Transcript: Grow Local, Eat Local

JESSICA PRENTISS: It just drives me crazy that we have a food system that makes no common sense.

 

MARK SOMMER: What kind of sense does it make when semis carrying fresh strawberries grown in New York State head west to grace to San Francisco fruit salads, while semis carrying California strawberries pass them in mid-continent heading east to garner New York desserts?

 

PATTY CANTRELL: Trade is a good thing. But what if we traded more between local community instead of through the big global market?

 

MARK SOMMER: What a concept. Each what grows near your dinner plate rather than what’s grown across the continent or halfway around the world. Support your local farmer and your local economy. And in the process, lower your carbon contribution to global warming.

 

ALISA SMITH: When we walked into the supermarket when we first started out, we immediately realized, okay, nine of these ten aisles are full of boxes. They don’t say where any of the ingredients are from.

 

MARK SOMMER: Today on A World of Possibilities, “Grow Local Eat Local: Feeding Our Hunger for Connection.”

 

JESSICA PRENTISS: Really my local food activism came through this desire to put food back into the context of relationship.

 

MARK SOMMER: The budding grow local, buy local, eat local movement even translates into a traditionally one-crop region like the tobacco country of the southeastern United States, where some farmers, pressured by changing crop allotments, have switched from cigarettes to squash and tomatoes.

 

ANTHONY FLACCAVENTO: It’s been terrific to be able to begin to replace that and see that farmers can actually make substantially more raising organic vegetables and doing something they’re really proud of because it’s a very healthy thing, rather than detrimental.

 

MARK SOMMER: I’m Mark Sommer. Join us for a trip down back roads to far places, the locales where local food is eaten near where it’s grown. Welcome to A World of Possibilities.

 

In the gourmet ghettos of the San Francisco Bay area, it’s tough to attend a dinner party these days without first learning the provenance of pasture raised poultry, following the ancient rhythm of the seasons, chef Jessica Prentice holds court before dedicated diners with ladle in hand, presenting a cornucopia of gastronomic delicacies, all grown or harvested within a hundred-mile radius of where they dine.

 

The self-described culinary adventurer and passionate food activist began her journey as a teenager, struggling to gain control of her appetite and create a healthy relationship with food. Frustrated with the vast distances food travels before reaching her dinner plate, Jessica co-founded Locavores, a merging of the words ‘local’ and ‘omnivores’, that conveys a double passion for eating lots of everything grown at close range.

 

The idea has caught on like kudzu. Today, Jessica is cooking it up at the 3 Stone Hearth, a worker-owned cooperative serving up local foods she and others refer to by the somewhat unappetizing term, nutritionally dense. To recount her quest for connection with what grows in her own region, Jessica Prentiss joins us now from her home in Berkeley.

 

JESSICA PRENTISS: I went through a process of really sort of looking inside myself and exploring my creativity. And this food thing kept coming up over and over and over again. You know, I’d always been interested in it. I’d always loved to cook. And it was at that point that I decided I was going to go to cooking school. And so it sort of started with that.

 

I went to cooking school, but, you know, I still hadn’t sort of had the big epiphany. It was really in cooking school that I really started to think about relationship, food and relationship, and started to get very frustrated by the anonymity of our food system and the lack of connection that we have to the earth through our food, the lack of connection that we have to other people through our food, to the people who grow our food, to understanding how foods are made and where they come from. All of those links really seemed to be broken. And I started to feel that the reason that I’d had such a troubled relationship to food as a teenager really had to do with the fact that I wanted-- I knew that food should be this thing that really connected us, you know, spiritually to everybody else and everything else, and that it didn’t. And really, my local food activism came through this desire to put food back into the context of relationship.

 

MARK SOMMER: So at what point did you decide that local was paramount for you, and then move towards founding Locavores?

 

JESSICA PRENTISS: The more that I, you know, shopped locally and ate local foods from the farmers' market, and the more I learned about agriculture, the more it became just compelling, just the more compelling it is. It’s just one of the things where it feeds you on so many levels, that it becomes really hard to, you know, go to a grocery store and buy a bunch of scallions after seeing piles of scallions then, you know, at the farmers' market with the person standing behind them who actually picked them.

 

And I also started really being educated on all of the big picture environmental issues, the petroleum one being a major one, really understanding that our food system as it is now is only possible with a steady supply of cheap petroleum. I started to see our current food system really as a very, very fragile kind of house of cards, and this cheap petroleum card being right at the bottom. And started to really think about, once you pull that card out, how are we going to survive? How are we going to feed ourselves? And it just drives me crazy that we have a food system that makes no common sense.

 

MARK SOMMER: I’m intrigued by the subtitle of your book. The book is called Full Moon Feast: Food and the Hunger For Connection. That hunger is-- this goes back to your sense of spirituality. In fact, it seems to make the connection between food and spirituality.

 

JESSICA PRENTISS: And that’s because that’s really what the book is about, is I really believe I’m not the only person to have this hunger for connection. And food can play a very vital role in feeding that hunger, I mean, not just feeding our bodies, but feeding that spiritual hunger, that hunger for connection to other people, that hunger for connection to the earth, plants, and to animals.

 

I think part of why people are so distraught, particularly around factory farming and the factory farming of animals is, there’s a kinship that we have with these animals, and they’re being abused. And we feel that abuse. It hurts us. And I think, you know, our view of reality in The United States is sort of hyper‑materialist. But I’m trying with this book to kind of peel that back and look at life from sort of a different angle, that I think, you know, all traditional cultures have, and we’ve kind of lost a little bit of sense of here.

