OK, you decided to serve a nice healthy, nutritious sit down meal for your family this evening. What are you going to serve? You go to the store. Lets see, you could have some chicken. You've heard that conventional chicken might not be so good so how about "free range" chicken? Label says "access to out doors," "fed a vegetarian diet," what does all that mean exactly? How much better is it then conventional? How about some beef? Corn fed? Grass fed? Should you worry about "mad cow"? What does "natural" mean? Well, maybe a salad. Hum, organic lettuce from California. Is that safer then conventional? What about that spinach scare from California? Well, while your here, the dog needs food but, wasn't there a recall of some brands of dog food? Who ever thought that in the 21st century it would be so challenging to feed you and your family and now feeding Sparky ain't no picnic either. Endless labels, diets, facts, myths and food recalls make it increasingly difficult to fulfill one of the basic requirements for our existence. Who and what are you supposed to believe? Heck, McDonalds and Tyson are running television ads with children running and playing while they make the argument that their products should be part of your "healthy" food choice. How can you the consumer make healthy choices of what to feed your family? It does require some homework. But this should not be a surprise. After all, you have to make these decisions every day. What pre school to send the kids, what family doctor to use, what contractor for my home repairs, What kind of car to buy. Now, you should ask yourself what farmer will feed my family. Sound strange? It could be argued that this question is the most important. Making those all important life decisions might come down to where your fresh, local, trustworthy food supply is located. Knowing how you are going to feed you and your family first, might be the deciding factor on where you live, what car you will drive and how your children will be educated. Just asking the simple question of how will we feed ourselves could have a powerful effect on our communities. It could change our zoning. In Pennsylvania, we have to provide every kind of zoning for every township except, we DON'T have to zone for agriculture. Imagine if we DID have to zone for agriculture what our landscape would look like not to mention having a secure food source for every community. No more farm subsidies, no more poor access or NO access to food in inner cities or rural areas and we could have landscape and development designs that make sense. Healthcare costs could be lowered because people would have access to food that is fresher and more nutritious and more diverse. Companies may even consider what the local food system is like for their employees before they decide to move into a community in order to keep their healthcare costs down. Perhaps the best benefit of all is folks will know who grows the food. Farmers and consumers together could decide what they want to eat. Still sounds strange? Think I'm dreaming'? There are many more folks who are questioning our conventional food system. This is evident by the rapid growth of Whole Foods stores. Whole Foods is a 3.6 billion dollar company that claims to double its sales every three years. There is no other retail food sector that has this kind of growth. What was once thought of as "leftist, freaky, elitist food" is now part of the "main stream" and it was the consumers and farmers that put it there. Small family farms that use sustainable farming practices are seeing 20 to 30% annual increase in sales. The demand for local farmers markets is increasing every year to the point where there aren't enough farmers to fill them and more and more restaurants are looking for local ingredients. What we are witnessing is a grass roots reclamation of our food system. A joint venture between farmers and consumers. Consumers can no longer trust the food companies or our government to provide us with safe, healthy food and farmers no longer trust companies or government to keep them in business. Farmers and consumers do the hard work of finding eachother and eliminate the questionable "middleman" whose only goal profit for the shareholders with no regard for quality, safety or community. With all this "big picture" stuff in mind, isn't it worth taking a few extra steps and a few Internet searches to find those farmers, those stores and restaurants who buy local? It's only a small step, one forkful at a time, to building a better, healthier community. So let me ask you, what's for dinner?

 

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