On Tuesday night, Jillian and I headed down to the Ferry Building for a panel discussion on local food distribution, put on by Kitchen Table Talks and (CUESA) aka the Center for Urban Education About Sustainable Agriculture. There is no question that the current food distribution model is broken, as there are food surpluses throughout this country (where plenty of food is being grown), yet because of a lack of functional, sustainable distribution channels, many people don’t have access to the bounty. One example given….in one Los Angeles community of 120,000 people, there is not a single grocery store.
Panelists were Grayson James, Executive Director of Petaluma Bounty, Melanie Cheng, Founder of FarmsReach, and Christine Cherdboonmuang, Coordinator of Oakland’s Healthy Farms/Healthy Communities program. They discussed several facets of the problem, here are the things I found most interesting from the evening:
- Fresno county is the country’s largest food producer, yet has the highest rate of food scarcity in the country.
- Grayson James : “It’s important to find a balance between local and non-local food. If you at eating 100 percent locally and a drought hits, you become extremely vulnerable”. Meaning a lightening bolt will not strike you down if you eat non-local produce, phew.
- Melanie Cheng : “With no concrete data readily available to farmers, they are guessing what to grow and guessing how to set their prices”. She believes that using tools to help track data about what is being grown, in conjunction with giving farmer’s a marketplace to sell their goods, will allow for adequate living wages. (Local Dirt and FarmsReach are two tools aimed to tackle such problems)
- Gleaning. I’d never heard the term but apparently it’s a popular one we should know about. It’s where you help harvest someone else’s land, then are given some of the yield in return. Food Runners and Marin Organics both practice gleaning. Anyone have an apple tree I can do some gleaning with?
- Urban farming can be a sustainable and reasonable option. During World War II, 40 percent of the produce we consumed came from Victory Gardens.
- In terms of meat production, dairy production currently subsidizes meat production due to an imbalance of pricing standards. And, apparently, you CAN eat dairy cow in replace of beef cattle? Who knew. Chez Panisse is buying it for their restaurant though so it must be good.
- Currently $2.67 is allocated per child for food in schools. Only .60 – .70 cents goes toward the actual food, the rest goes to labor and distribution costs.
Learn anything you didn’t know before? I sure as heck didn’t know it was a possibility to eat a dairy cow in place of the meat we know and love.
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