 

MARK SOMMER: You’ve been holding occasional full moon feasts. Tell us about what those are like.

 

JESSICA PRENTISS: Yeah, well, since the business started, they’ve been more than occasional. They’re pretty much monthly. So on the Saturday closest to the full moon, we have a big feast. And we have about a hundred people every month. And we invited a speaker. Usually it’s a farmer, rancher. Sometimes it’s an author, an importer. I’m not against imported ingredients, but, again, I want those to be the things that we can’t grow here. And the more relationship and knowledge that we have about how those things are grown and where and the context, I think the better.

 

So we do a family style dinner. And then we have this speaker. And usually the way it works is I interview them, you know, about a 20-minute live interview in front of people. And then people and(?) I(?) take questions from the audience. And it’s a lot of fun.

 

MARK SOMMER: Now, as I understand it, this is-- it’s somewhat upscale. I mean, you’re using very expensive ingredients, and you end up having to charge $30 or $40 dollars a person. Is that right?

 

JESSICA PRENTISS: Yeah, it’s a $40 dollars per person donation.

 

MARK SOMMER: I see.

 

JESSICA PRENTISS: You know, I don't think of it as upscale. The atmosphere is very relaxed. I’ve been to a lot of sort of sustainability dinners that feel very chichi. And this one doesn’t. It’s pretty down to earth. The issue really is that there are true costs involved in the food. If we serve chicken, for example, we’re serving pastured chicken. Pastured chicken is very, very expensive and challenging to produce. You can’t get it year-round. When I’m able to get it, it’s wholesale to me for $4.50 a pound. So on top of that, you know, we’ve got our rent, five worker/owners that need to earn a salary. Forty dollars a person is just sort of the minimum that it takes to pay the bills. And the only thing is that people aren’t used to paying the true cost of food.

 

MARK SOMMER: There is a challenge in that. It’s, like, local is extraordinarily important. Organic is extraordinarily important. And affordability somehow, which really means access for people, seems to be important. And it hasn’t really been-- In all of these movements, it hasn’t been fully addressed yet.

 

JESSICA PRENTISS: You know, I do think that all of these movements have really been struggling with this and trying to address it. The problem is that our food in this country is extremely cheap. And the amount that we spend as a portion of income on food is at an all-time low, and is low compared to almost every other country as well.

 

You know, I really feel like food is one of the few things that really actually matters. It’s one of the few things that really can have a marked effect on our health. We pay a huge amount in health insurance, which doesn’t insure our health. We haven’t said that food is so fundamental that it’s precious, it’s priceless. And so I really don’t think that we need to be attacking this problem from the end of, how do we make, you know, local organic sustainable foods cheaper. It really has to be a societal discussion about what our priorities are.

 

And I actually don’t spend too much time sort of worrying about, “How are we going to convince people to eat locally,” yadda-yadda-yadda. I’m much more interested in the question of, once we only have to eat locally because we don’t really have this cheap alternative, are we going to be able to do it? Are what are going to--- Are we going to have the infrastructures in place to be able to survive without this globalized system?

 

Because I really think it’s crumbling. I’m much more interested in, how can we live well in the meantime? And how can we prepare ourselves best as possible for that eventuality? So that when that card at the bottom of the house of cards gets pulled out, there’s something else in place that keeps the structure up.

 

MARK SOMMER: Chef and Locavores co-founder Jessica Prentiss. Find out more and join the eat local challenge at Locavores.com. L-O-C-A-V-O-R-E-S dot com. We’re off now to middle America, a world away from the Bay Area birthplace of the Locavores movement, in the rolling hills and pasturelands of southeastern Kansas. Here, where a local agrarian heritage struggles to maintain a vanishing niche among industrial parks and corporate agribusiness, we find Diana Endicott of Rainbow Farm in Bronson, Kansas.

 

After years of running a landscape business in Dallas, Diana and her husband moved back to their childhood home to realize their dream of working a small family farm. Now occupying 400 acres, their certified organic ranch includes beef cattle, vegetables, grain, and hay. But it all started with the tomato.

 

Years before most Americans even thought of eating local, this husband and wife team boldly marched into their local supermarket, tomatoes in hand, and persuaded a grocery chain to start carrying their Early Girls. Rainbow Farm is now part of a cooperative they co-founded called Good Natured Family Farms. To describe her family’s return to its roots and their community’s return to locally produced food, Diana joins us now from her farmstead in Bronson, Kansas.

 

What was it like to go to them the first time? There you just have a few tomatoes and you’re going to a great, big supermarket chain.

 

DIANA ENDICOTT: That’s where ignorance comes in real handy, being that-- 

 

MARK SOMMER: In other words, you didn’t really know-- 

 

DIANA ENDICOTT: No. My background was not in marketing. And so we just took one box of tomatoes and took it into the store to the produce manager and said-- Jack Otterman(?) was his name, as a matter of fact, and said, “We have these tomatoes. And we’d like to see if you’d be interested in buying them.” And he took one bite and he said, “Bring all you have.”

 

MARK SOMMER: That must have been a great moment for you.

 

DIANA ENDICOTT: Yeah, it was really-- It’s-- You know, again, you know, not knowing the corporate structure or being exposed to the corporate structure was probably a good thing.

 

MARK SOMMER: So tomatoes, you got into tomatoes in a big way. How did you happen to get into meat as well?

