Eat Local, Save the World

I’m fortunate enough to live on Fraser Common Farm Cooperative in the heart of the Fraser Valley. Founded forty years ago by an idealistic group of urban planners, do-it-yourselfers, community activists and back-to-the landers, the initial vision for the farm was to grow food for ourselves and our community. Today the farm services around 40 restaurants, 60 CSA customers, three farmers markets, provides gleaning opportunities for our community, and still grows food to feed ourselves. We grow over 40 different leafy greens, 6 varieties of garlic, beautiful market vegetables and fruits, nuts and berries from 160 trees and bushes.

People are always delighted to visit our farm. Some are excited by all the different kinds of kale we grow, some delighted to find that arugula flowers and rose petals are edible. The kids just like the animals. Guests love it when we give them some of our salad mix to take home. As bucolic as that sounds, when we started farming in the 1980s, people didn’t know what kale was or how to cook with it. We couldn’t give rhubarb away. Supermarkets weren’t interested in dealing with local producers. Many restaurants set their menus yearly and didn’t want to deal with unpredictable seasonal products.

Dr. Lenore Newman observes that, “In the last ten years or so we’ve had this real resurgence of interest in local food—particularly around the idea that it tastes better.” Newman holds a Canada Research Chair in Food Security and Environment and is associate professor in the department of geography and the environment at the University of the Fraser Valley. “We’re also seeing an audience that is much more interested in food. They’re really seeing food as something that is individual, that they can really engage with. So we’re seeing huge drop-offs in canned goods sales and a huge rise in fresh consumption, which is great,” she reflects, “I grew up in the 70s when everything came out of a can. If there’s one trend I’m glad is reversed, that’s it.”

In BC, primary agriculture, the actual growing of crops and raising animals, is a 2.9 billion dollar industry. But as Newman points out, “This very quickly creates opportunities for agri-tourism, value-added products, and an incredible restaurant culture. Basically, all the world’s great restaurant cultures are in areas where there is strong local food production.” Food processing (seafood and meat packing, bottled beverages, dried, frozen and packaged fruits and vegetables) adds another nine billion to the BC economy. Most of that money circulates in the economy multiple times. Think of the grape growers in the Okanagan, the wineries that buy the grapes, and the robust restaurant and hospitality industries that support tourism in the region. Primary agriculture makes all of this happen, and BC is particularly good at primary agriculture. Newman describes our region as, “one of the most productive regions on earth (the Nile Valley is slightly more productive). By dollars per acre it’s incredible. The Fraser Valley is only about 0.4% of Canada’s agricultural land but produces about 5% of the Canada’s total exports. In our region, agriculture is king.”

The other major part of our local food system is wild food harvesting. The most obvious is the magnificent diversity of seafood species harvested in BC, but there are also terrestrial species like mushrooms, fiddleheads, berries, and wild meat that figure heavily in our regional cuisine. Newman observes that this wild heritage is a signature of our national cuisine. “Canadian cuisine is particularly place-based because it draws on this national identity of wilderness and as a wild frontier,” she says. “We’re a natural for a local, seasonal cuisine grounded in the place we live.”

As in any industry, it is the customer that decides and ultimately votes with their dollars —purchasing according to taste but also addressing other concerns. Many people have concerns about health and food additives, ethical treatment of farm workers and farm animals, and the environment practices of agribusiness corporations. Global industrial farms produce a massive amount of calories, seemingly cheaply. But there are hidden costs that simply aren’t addressed. There are over 400 dead zones in the world’s oceans caused principally by agricultural run-off, there is an unreasonably high cancer rate among farmworkers and their families on large-scale produce farms in California. 10% of the world’s energy supply is used just to make synthetic nitrogen fertilizers. We can only ignore these costs at our peril. The global food system is particularly troubling in that it keeps the mess—the chemical pollution and environmental degradation, the negative health effects, the less-than-ethical labour practices—at a distance. If our food choices are causing all these problems, don’t we have a responsibility to change them?

Despite the urgency of the situation, it is difficult to make change. As Newman points out, “about two fifths of the world’s population depends on food produced by artificial fertilizers. We can’t just turn that off. It would be total chaos. At the same time, we know it’s not really sustainable going forward.”

The good news is that it is becoming clear that small-scale farms and sustainable practices are part of the solution to a number of these problems. The United Nations’ Farming Report, “Wake Up Before It’s Too Late,” concludes that major changes are needed in our food, agriculture and trade systems, and recommends a shift toward local, small-scale farmers and food systems. It went further to state that organic and small-scale farming is the answer for “feeding the world,” not GMOs and monocultures.

It’s important to remember that the use of planetary resources and of our environment is not without cost. The more harvesting pressure we put on any of these systems, the greater our obligation to manage, mitigate and restore them to guarantee a productive future. Newman points out that we are in a very privileged position. “One of the things to remember is how lucky we are. Canadians eat more wild food than pretty well any country on earth at this point. It’s really an amazing luxury. Most of our province is wilderness and it’s full of berries and we can just go pick them. There are people in Europe who would pay big money just to be able to go pick berries. Canada is one of the last great wilderness areas on the planet.” As such, we are increasingly stewards rather than simply consumers, and it seems that one of the best things we can do for our economy and our environment is to support our local food producers. And it really does taste great.

Michael Marrapese
August 2017