mail Shyaam at sms2000@aol.com, or call 510-329-1214

Also, in the e-newsletter, I erroneously stated that EcoVillage had recently planted 25 fruit trees. The correct number is 60 and will plant 40 more by the end of this season.

WHY DEVELOP THE LOCAL FOODSHED?

Quotes and links related to massive and sudden disruption in the food system
(1) Tommy Thompson, former US Health and Human Service Director in 2004
"I, for the life of me, cannot understand why the terrorists have not attacked our food supply, because it is so easy to do," [Tommy Thompson, former US Health and Human Services Director] said [in his resignation speech in 2004].”
From http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/5274022.stm

(2) Excerpt from “Avian Flu: A Test of Collective Integrity”by Susan Penfield and John Larkin
“ Neither governments nor corporations will be able to distribute food on a large scale in a pandemic crisis. The government will likely direct the general population to stay in their homes to minimize contagion. However, people will inevitably disobey such orders when there are widespread shortages of food, water, and other essentials. Therefore, both local police forces and individuals should be prepared, thinking ahead about the ways in which neighborhoods could safeguard themselves and survive the most difficult weeks."
Found at http://www.strategy-business.com/press/16635507/06201
Also see related report at http://www.boozallen.com/media/file/Influenza_Pandemic_Simulation.pdf

3. Excerpt from
U.S. companies prepare for bird flu pandemic
Tue Feb 6, 2007 8:24pm ET

Jay Schwartz, vice president of information systems at North Carolina-based Alex Lee Inc., is worried about what will happen when food supplies begin to get scarce as people become ill, stay home to care for children when schools close or tend to ill relatives.
"Security is a huge issue," Schwartz, whose company owns a chain of grocery stores and an institutional food supplier, told a conference in Orlando.
Big food trucks may be targeted by bandits. "Maybe we'll have someone riding shotgun for added security," Schwartz told the Business Preparedness for Pandemic Influenza summit, sponsored by the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota.
Found at http://www.internet-grocer.net/birdflu1.htm

Take-home points:
•Many reasonable, informed people think there is a decent chance we will face serious disruptions in our food supply at some point in the future.
•Many private companies are paying lots of money to draw up contingency plans. At least one private grocery business is seriously considering shipping food under armed guard.
•Recent history has shown that states and communities cannot expect the federal government to provide timely emergency supplies. Consider that in a pandemic, most of the country may be in crisis simultaneously. West Contra Costa County probably will not make FEMA’s highest priority list for emergency food relief during a national crisis brought about by an agriterrorism incident or a flu pandemic.
•If any of these scenarios come to pass, we will be grateful for miles of fruit, nut, and olive trees lining the Richmond Greenway, large-plot community gardens at every city park, production gardens at every school, kitchen gardens in every backyard, and widely dispersed food production knowledge and activity which the 5% Local Coalition hopes to facilitate.

Gardening Along the Richmond Greenway---A Vision

Gardening Along the Richmond Greenway
Our Vision
It is early on a sunny Saturday morning in August of 2010, a perfect time for a stroll along the Richmond Greenway. You enter the Greenway at 23rd Street, where you, you greet three neighbors who have just finished tending their community garden plots. They invite you into sit with them in shade of the grape arbor which serves as the Community Garden Living Room. They need the help of an objective judge to settle their long-standing rivalry over who grows the tastiest tomatoes. You are happy to sample their prize entries, but wise enough to declare the contest too close to call. Explaining that you’ll need more samples in the future before you can issue a final ruling, you move on.
A short distance away, you notice an intent teenager and his five year-old sister in a large, neat, fenced-in garden plot. The young man hustles to harvest green beans, tree collards, zucchinis, and bundles of cilantro. He pauses only to give instructions to his sister who is filling ten paper bags with the produce. A sign explains that this is a Community Support Agriculture micro-farm managed by the young man with the help of a local non-profit. Neighboring residents can purchase subsidized produce bag subscriptions with Food Stamps, ensuring them a steady supply of affordable, fresh organic produce. Between the subscription charge and the subsidy, the young man earns $10 for each bag of produce he delivers, about $200 a month (minus the pocket money he gives his young sister). The work is hard and the hourly rate comes out to be pretty close to minimum wage, but he knows his contribution to the community is important and the experience running his own business is invaluable. You wave to them as they notice you, and you move on, not wanting to keep them from their work.
At 21st Street,, you pass a series of trees heavy with fruit…apples, pears, lemons, figs, and a dozen more varieties that you don’t recognize. You have arrived at the Linear Orchard. Signs at each tree and a central interpretive kiosk explain each variety, cultivation techniques, ripening times, and serving suggestions. The kiosk also has flyers announcing dates of various workshops offered here throughout the year: winter and summer pruning, drip irrigation, and fruit tree grafting. You are in the mood for an apple, but the early ripening Gravenstein tree has been picked clean and the Braeburns aren’t quite ripe yet. You make a mental note to return for the Braeburns in two weeks and move on.

A hummingbird passes directly in front of you, pauses in midair and then flits off, leading your eye towards the California Native Plant Garden. You watch it feast frantically, bouncing between the scarlet flowers of a California fuschia. A sign explains the importance of native plant gardening for both water conservation and preserving local biodiversity.

As you pass the Peace Garden, near the intersection with 18th Street, your mood grows somber. A variety of trees, flower beds, murals, and 3-dimensional garden art memorialize individual victims of violence. You pause, whisper a prayer, and walk on in silent reflection.

Joyful shrieks lift your spirits as you reach your final destination…Berryland. Here, dozens of children of all ages, race between thirty varieties of berry bushes. Some of the children can’t contain their delight when they find a hidden pocket of ripe raspberries and call out to their friends. Others keep their discoveries to themselves and munch away quietly savoring the taste of late summer. A young neighbor you know runs up and blurts out the berry report: “Yellow raspberries are perfect right now, but the red currants won’t be prime for another couple weeks yet!” She scampers off to feast some more. After three years, the neighborhood kids have learned to mark the seasons by the delicious treats ripening along the Greenway. You sample a few berries, but decide to leave most of them for the kids. Not only does Berryland help the children get their 5-a-day servings of fruits and vegetables, but it also helps develop the habit at a young age of eating a wide variety of produce early---an important factor in preventing many common chronic health problems.

Inspired, refreshed, and connected, you head home passing through an archway decorated with tiles made from brightly colored artwork created by Lincoln Elementary school students. As you walk, your mind wanders, reflecting on all of the benefits the Greenway has brought to the community. You resolve to make your Saturday greenway stroll a regular event.

Welcome!

The 5% Local Coalition is a group of individuals and organizations working to produce 5% of our food supply within West Contra Costa County. We believe localizing at least some of our food system will help create a more vibrant, sustainable, healthy, and just community.

Please join our listserve by sending an email to 5percentlocal-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

or by contacting Park Guthrie at park@urbantilth.org or (510) 691-5051.

View of production beds at Verde Partnership Garden at Verde Elementary School in North Richmond, May 2oo7.