 

DIANA ENDICOTT: Well, during that same time, we had the Canadian tomatoes coming into Kansas City. And then we had the co-generation plants that were being built. And the market in Kansas City became flooded with greenhouse tomatoes. So therefore, the price plummeted. We scaled back on the numbers that we were producing. And at that same time, we had a cow/calf herd that we’d been building over the years. The beef market was down.

 

So I went to Ball’s Foods or Hen House Markets and sat with their meat director and asked them if they would be interested in trying a new locally grown beef. And they said yes. So we started with one head of beef. And they were just looking for a new beef program at the same time. So we started with one head and we kind of learned together, because no one had done this for years. I mean, they had not taken farm-raised beef directly to the supermarket.

 

MARK SOMMER: And from the beginning, did you have in mind all natural beef and going for the sort of premium market?

 

DIANA ENDICOTT: Oh, definitely. I mean, that’s what we did in the landscaping business in Dallas. We were really looking at the premium market.

 

MARK SOMMER: How large a segment would you say that is of the marketplace in that region around Kansas City?

 

DIANA ENDICOTT: Well, I think what’s really surprising is that as we’ve grown, part of what we are about now is, we are really looking for now, bringing the products to the average consumers. And I think even though we are priced a little bit higher than the lowest type priced meat, we still are not an exclusive type product any longer.

 

MARK SOMMER: When did that change? And how did you-- how were you able to make it so that it could be more affordable for average consumers, and still make enough to make it worthwhile for you to raise the beef?

 

DIANA ENDICOTT: When we first started, we were partnering with small locker plants. And then the one that we had built the longest term relationship with burnt to the ground. And we purchased a small processing plant locally here. And so that again is, you’re starting off. Instead of building a new facility, you’re starting off with something that is very affordable, very small. And therefore, you have your low overhead.

 

And I think over the years, we’ve seen beef prices go up. And as beef prices go up, dairy prices go up. And your margins are less and less. So therefore, your products become more affordable.

 

MARK SOMMER: At some point, you decided to launch with others Good Natured Farms beef cooperative. Is that right?

 

DIANA ENDICOTT: As we started growing the beef program, the demand for the beef increased and we started networking with other farmers that we knew were raising beef on their farm. And then they formed the All Natural Beef Co‑Op. That is what-- They have, I think, 27 members now. And they provide the beef. And then all of our products are under a brand called Good Natured Family Farms, which is an alliance. And we now have about 75 family farms in that alliance.

 

MARK SOMMER: And you ship the beef around the whole region, or even beyond?

 

DIANA ENDICOTT: No, we specifically, right now, we can just supply the Hen House Markets. They have exclusivity with that product because right now that’s all we can supply.

 

MARK SOMMER: Does Hen House find that they sell well?

 

DIANA ENDICOTT: The beef industry in the supermarkets had a very-- over the last couple years, has been, you know, kind of stagnant. And ours has been the bright spot, I guess, in the scenario, in that we’ve actually seen some tremendous growth increase.

 

MARK SOMMER: Why do you think that is? Is it increased consumer awareness of the hazards of commercially raised beef?

 

DIANA ENDICOTT: I think it is just more of people wanted to connect. We’ve had some food safety issues. And I definitely think that that’s brought a large consumer awareness of where our food is grown. However, I think in the mass market--  I mean, if you’re selling to a health food store like Whole Foods or Wild Oats or something like that, you may have a different demographic of people. But when you’re selling to the conventional markets, and competing against-- I don’t want to say competing, but you’re in the market with conventional beef products, we’ve always looked at it that we are an additional sale. We’re not a replacement sale. We don’t try to make negativity about how other farmers or other businesses have chosen to raise their beef or raise their product or sell their product.

 

What we try to do, is we just really try to focus on the positive things about what we’re doing. And I think people buy our product, number one, because of taste. Even if it was from the family farm and it had all these great attributes, if it didn’t taste good and/or better than the other products, they wouldn’t be buying it.

 

MARK SOMMER: But you also said connection. What did you mean by that?

 

DIANA ENDICOTT: In this area, in the Kansas City area, at one time, the farming areas were really a lot closer to the city. And a lot of the people that live there now have some connection to farming. They either farmed before, retired and moved there, they’ve had an uncle or an aunt that farmed. And they have maybe a romance of what they remember about farming. And I think that this provides, these locally grown foods provide that emotional connection. And I think that’s what they’re trying to connect to.

 

You know, you have less than two percent of the population farming now. You know, most of it is privatized farms. So people really-- You know, it’s very difficult to say, “Well, I’m going to go out today and I’m going to go spend the day at the farm.” We don’t have ready access to private land.

 

MARK SOMMER: This takes a lot of effort. I would imagine that upscale landscaping in Dallas, for all the stress, was an easier way to make a living than doing this. Did you ever along the way find yourself scratching your head and said, “Why did I take something that’s so much harder”?

 

DIANA ENDICOTT: Well I do that on a regular basis now.

 

MARK SOMMER: I thought you were going to say, “No, I never think that way.”

 

DIANA ENDICOTT: Not at all. I think that we really look at, what is our passion? And I guess my passion has always been to do what people say cannot be done. And so when we started, again, not knowing has been a huge advantage, I believe. And then as you go down the road, each challenge is the next one to overcome. And then whenever you get to scratching your head and you say, “Well, why am I doing this,” it always seems to be that something comes along. It’s enough to make you feel good.

 

MARK SOMMER: Diana Endicott. In a moment, the foodies of northern Michigan.

