It used to be the norm. According to our grandparents the backyard garden and neighbourly food exchanges were a part of our way of life. Click through to the twenty first century to a different everyday scenario. The connection with homegrown and unspoiled an alien notion, replaced by the easy convenience of drive thorough supermarket pickups and homes built without kitchens. The pace of modern life has been an endorsement of clever and speedy food solutions.
Then something began to change. What was the trigger? Did we get sick of the tasteless flavour of forced tomatoes? Did climate change concerns overwhelm convenience? Or was it just a longing for a simpler way of life, better connected to community and friends? Were these all reasons people now consider Why we need to change the food system?
People the world over are returning to favouring local foods. It is a movement that is at once cool and useful. Who doesn’t benefit from local food producers keeping control over the quality and identity of their produce, and making a fair income? New marketing channels have opened up, fed by those who enjoy not only the fresh and tasty quality local produce of farmers markets, but the community contact and social connectedness that springs from seeing the person who has grown your dinner or provided you with the elements to do so?
Those who dig further into the issues around the food system claim that the preference for local food over the industrialised food system, whose products grace the supermarket shelves, helps the local small retailer and local economy. http://sustainableagriculture.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/market-forces-report.pdf
Then there are the perceived health benefits of ‘just picked’ and chemical free produce and interactions with those with dirt under their fingernails.
Those who don’t profit are those who operate with a different strategy, focused on trade and volume sales.
Returning to the benefit question and we see the startling arguments mounted by the Australian Farm Institute (AFI), who are asking Will locavores destroy the planet? Indeed the fact that enthusiasm for local food production has been conflated with being a locavore does not deter those who would try to argue based on flawed assumptions that the future will look much the same as the past, that farm incomes will be higher when more food is produced and that the benefits need to be prioritised towards large agribusiness and retailing corporations. Spending on increased access to fresh local food production is a minnow compared with global food trade figures, yet is described as a risk that could cause a national retreat from globalised agriculture markets.
It is indeed difficult to understand how nations who have avoided major famines over the years are said to be those who have embraced the globalised, industrialised, internationally-traded food system and reduced their reliance on local food as the AFI argue. Additionally they claim that policies that foster local food systems, while at the same time restricting new technologies like genetically modified foods, the health impacts of which are unproven in the longer term, are much more likely to do more harm than good. How so? I would like to ask. How so when to date the touted ‘greatest success stories of humanity’ of industrialised agriculture have produced a generation so obese they may be the first not to outlive their parents? What if a quadruple bottom line decision making considered not only economic outcomes for food business, but also health, social and environmental considerations for the planet? Would that destroy the planet?
