Creative Class

A reader writes:

Another issue that is starting to arise outside of your writing is the future of food production. I would like you to consider how your view of future urban areas would interact with increasing commodity prices for basic food stuffs. Northern to central Virgina is an interesting case in point. There is a vibrant rural community, filled with local food-growing ex-urban dwellers. In the late 90’s up to this crash, they were competing with Mc-mansions for land. Can these extended regional urban/suburban/rural areas continue? Or will the increases in prices on food commodities further separate urban and rural as the need to increase productive yield becomes the only value of rural farm land?

I asked Betsy Donald, a geographer at Queens University who has done extensive research on the creative food economy, about this.

The creative food economy has profound implications for sustainable economic development because place and providence become central to quality food making, marketing and lifestyle. Food, unlike any other commodity on the planet, is intimate: we eat it and therefore how we eat it has implications for a host of policy related issues around job creation, health, hunger, ecosystem protection, carbon footprint, labor practices, cultural awareness and diversity.

There is a huge movement toward preserving prime farmland on the urban fringes through efforts to resolarize the farm, but also a budding trend toward urban gardening. Recall during World War II that 40 percent of produce consumed in America came from private “Victory Gardens.” Now these urban gardens are making a comeback – with more attention paid to organic and diverse food production (think Michelle Obama’s White House Garden) and San Francisco’s recent veggie planting on the grounds of City Hall. In Seattle, a local program offering public gardening plots has 6,000 plots assigned and a waiting list of 700 people - an aspect of the food economy that integrates local, organic and ethnic food production.

Some of this creative food production draws on more traditional farming practices, but much of it also challenges it by calling for more sustainable forms of food production that reduces the need for both fertilizers and pesticides and cleverly used polycultures to produce large amounts of food from little more than soil, water and sunlight (as is going on in Argentina and Brazil). It calls for a more holistic vision of the food economy that views food as a prism through which we can explore the scope and complexity of many of our most pressing economic, social and ecological issues.

She’s on to something. The demand for higher-quality food – both from individual consumers and from restaurants – is already leading to a tighter, more organic, higher-quality food supply chain. Adding creativity, so to speak, to food production will increase its value; we’ll pay more for it, and that will make this kind of food production economically more viable. Who knows? Perhaps the economics will someday enable the remaking and reuse of declining ex-urbs as centers of more vital, higher-end, creative farming communities.

The new organic garden at the White House gotten a lot of attention, but a story in last Sunday’s NY Times business section says that the administration’s agricultural policies go much deeper. If the story is right, and if the changes are sustained, Americans may move back to eating the way our grandparents did on the farm.

The long Times piece talks about food’s impact on health and the environment, class issues around healthy eating, and the entrenched agricultural industry.

The most vocal booster so far has been the first lady, Michelle Obama, who has emphasized the need for fresh, unprocessed, locally grown food and, last week, started work on a White House vegetable garden. More surprising, perhaps, are the pronouncements out of the Department of Agriculture, an agency with long and close ties to agribusiness.

In mid-February, Tom Vilsack, the new secretary of agriculture, took a jackhammer to a patch of pavement outside his headquarters to create his own organic “people’s garden.” Two weeks later, the Obama administration named Kathleen Merrigan, an assistant professor at Tufts University and a longtime champion of sustainable agriculture and healthy food, as Mr. Vilsack’s top deputy….

(Vilsack) has said he hopes to devote more resources to child nutrition to improve the quality of school breakfasts and lunches. He also wants to make sure that only healthy choices are available in school vending machines….

Noting that the department’s recently released Census of Agriculture included more than 100,000 new small farmers, he said he wanted his agency to help them develop regional distribution networks. The small farms’ produce could be sold to institutional buyers like schools.

Vilsack was generally seen as an agribusiness supporter in Congress and wasn’t a popular choice with the organic and local foods communities, but they’ve been pleasantly surprised. If Vilsack and the local food activists succeed in getting their crops into supermarkets and school lunches, it could be a sea change in American eating habits.

The market is ahead of the government on this. Chains like Whole Foods have brought organic to the big grocery business and now Safeway and Wal-Mart have organic produce sections. Farmer’s markets that sell locally grown food are springing up around American cities, and my guess is that the many of those 100,000 small farmers are selling to them. Portland’s metro area has over 30 farmer’s markets – downtown, in low income working-class neighborhoods, and in the suburbs. Healthy school lunches were pioneered by Bay Area celebrity chef Alice Waters, who got the Berkeley schools to plant gardens for their cafeterias. With Michelle Obama out front, the healthy food movement is poised to make another giant step forward.

Agribusiness is similar to Detroit automakers in many ways. “Big Ag” has subsisted on subsidies and fought reform, while marketing products heavy in corn syrup made cheap by subsidies, and petroleum-based fertilizers are a major oil user. When I was a kid growing up in California’s agricultural Central Valley, my father worked for a poultry feed manufacturer. He brought home calendars from Shell (I think) with cartoon pictures of gigantic tomatoes grown with chemical fertilizers. Now the Valley’s aquifer is poisoned by fertilizers and pesticides and the tap water is unsafe to drink.