 

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MARK SOMMER: The Midwest is sometimes viewed by provincial coast dwellers as mere flyover, not much worth stopping to see. And for the most part, locals like keeping the secret that it’s actually a great place to live in. In half-wild northern Michigan, a localist food culture is sprouting from the rock-strewn soil. When some said there was no future in the region for small farmers, Patty Cantrell begged to differ.

 

Where some saw extinction, she saw opportunity. As entrepreneurial agricultural director for the Michigan Land Use Institute, she noticed savvy small business owners thriving by being innovative and staying attuned with what their customers really wanted — fresher, more natural ingredients and a relationship with the farmers and land on which their food is grown.

 

In 2002, the Institute began a project to point struggling farmers towards renewed prosperity by expanding local food choices for Michiganders and gaining environmental protection for threatened farmland in the process. It’s in an industrial agricultural system where prices and decisions are determined thousands of miles from where the food is grown, where local farmers get plowed under.

 

But the local food movement makes it easier for farmers to withstand the pressures of the global marketplace. From the studios of Interlochen Public Radio in Interlochen, Michigan, Patty Cantrell joins us to share the story of one local dairy that got it right.

 

PATTY CANTRELL: You know, one good example here is a farm (and I know this has happened elsewhere around the country) that had a small herd of cows, 40 cows. And they know them all by name. And in the big, bulk market, they were getting hardly any money for their milk, and were pouring their milk into the same vat as a bunch of farms that didn’t produce the same quality that they did.

 

So they said, “How could we market this in a different way?” They had to develop their own bottling plant, a very small bottling plant. And that’s where we need to help farms more. Because a lot of the equipment that they needed at a smaller scale wasn’t available. But they found some. And now their business is so successful, they sell glass bottled milk that is not homogenized. That’s partly what they do if the customer wants that.

 

Now their kids are coming back to live on the farm because there’s so much opportunity. And other farms are getting into the same market.

 

MARK SOMMER: Why is it important to you and to those you work with to eat local and to supply locally?

 

PATTY CANTRELL: Up here, you know, we look outside and we still have open countryside and clean water. And people are beginning to connect that farm with those things that they want around them. That also translates to, when people have businesses in town, they have kids in school, they’re involved in their community. And we have found on a variety of levels that we’ve been working on that that’s one of the biggest drivers, is people building those kind of relationships in their community. And that’s one of the big ones with local food. 

 

MARK SOMMER: As I understand it, your organization also supplies local food to hospitals and schools. Tell us first all about the hospitals.

 

PATTY CANTRELL: What they’re doing is, at least once a week in the summer, they are featuring a local farmer and that farmer’s product. So they started in May and June with asparagus here. And the cafeteria brought the farmer in. And people came down to buy that food, but also boxes of asparagus from that farmer in line. So the employee has a cart and they can go through, buy lunch and buy asparagus. And the farmer, all the farmers that participate go through pounds and pounds and flats and flats of their product because people find it convenient to buy from them right there.

 

And the purpose with this is just to kind of introduce people to a lot of foods they may not eat, to the farmer, and also get to know what it’s like to buy local food. And I know that the hospital is interested in how they might get it into the patients’ food eventually or follow some interesting models around the country where they have farmers' markets at hospitals.

 

MARK SOMMER: Oh, that’s interesting. I never heard of that.

 

PATTY CANTRELL: Yeah. The big leader in that is the Kaiser Permanente Health System. And they started with one of these at a hospital in California. And now they have about 32 or 35 in five states at different hospitals.

 

MARK SOMMER: Do you think that there are other aspects of being-- of having a farmers' market in a hospital environment that could be healing in ways we can’t even see, that have not so much to do with the nutrients in the food, but the, dare I use a California word, vibe of having the farmers' market in that environment?

 

PATTY CANTRELL: I think the whole movement is really around people having relationship with each other. And so when you put a farmers' market into a hospital scene like that, you do get more color. You get people talking to each other. You get, you know, oohs and aahs over eggplant and carrots. And people, there’s just a joyous feeling that can come out of that. And I do believe that’s healing.

 

You know, we’ve seen that in the work we’ve done with schools. Our Taste The Local Difference Program has been working with three different districts. And about 41 school sites have all started experiencing and serving some local foods. And the children are really responding to the fact that it’s something different. There’s a farmer that produces it, and it comes from their area. And, again, it’s a heart connection to the food, not just a plate of carrots in front of them.

 

MARK SOMMER: So local is important. But is it such an imperative that you really need to say, “Look — I’m not going to buy this particular product because it’s not within my 100-mile radius”?

 

PATTY CANTRELL: That’s not where I am. I’m more into building the local structures needed to make those choices available to you. Trade is a good thing. But what if we traded more between local communities as-- instead of through the big global market where it’s very faceless and there’s no accountability to a community? There’s something about a face and accountability in your place. That is what’s driving my interest in local food and local community. And trade and regions and stuff working together I think fits into that.

 

And, you know, the fair trade movement around where the profits go back to those farmers is, I think, part of the same movement, the same interest that people have. Because there’s buying Kenyan coffee, or there’s buying the coffee where you know the farmer and the community is benefiting from it. And the same forces that cause those problems there are causing problems in American small communities.

 

MARK SOMMER: So there’s a different kind of global market emerging. It’s not that it isn’t a global market. It’s that it’s global local.

 

PATTY CANTRELL: Yeah. I like to call it a world of markets.

 

MARK SOMMER: Oh, I like that.

