Find Local Food
History of the Local Food Movement
Kentucky farmer, writer and visionary Wendell Berry is the grandfather of the local food movement. In his 1989 essay, "The Pleasures of Eating" he wrote, "...Eating is an agricultural act... and how we eat determines to a considerable extent how the world is used." Berry then went on to suggest 7 ways to eat responsibly:
- Participate in food production to the extent that you can. If you have a yard or even just a porch box or a pot in a sunny window, grow something to eat in it. Make a little compost of your kitchen scraps and use it for fertilizer. Only by growing some food for yourself can you become acquainted with the beautiful energy cycle that revolves from soil to seed to flower to fruit to food to offal to decay, and around again.
- Prepare your own food. This means reviving … the arts of kitchen and household. This should enable you to eat more cheaply, and it will give you a measure of "quality control": you will have some reliable knowledge of what has been added to the food you eat.
Learn the origins of the food you buy, and buy the food that is produced closest to your home. The idea that every locality should be, as much as possible, the source of its own food makes several kinds of sense. The locally produced food supply is the most secure, the freshest, and the easiest for local consumers to know about and to influence.- Whenever possible, deal directly with a local farmer, gardener, or orchardist. By such dealing you eliminate the whole pack of merchants, transporters, processors, packagers and advertisers who thrive at the expense of both producers and consumers.
- Learn, in self-defense, as much as you can of the economy and technology of industrial food production. What is added to food that is not food, and what do you pay for these additions?
- Learn what is involved in the best farming and gardening.
- Learn as much as you can, by direct observation and experience if possible, of the life histories of the food species (domestic plants and animals and wild ones.)
Fast forward to 2007 when Oxford University Press (which publishes the Oxford American Dictionary) chose "locavore" as the Word of the Year. A "locavore" is someone whose first choice is local food.
The word was coined two years earlier by a group of four women in San Francisco who challenged people from the Bay area (and all over the world) to eat only foods grown or harvested within a 100 mile radius of their home for the month of August.
Their website, www.locavores.com, states their reasons. "We recognize that the choices we make about what foods we choose to eat are important politically, environmentally, economically, and healthfully."
This was the spark that ignited people all across the country to create groups that vowed to eat locally raised foods and then wrote about their experiences. Check out www.tucsonivores.wordpress.com, a blog about eating locally in Southern Arizona by a couple who are attempting to limit their diet to "organic" food grown within 100 miles of Tucson.
However Gary Paul Nabhan, (one of the founders of Native Seeds/SEARCH and NAU’s Center for Sustainable Living, coming back to Tucson to the University of Arizona’s Southwest Center), is called the father of the local food movement with his 2002 book, "Coming Home to Eat."
"It is the story of finding kindred food-loving souls within a 250-mile radius of my home in Arizona, and sharing with them the pleasures of gardening and gathering, pit roasting and fermenting, feasting and frolicking," writes Nabhan in the preface.
Another former Tucsonan, writer and activist Barbara Kingsolver wrote a best selling book in 2007, "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle." It is about a year of eating locally by her family who relocated to rural Appalachia where they could raise most of their own food and buy the rest nearby. As Kingsolver describes her book on her web site, www.animalvegetablemiracle.com, as account of "how our family was changed by one year of deliberately eating food produced in the place where we lived."
Eating Arizona Grown food raised in the southern part of the state is now easier than ever. This section is designed to help you find local organically raised food through:
Farmers Markets – List of farmers markets in southern Arizona with contact information. See Calendar for events at farmers markets.
CSAs – Community Supported Agriculture – CSAs operating in Baja Arizona. Local CSAs can be listed by contacting BASA at valerie.mccaffrey@bajaaz.org
Local Food Directory – This directory enables consumers to find farmers and ranchers that raise food locally and the grocery stores and restaurants where local food is sold. See link to left. Local food producers can be listed on this directory by contacting BASA at valerie.mccaffrey@bajaaz.org and submitting a form.
10 Reasons to Eat Local Foods Handout
