festivore

Here are the comments presented at the panel discussion on “Eating Locally” at Third Place Commons in Seattle on 28 July 2008.

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What is a festivore?

You have heard of omnivores (people who eat everything) and locavores (people who eat local food)… but perhaps you are really a festivore! Festivores are people who love food, love life, and see dining as a celebration of nature’s bountiful harvest. They like their food to be mostly local, seasonal, natural and generally low on the food chain (we call this “low food“). But they are not extremists; they enjoy occasional extravagances and compensate the next day when they do – life is meant to be lived.

Festivores know that dining is also a social event. Over a meal families come together, friendships are celebrated, deals are struck, and romances are kindled. And of course festivores are “green,” so they like their restaurants and food to be eco-friendly and fair.

Festivore highlights restaurants that are “mostly local,” meaning that priority is given to known and trusted local vendors of produce, meats, beverages and supplies.

But realistically, many communities, like Seattle, lack sufficient variety of foods in the winter to support a healthy diet. Rather than ask everyone to leave Seattle and move south, we allow for reasonable supplementation with non-local ingredients… but we still expect our restaurants to pay homage to seasonality, even in winter.

Not every tasty product can be grown locally. Some obvious examples for Northern cities are coffee, chocolate, and bananas. We also recognize that an artisan food (say, a lovely Basque sheep cheese) may make perfect sense on a menu as a complement to local produce and meats. Many of these exported hand-crafted products have supported families and communities for many generations, while bringing culinary pleasure to their customers.

Now, I would like to make a few comments on issues in local food.

Local food is in vogue today, particularly in an age of $4 or $5/gallon fuel, but it is not without controversy, and the argument is not just right vs. left.

Advocates for the poor sometimes view local and organic food as an elitist luxury, inaccessible to families on a limited budget. And importing goods from developing countries effectively transfers wealth from richer to poorer communities, with the attendant social benefits.

Traditional environmentalists sometimes favor industrial food over local, because the same number of people can be fed on a much smaller piece of land using intensive agriculture techniques. Thus, more animal habitat can be preserved.

Even the much-discussed transportation advantage of local food is not without its skeptics. Although industrial food may travel an average of 1500 miles to your plate, there are tremendous efficiencies of production in the industrial food system that are simply unavailable to the local farmer, so his/her net input of resources may be greater overall.

The food industry has developed sophisticated sanitation, packaging, and distribution systems that reduce spoilage, waste, and illness and allow food to be sent safely to the remotest areas. Thus, the corporate motto of Tetra Pak, the world’s largest maker of beverage cartons, is “we make food safe and available, everywhere.”

But there are serious issues in industrial food, in terms of environmental, social, and economic sustainability.

Industrial food production fouls rivers, pollutes the air, tortures the animals that feed us, depletes fossil fuels, reduces biodiversity, and is destructive to living local economies.

Then there is a Fourth Element of sustainability, the impact of products on consumers. Industrial food is a prime cause of global health issues like obesity and chronic disease, as people around the world abandon their traditional diets in favor of new “foods” marketed by industry.

What are the health impacts of the consumption of pesticides, hormones, additives, GM foods, excessive amounts of animal protein and fat, refined sugar and flour? What are the long-term effects of the abandonment of seasonality, the loss of local food species, and confined animal feeding operations? Here in Salmon Nation, what are the consequences of a broken connection to our farmers, fishers and foragers?

What are the risks associated with a single hamburger containing the meat of 100 cows or more? And what are the consequences of the loss of community self-sufficiency in food, water and power in the event of a disaster such as an earthquake?

Is there a path forward, to a food system that is safe, efficient, humane, local and affordable? Or are we doomed to an impersonal, uninteresting and unhealthy global food system just because it’s cheaper?

Here are a few thoughts to consider:

1. In our perspective, industrial food is cheap partly because we have subsidized it. If we, as a society, provided the same billions of dollars of research, farming subsidies, low-cost water rights, and political influence to local farming that we have given to industrial food systems, local farming could become much more efficient and prices would come down. It is a matter of priorities.
2. Banding together as small businesses, we could create our own local economies of scale, with collective processing facilities, distribution systems, and supply chain software to connect farmers and buyers. Some of this is beginning to happen.
3. Larger corporations can begin to source more locally & regionally, strengthening local economies while maintaining efficiencies of scale. It’s not impossible: even Wal-Mart published a “Locally Grown” page on its web site earlier this month as part of a small, but growing company initiative to deal with this issue.
4. As a society, let’s get more educated on the subject of permaculture: learning how to solve human problems by designing innovative approaches to harness nature’s power and complexity. In a future of limited natural resources, local permaculture-based agricultural systems could achieve efficiencies unattainable by industrial means.
5. We can develop political solutions like the Seattle Local Food Action Initiative, in which the city promotes nearby farms, community gardens, farmers markets, produce in food banks, etc. through changes in public policy.
6. Finally, as consumers we can do business directly with our local farmers, giving them the bulk of the profits, by shopping at CSAs, farmers markets, and progressive grocers, and by supporting restaurants and cafeterias who source locally. And of course, you can find these restaurants on festivore.com.