 

PATTY CANTRELL: Instead of one-- Yeah, one-- Instead of one big global market and you’re just flotsam in it, maybe a world of markets that have identities that can relate in different ways, and where you have some bearing in your community and relationship to the others. That to me is what international economics is all about.

 

MARK SOMMER: Is it important that localism not become isolationism?

 

PATTY CANTRELL: I believe that that’s a danger, you know? Every time a good idea or a movement like this happens, you can get religious or militaristic about it. And so I would agree, it’s not about isolationism. It’s about connection.

 

MARK SOMMER: Yes, it actually seems that it’s precisely the opposite of isolationism. And it’s less about homogenization. You talked about how people don’t want homogenized milk anymore. Maybe we don’t want homogenized cultures or homogenized agriculture. Maybe what we want is much more of a mosaic.

 

PATTY CANTRELL: Yeah, that’s what’s so exciting to me. Because people who buy food, eaters, are become less tolerant of the bland stuff that’s being placed in them. People are understanding that milk with cream on top can be exquisite. And part of the local food movement or the good food movement is just that discovery, and the celebration of that. And it can be produced from a farm next door. And it’s not like we all have to know each other one-on-one, but that spirit, that connection, it travels through the economy and community in a lot of unknown ways.

 

MARK SOMMER: I’m also thinking, you said earlier that particular places become known for their very special climates, for example, like the Napa Valley for wine in California, or the Bordeaux in France.

 

PATTY CANTRELL: Mm-hmm. And I think what happens and that is happening is that then we defined that there’s so much to choose from. And that doesn’t mean that one group wins out over another on a melon. It’s more just a huge diversity of tastes and flavors that we can enjoy.

 

MARK SOMMER: That means actually that the customer/consumer can be the driving force in re-diversifying agriculture. It’s the consumer who’s saying, “No, give me more variety, not less.”

 

PATTY CANTRELL: Right, the driving force being, “I’m ready to try something else.” I think the consumer is driving that. I think also the consumer is beyond just buying food. They’re more of a citizen of their community, and all those other factors are coming into play. So I agree with that. But I guess I would broaden the definition of who we’re talking about, because the eater, the consumer is also the voter, the person who’s dealing with some water pollution somewhere. And all those things are coming back together into where the food comes from and how it’s being produced. And that person has a lot of different ways to influence the system.

 

MARK SOMMER: Patty Cantrell, entrepreneurial agricultural director for the Michigan Land Use Institute. I’m Mark Sommer and this is A World of Possibilities, distributed by the WFMT Radio Network.

 

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MARK SOMMER: I’m Mark Sommer, and this is A World of Possibilities. This program, “Grow Local Eat Local: Feeding Our Hunger for Connection” is underwritten by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. Coming up in this half hour, Anthony Flaccavento and the surprising and circuitous path from tobacco to organic tomatoes. But first, here’s a proposition. How would you like eating nothing but locally produced foods for a full year? Think of it. For those of us living in North America, no more coffee, no more pineapples, no more tomatoes out of season. And heaven forbid, no chocolate.

 

Alisa and James Mackinnon had the best of intentions when they embarked on what they called their 100-mile diet. But they didn’t account for how in short season British Columbia they’d have to forgo bread with no wheat nearby, and eat more potatoes than either imagined possible. You can read about their gastronomic journey at 100MileDiet.com.

 

Living in a Vancouver apartment, they decided to turn their backs on the so-called SUV diet, food that travels a thousand miles or more, and committed themselves to buying or gathering only food grown within a hundred miles of their home. Together with her husband, James, Alisa wrote The 100-Mile Diet: Local Eating For Global Change. To describe how they turned a one-year experiment into a way of life, Alisa joins us now from the studios of the CBC in Vancouver.

 

ALISA SMITH: When we started our local eating experiment, we sort of felt almost like outsiders. And we wondered, are we the only people that care about this? But then as we started writing about it online and hearing from people all over the world really within only a few weeks of having posted, we realized we’d struck a chord. And it truly is one of those grassroots movements that’s been simmering under the surface I think for a few years. And finally the mainstream media has latched onto it.

 

MARK SOMMER: And once you started to attract that kind of attention, did you start to have conversations, online conversations with people in other parts of the world who were thinking about doing the same thing?

 

ALISA SMITH: Oh, we did for sure, all the way from Australia and France and lots of people in the States and Canada, Britain. Yeah, they’d either say, “Way to go. I’m trying to eat locally, too,” or, “How can I do it here?” So we started to realize that we wanted to do more with it. So after we finished our year of posting on this Canadian website, we started our own website, 100MileDiet.org. And it’s specifically designed to help people find their own hundred miles. You can put in your zip code or postal code and it’ll show your hundred mile radius.

 

And we try to respond personally to all the emails we get, even though it has to have been many, many thousands by now. But I like to hear what people are doing.

 

MARK SOMMER: Initially, did you know before you went into this, what that was going to restrict you to in terms of diet?

 

ALISA SMITH: The only thing that struck me immediately was sugar. I knew that we wouldn’t be able to find sugar. But I thought, well, you know, there is honey locally. I should be able to make do with that. But it was all the things that we didn’t expect that were the shock, like rice and olive oil or even cooking oils and wheat. Some of these are because they can’t grow here due to the climate. But many more of them, it’s because of what the industrial food system, how they’ve designed the economy around us. And farmers have just given up on the idea of self-sufficiency or, you know, self-subsistence growing.

 

MARK SOMMER: Did you grow a garden during this time? Or were you in an apartment where you didn’t have access to soil?

