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Why Is Real, Locally-Produced Food A Partisan Issue?

Edna Valley
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The following commentary is one in a series from KCET and Link TV writers and contributors reflecting on how the incoming president will shape, change, and redefine the future of California.

You walk into a restaurant in Los Angeles and the walls are a pearly white. It is staffed by attractive 20-something year olds with long flowy skirts, skinny jeans, and perfect tans.  Deep green house plants are the only sort of decoration and mason jars are a regular fixture on each table. The menu is inscribed on the walls by chalk in the most pristine calligraphy. The food is a mixture of healthful bowls and soups and juices. Sprouted brown rice, grown in California. Eggs from a farm just ten miles away. Sauerkraut, pickled in-house. Jam, made with bright, Southern California citrus. Beer from the micro-brewery in Long Beach. Expect to pay no less than $25 for lunch.

Conversely, walk into a household situated in the thick of the Amazon Rainforest in Ecuador. There are no windows. They eat on simple wooden tables and the jungle is their backyard — lush and teeming with green. Monkeys make their daily commute in the trees right in front of the house in the morning and toucans are a regular occurrence. On the table for lunch: Papaya, grown in the backyard. Grilled fish, captured that morning from the local river. Backyard eggs sautéed with handpicked yucca leaves. And pickled ferns from their family farm. These people don’t earn any income. They live off of the land and the meal is free.

In the most remote corner of Taiwan, saunter into a local indigenous home. They will feed you a feast of wild boar from the mountains and fresh bamboo that the girls went out and got that morning. Sweet potato is mashed in with cooked millet and shiitake mushrooms, farmed for supplementary income, are incorporated into the dish. The peaches that grow there are the best on the island.

Clarissa Wei - Smangus
Photo: Clarissa Wei

I’ve been in all three scenarios and it is the first one, set in Los Angeles, California, that bewilders me the most. It bewilders me simply because of how inaccessible good, local food is. It’s impossibly expensive for low-income families. And for middle-class folks, to eat locally on a daily basis is a real treat. For the home cook, it requires a great deal of farmer markets visits or boutique delivery services.

In the States, the terms farm-to-table, organic, locavore, and real food are often associated with liberalism and coastal elitism. It is food for the rich and privileged and there’s a backlash against it.

This is a systemic problem. Our infrastructure makes it so that mass-produced and imported foods are cheaper than local goods.  Only 2% of food produced in the US is consumed locally. In the realm of seafood, the simple forces of supply and demand mean that some of our local catch is shipped to China while 90% of our seafood is imported. Our American food system contributes to nearly 20 percent of the nation's carbon dioxide emissions. Worldwide, agricultural land use equals 12 percent of the planet’s global greenhouse gas emissions. Heavy pesticide use is causing the pollution of waterways and, for our native pollinators, colony collapse disorder.

In Southern California, from 2002-2007, 10% of agricultural land was lost to development, despite some of the best conditions for producing food in the world.

And so I find it incredibly ironic that eating healthful, pesticide-free food is considered a luxury in one of the most developed countries in the world, whereas in some of the most remote places in the world, doing just that is considered a part of day-to-day living. 

I believe urban farming is the solution to lowering the cost of wholesome food. We have thousands of empty lots scattered around the city and while there are people advocating for something as simple as planting vegetables in front of their homes, this group is a minority and often faces legal hurdles created by city code.

Why is this a partisan issue?

Instead of trying to increase accessibility, we have elected a president who wants to broaden that gap. We are inaugurating a man who has appointed an agricultural transition team set against defending “American agriculture against its critics, particularly those who have never grown or produced anything beyond a backyard tomato plant.” We have given power to a man who is appointing a climate-change denier as EPA chief.

Conversely, my friends from the remote tribe in Taiwan could not fathom the use of pesticides and chemical fertilizers because using these additives would ruin their land and strip the soil of nutrition. They don’t own much, but they own the land and it is their lifeblood. Likewise, in the Amazon rainforest, opting for a monocrop operation would do them absolutely no good because certain trees, like the guayusa plant, which provides tea, grows better in agroforestry systems.

In the States, we run into the problem of scale, time, and price point and I think it is the latter that makes this so divisive. If eating real food remains expensive, then of course this will be an issue that can only be championed by the people who are able to afford it. If small businesses cannot possibly fathom supporting local farms and seeing the benefits, then of course this becomes a partisan issue.

Scale is another difficulty. How can we grow food for millions of people without harming the land? It’s doable. An entire country did it. But when I interviewed the man behind that movement, he admitted that it would require a great deal of “spiritual connection” for such a phenomenon to take place.

Start small: I imagine a co-op where we turn empty parking lots and alleys into small community farms. I imagine that we can turn empty garages into composting stations. I imagine that we start growing and eating plants and species that are native to our ecosystem, though this would take a massive marketing push from restaurants.

This isn’t an impossible project, especially not in California. And it will create jobs, if done right.

When I asked the chief of the Taiwanese tribe for advice, he answered with this: “Money cannot grow sweet potatoes and millet. Money by itself cannot feed our people. Prioritize the land.”

PLEASE NOTE: The information, statements and opinions expressed here are solely those of the respective authors and do not reflect the views of KCETLink. KCETLink makes no representations or warranties of any kind, express or implied, about the completeness, accuracy or reliability with respect thereto for any purpose.

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