“A couple of weeks ago we all paid our taxes. Whatever your politics, there are activities your tax money supports that I’m sure you find troublesome, if not deplorable. But you can’t do anything about those activities — you can’t withdraw your support — unless you’re prepared to go the jail. Food is different. You can simply stop participating in a system that abuses animals or poisons the water or squanders jet fuel flying asparagus around the world. You can vote with your fork, in other words, and you can do it three times a day.”
Vote with your fork!
Michael Pollan wrote this column in 2006, and the message is even more urgent today. The personal action he advocates — voting with your fork — is even more necessary and relevant: it may be the best action left to us as individuals through which we can can collectively and positively impact the health of our society and our planet.
We started Corvus NW to provide consultancy services specifically for the food chain in our local foodshed. Why food? Why farms? Why local?
As we (and many others) have said, food is the primary fact of human culture. The rituals of sharing food are embedded in the psyche of herbivore and carnivore. From Anthropophagy to Theophagy humans prescribe and proscribe the proper approach to the table.
At the same time, food is profoundly mundane and quotidian: it is common to all human experience, it is unequivocally necessary. While the experience of food can reach the sublime, a neutral paste comprised of nutrients necessary for life will suffice (even if it won't delight).
Simply put: you gotta eat.
In politics and small business, there's a pervasive (and correct) sense that the largest corporate entities dictate the rules of the field on which the individual and the entrepreneur play. "Too big to fail" entities accommodate a degree of regulation—and command levels of subsidy—which casually envelope the profit margins of family farmers, producers and entrepreneurs. How can a Local David engage the Global Goliaths?
They shouldn't. It's not enough to sling the small stones of consumer choice and votes in the larger political domain (though those are necessary and useful tools); we should endeavor to make the Goliaths irrelevant. The first baby-step towards severing the umbilical of "Big Ag" and top-down food policy is: eat local.
The most enduring, powerful act of self-agency and community activism in which you can engage is to eat locally, to the extent your wallet and local opportunities permit (a discussion of the disparity between wallets and opportunities to make those choices is a subject for another time).
If even 50% of a given population sourced one meal a day — or even one meal week — from entirely local offerings, there would be a dramatic impact in local economics, knowledge, and culture. We'd have a better sense of what it means to be truly independent, and perhaps a deeper understanding of how precarious that independence would be, if abruptly deprived of (to adapt a phrase from Dwight Eisenhower) the "Industrial Agriculture Complex."
If natural or economic disasters strip away the niceties of consumer choice and artificially cheap food, we're left with what we grow or find locally. The degree to which we successfully feed ourselves and our families in such circumstances is the measure not only of our (to use an increasingly popular phrase) "food independence," but of our independence and agency as humans and citizens of our local community.
Thus, millions of Davids, turning their collective back on the corporate and governmental Goliaths: that's the leverage we still possess as consumers and entrepreneurs. I'm overstating the simplicity of that act but not its urgency: it takes time to unbind the ties of dependency upon top-down systems which have been built over the years.
However: mere independence is no guarantee of survival or sustainability over the long term: interdependence is what creates a resilient community of people that are stronger than any individual, and richer than any government or municipality. When the doctor and the farmer and the mechanic all know each other and can exchange goods and services of real value, that's a step towards making the whims of Goliath markets irrelevant.
We should recognize with any discussion of local food that farms are first: while the doctor and the mechanic are necessary to supporting the quality and patterns of our life as we know it, the farmer is the one who sustains the lives of every member of the community. This is why we have decided to focus on farmers and small food producers: you gotta eat.