 

ALISA SMITH:  Well, we were in an apartment, still are. It was very important to us to have access to a garden, though. We had been gardening a small community plot for about five years before we did that. But it’s only three foot by ten. But all of a sudden, we were farmers in microcosm because everything we planted in this tiny space really mattered to us.

 

But it made a big difference to our year’s food supply. We could grow enough garlic for a year. Probably half the lettuce we ate over the summer was from our garden. All the green beans that we froze for the year were from our garden. So even a very small space, when you’re doing it yourself, is very productive.

 

MARK SOMMER: I hear you ate an unbelievable number of potatoes. Why potatoes?

 

ALISA SMITH: Well, if anyone wants to start eating locally, they could focus on potatoes. They grow everywhere. They grow here. So when we couldn’t find wheat, we were, like, okay, well what carbohydrate can we eat? And it did turn out to be potatoes.

 

MARK SOMMER: Mmm, yeah, potatoes, maybe turnips or rutabagas or-- 

 

ALISA SMITH: Yes, all those things. Although in some ways, they’re underrated. I can’t say that I want to see a beet again, but all the other things-- I still enjoy eating cabbage, turnips. So that is part of local eating. It’s very important to start to eat seasonally and accept what you get with the seasons. And then all of a sudden, on the cornucopia of summer, you appreciate it so much more.

 

MARK SOMMER: In the wintertime, you must have had to go to supermarkets. And so did you have to pester the-- all kinds of employees there about, “Now, where did this come from? Was it within a hundred miles”? And did they really know?

 

ALISA SMITH: Yeah, it was sort of a combination of doing that. And we focused in on the supermarkets that were at least more responsive to stocking local growers. When we walked into the supermarket when we first started out, we immediately realized, okay, nine of these ten aisles are full of boxes. They don’t say where any of the ingredients are from. Food labeling requirements are very loose. It doesn’t help the consumer who wants to choose local food.

 

So we did find a big component for eating through the winter was preserving foods ourselves so that we’d have them on-hand, or buying our own 50 pounds of potato direct from the farmer and storing them on our balcony so that we were more self-sufficient.

 

MARK SOMMER: Did you in fact develop relationships with individual farmers?

 

ALISA SMITH: That was really key to our year of local eating, was all the small farmers that we met through the year, and developing those personal relationships. And it’s what made us want to carry on with local eating, even after the year officially ended. Because now whereas people in cities today might have an accountant, a hairdresser, and a therapist, we have a fisherman, a beekeeper, and a potato grower. And, you know, we can put a face to that food. And there’s a story to that food. And we really enjoy that.

 

MARK SOMMER: So it means that you probably ate more simply in general.

 

ALISA SMITH:  We did. And I felt full of health the whole year that we did it because of everything being cooked from scratch. We had no processed foods of any kind, no processed sugars, fats, anything like that. And those are sort of the big dangers and problems in the modern North American diet.

 

MARK SOMMER: How did people around you respond, your friends, your neighbors, others to-- Did they at first think you were quite eccentric?

 

ALISA SMITH: Probably eccentric, but people got really enthusiastic about it. I mean, it was our friend Rubin who really urged us on to make cheese, something I don't think we would have had the confidence to do otherwise. Or, you know, friends would have us over for dinner. They’d go out of their way to serve us a local meal. And, you know, we had a all-local Thanksgiving with family in the interior of British Columbia. And just people from all walks of life seemed to get really excited about the idea, because not only is it a challenge to them to find all of the ingredients locally, when you eat the meal, it tastes so much better that that’s sort of justification enough for most people.

 

MARK SOMMER: Now tell me the truth — there had to be some things you missed. What did you crave?

 

ALISA SMITH: Wheat was the big one. So we probably spent about seven months of sleuthing, phoning all these farmers before we finally found one rogue fellow who had four acres. But that was enough for 32,000 loaves of bread. He had a small milling machine on his property. And we sort of went on hands and knees and said, “Please, please will you sell us some of this flour.” And he sold us 75 pounds, which we probably even overestimated what we needed, because we’re still going through it.

 

MARK SOMMER: You didn’t miss things like chocolate?

 

ALISA SMITH: Well, I will admit chocolate is a struggle. And the question that we get a lot, pretty much the first question is, people say, “What about coffee?” And some people say, “Well, there’s always ground dandelion root.” But, you know, that doesn’t have caffeine so, it’s not really going to satisfy. So what we say to people is, you know, don’t necessarily do what we did. We knew it was extreme. We did it to make a point and learn about the industrial food system and the local food system at the same time.

 

For your average person, it’s just important to eat more locally. So if it’s coffee or chocolate-- which, you know, they’re tropical plants. They can’t be grown in North America. Make that exception and focus on everything else that you’re eating and make those changes there.

 

MARK SOMMER: Journalist Alisa Smith. In a moment, Virginia food entrepreneur Anthony Flaccavento.

ANNOUNCER: This is A World of Possibilities. We love hearing from our listeners. Contact us at comments@aworldofpossibilities.com.

 

MARK SOMMER: In 1995, a small group of farmers and community activities in northern Appalachia set out to end their region’s ancestral dependence on coal, forestry, and the area’s most famous crop, tobacco. The plant that for generations reigned supreme as the one cash crop with enough return to support family farms was losing its privileged status in Federal subsidies.

 

With the demise of the Federal tobacco program, reduced crop allotments and growing foreign competition, farmers were forced to raise less and make less. The question most were asking was, what comes after tobacco?

 

Anthony Flaccavento, director of Appalachian Sustainable Development says hard times are nothing new to this corner of Tennessee and Virginia. The area suffers from long-term economic stagnation and environmental devastation. Working through the Appalachian harvest network, Anthony helps farmers transition their conventional tobacco fields to organic farming to meet the rising regional demand for organic, locally grown produce, meat, and dairy products.

 

From his office in Abingdon, Virginia, Anthony explains that in this part of the country, tobacco’s not just a crop, but a culture.

 

ANTHONY FLACCAVENTO: Before the tobacco system was ended, you had all kinds of things that supported the production of tobacco. You had a series of local farm stores, cooperative extension in the land grants in this part of the world. UT, Virginia Tech, North Carolina State, many others were, not exclusively, but heavily geared towards tobacco production. And then the rhythms of it are not bad. It’s a labor intensive crop, worked well for small families. And people got to know each other it, taking the dried tobacco to the tobacco warehouse. So a lot about it was good.

 

But the only problem was that it killed people. That, and it’s hard on the land. Tobacco’s a big plant, extracts a lot of resources. And it required a lot of chemicals going in. Both environmentally and from a human health point of view, particularly the latter, it’s not a really great thing. You know, in our case, it’s been terrific to be able to begin to replace that and see that farmers can actually make substantially more raising organic vegetables and doing something they’re really proud of, because it’s a very healthy thing, rather than something that’s detrimental.

 

MARK SOMMER: In an article in Grist, which is an environmental online magazine, you wrote that moving from tobacco to organic fruits and vegetables is more like a leap across a precipice in the dark with a hell of a headwind smacking you around. Tell us about that transition. You were having to shift a hundred-year culture. I would imagine that tobacco farmers were not exactly into eating organic food or raising organic produce themselves when they started out.

 

ANTHONY FLACCAVENTO: That’s certainly true, fairly broadly. And I’d say that, you know, when we set out to do it, we did not set out to change the culture. We were very strategic in feeling that these folks had been through a lot, they didn’t have a lot of options. These were not well-to-do farmers for the most part. We started out with a typical kind of organic crew. It was-- You know, it was a few Amish families. It was back-to-the-landers. It was young people with ponytails. It was-- And it wasn’t many of us either, selling kind of exotic stuff to high-end restaurants. It’s sort of a fairly typical sustainable ag or organic strategy.

 

And pretty quickly, we realized that our efforts to reach the traditional typical farmer of this area were not working. So when we started talking to tobacco farmers, we were simultaneously talking to supermarkets. And we were very fortunate to have a small family-owned chain in the region, about 15 stores, that decided they wanted to give organic a try.

 

And so we started with a small and relatively forgiving customer, and then kind of graduated from that. And really what has brought tobacco farmers to us was not moral persuasion or intellectual arguments. It was markets, plain and simple. Typically we’re a doubling or a tripling of the gross and even more of the net that they could make as compared with tobacco.

 

MARK SOMMER: Take us through the evolution of a particular family that began with just the notion of, “Maybe I could make some more money this way,” but then began to reconsider many other aspects of their lives. Was-- John Mullins, was he one of those, and Martin Myles?

 

ANTHONY FLACCAVENTO: There’s several folks that I would say are much like Martin and John, in that when they initially came to us, it was out of a combination of, not quite desperation, but let's say high need that they were wondering, “What are we going to do after tobacco?”

 

But what does happen, the typical evolution is, they start small, somewhere between a half and two or three acres. If they have a little success the first year, they usually come back. And as their land becomes certifiable and meets the organic standards, Martin and others, then they gradually expand the acreage, typically also get more and more interested in a diversity of crops. They usually want to start with something that’s familiar, something they grew in their home garden or something that a neighbor grew. It might be cucumbers. Might be potatoes.

 

But as they stick with it, they start to get interested in, you know, a wider range of things. And then the other part of the evolution that would certainly have been true of John during the time we had him and Martin is really taking leadership within the farmers network. A lot of folks say to me when I go and talk about this, they say, “Yeah, but our farmers are not cooperative like your farmers. We can’t get them to work together.” I said, “Believe me, there’s nothing inherently cooperative about an Appalachian tobacco farmer.” The reason-- 

 

I mean, it’s true. The reason they’re working together is because pretty early on, they recognized that they need each other for access to this market, that at least up to now and for the foreseeable future, every farmer we add, every good competent farmer we add, increases our market share. Because our problem now is supply. The market just keeps opening up.

 

MARK SOMMER: I’m kind of amazed. I must admit my provincialism. I’m used to thinking that you can find, you know, considerable organic demand, demand for organic products next to major sophisticated urban centers like San Francisco or New York. I hadn’t thought of Appalachia as having that sort of urban environment in that particular region. Where is the demand for this coming from?

 

ANTHONY FLACCAVENTO: Are you saying that Bristol, Tennessee is not a major urban market?

 

MARK SOMMER: Well, I don’t want to go any further and reveal my ignorance any further. I was raise in Ohio, so I should know something about this.

 

ANTHONY FLACCAVENTO: No. We don’t have major urban markets. I’m teasing. No. We don’t have a single big city. The closest kind of real city we have is Knoxville, Tennessee, which is a small city, 200,000 or so. We don’t just limit it to the immediate region. And this is an interesting dilemma for us, but we sell to You Crops(?), which is a family-based grocery, a very fine grocer in Richmond, Virginia that’s 310 miles away from our central office. And even goes as far as one of the Whole Foods distribution centers in Landover, Maryland, which is getting close to 400 miles.

 

Many people would say, “That’s not a local food transaction.” From our point of view, it was a practical decision that we realized that what you’re saying would be true, that at least for the initial five to ten years, we couldn’t possibly generate enough of a critical mass within the market if we were kind of purists about what’s a local market to jumpstart this thing.

 

So we made that decision that that’s still within the global food system, is a relatively local transaction. Our long-term goal would be that the work we’re doing to develop markets right here in our own communities will be so successful that we won’t have to run the truck up Interstate 81 anymore, and we’ll be able to do it all within a hundred or a hundred and fifty miles.

 

On the other hand, the development of the interest in organic and local, after being pretty dull for the first few years we were doing this, is now rolling down the hill like a snowball. It’s all kind of added up to the point that, if you walk to the Abingdon farmers' market, you see hundreds and hundreds of consumers in this little town market. You see about 30 vendors, including several who are doing pastured beef and free range eggs, multiple organic producers, bakers using whole organic grains, people selling fair trade organic coffee.

 

What’s happened with our efforts along the way is that we’ve sort of begun to change the culture of food, I’d say at least as much as we have the farming culture here. So that now, all kinds of people, from elderly on fixed income to the very affluent foodies are just really looking for and really excited about and getting engaged with this kind of emerging sustainable local food system.

 

And so it bodes well to think that, as we keep adding farmers and the supply keeps growing, it would be fantastic if we could simultaneously keep bringing the market closer to home. And I think that’s possible.

 

MARK SOMMER: Jessica Prentiss, who was one of the founders of the Locavore movement, she said-- she wrote in the subtitle of her book, Food And The Hunger For Connection. And I wondered whether there is this hunger for connection there as much as everywhere else.

 

ANTHONY FLACCAVENTO: I think so. In rural areas generally, the disconnect has not been around as long as it’s been in suburban areas. We’re only really one generation removed in Appalachia from people having at least a major family garden that helped with their household food budget. And so I think you see people longing for the connection that you’re talking about. Boy, you should see how elated and excited they become when they now find farmers raising food in a way they can enjoy and respect. For them, it’s, like, so close and yet they were feeling like this was slipping away. You know, they’ve been bemoaning the fact that, “Ah, it’s just not the way it used to be.” And all of a sudden, there’s something that’s a little bit like what they remembered.

 

MARK SOMMER: Is this also crossing ethnic boundaries and political boundaries? I mean, are you seeing a kind of a mingling that you hadn’t seen much before?

 

ANTHONY FLACCAVENTO: Certainly in terms of political and cultural. We are actually beginning to work ASD in a more dedicated way on trying to reach out across racial and ethnic lines. The fact is that our area is 97 or so percent white. There are a couple of African-American farmers that are part of our network. And we’re also very interested in reaching out to some of the Latino migrants who have settled in the area.

 

That not withstanding, the other kind of crossover has been very profound. We have-- Personally, I’m kind of a left-leaning Democrat. And some of our biggest supporters are dyed-in-the-wool conservative Republicans. And what’s interesting is that food generally, and then when you talk about kind of a self-help, home‑grown local food initiative particularly, just draws people from both ends of the ideological spectrum. Because what they see is, we’re taking a dying farm economy and helping to rejuvenate it. We’re helping to keep people on the land. We are creating local infrastructure that enables, you know, dozens and dozens and dozens of farmers to get access to major markets with a small investment.

 

There’s not many people who would argue against the basic proposition of having a--  would it be good to be able to let people stay on the land, earn a half decent living for a change, and do that in a way that produces healthy food, and sustains and restores the ecosystem. I mean, who the heck’s going to argue with that?

 

MARK SOMMER: Anthony Flaccavento. So are you ready to go local? I could give up bananas, I guess. But I admit I’m a bit attached to my chocolate. I guess I could eat sundried tomatoes and pass on those hothouse winter varieties. But there’s no wheat grown within a hundred miles of my coastal home. So I’d have to give up most baked goods. This could be tough.

 

My wife and I once went totally local, a path our parents considered totally loco. In our 20s, we moved to the wilderness, and for the next two decades, grew nearly all our own food, raising our fruits and veggies, ducks for eggs, goats for milk and cheese, bees for honey, and more. We did cheat a bit, I guess. We bought whole wheat flour, rice, and a few other staples we couldn’t practically produce ourselves. And we need a pound of locally made chocolate a month.

 

Food localists today don’t insist that you grow your own. And even we have decided since then to do other things with our lives. Buying and eating local is one important way to shorten the distance between farm and fork, giving us fresher, healthier ingredients, new life for endangered local farmers, and reducing our collective carbon footprints.

 

Ironically, we may pay more to buy local, since given the vagaries of local commerce, the sheer volume of food shipped long distances reduced costs for everyone. But if factored into the equation, the long-term economic and environmental costs of long distance hauling far outstrip the costs of going local. And it’s so much fun to shop at the local farmers' market. Will I see you there this Saturday?

 

I’m Mark Sommer, and this has been A World of Possibilities. Thanks for listening.

 

ANNOUNCER: You’ve been listening to A World of Possibilities. For more information on today’s topic, please click on the listener action link at AWorldOfPossibilities.com. This program was produced and edited by Chuck Rogers, Tammy Rae Scott, and Kara Hochner, with administrative support from Ali Cook and Susan Semenov. Production engineer is “Tofu” Mike Schwartz. Support for this program is provided by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation.

 

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