Spade & Spoon: Localizing the Way Westerners Eat

Foodshed and Food Security

By Kisha Lewellyn Schlegel, 4-17-07

In recent weeks, stories of the tainted Chinese wheat gluten that killed sixteen cats and dogs and caused illness in 12,000 people have led to intense scrutiny over the safety of food imports…particularly those from China.

While no formal link has been made between the deaths and melamine, a colorless substance that is most often used in plastics and fertilizers, the FDA has blocked imports from the Chinese supplier until the investigation is complete.

Meanwhile, ports continue to block other tainted food from China.

According to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer agricultural imports from China have increased 20 fold in the last 25 years. But many of these imports have not been fit for animal or human consumption.

At the northwestern Port of Seattle (China’s largest trading partner in 2006) the following were recently kept from entering the United State’s food supply:
- Pesticide-laced blackberries
- Mislabeled frozen squid tubes
- Dog bones with traces of Salmonella

While critics continue to worry about the tainted food that gets through ports of entry and into our mouths and lives, this food danger actually travels both ways.

While researching agriculture in Montana’s Bitterroot Valley, I interviewed a grain grower whose husband, Robert, sold most of his grain on the commodity market in the 1980s. This meant selling to a large company in Lewiston, Idaho, that had the capacity to store the grain in elevators some six stories high, and the ability to then ship it around the world via barges. 

During one trip to Idaho, Robert noticed that the grain was being poured into the barge along with sand and water.  His pay for the grain had just been reduced for any small impurities such as dirt or weed seed.  Baffled by the addition of things that had just been penalized for he asked a company official what was going on.  He was told, “That’s just how it’s done.”

Not long after, a delegation of farmers on exchange from Kazakhstan visited Robert. At the time, Kazakhstan was in the process of shifting from communism to capitalism and the visiting farmers wanted to know how ranching and farming worked under such a system. 

Robert showed them the steel bin where the grain was stored before it was taken to Lewiston.  The visitors sifted the grain through their hands over and over until one of them looked at Robert, perplexed and said, “We don’t get it like this. By the time we get this grain, we can’t use it for human consumption.  We have to be careful how we feed it to the animals.”

For Robert, the image of sand and water poured into the grain played over in his mind.  He wondered if the barges that traveled down the Columbia River to the Pacific, and then to Asia and Russia, might bring the grain he had carefully tended to Kazakhstan in the form of sand cakes.  But there was no way to trace his grain to the people who were getting it or to the form they were getting it in. 

The inherent problem of distance is that anything can happen between here and there. While this adventure makes for great road trips and travelogues, it is not so good for our food. But relying on food grown within a small area (such as 150 mile radius) may not solve the problem of food-borne illnesses or disease either. Local food systems can provide clear links between the origin of food and the outcome of illness. But local food systems can also limit the resources that we are using to feed ourselves. If all the spinach is tainted or all the dog food full of melamine we will have to source food from elsewhere…

To balance the extremes of getting our food from another continent with getting it only from a 150 mile radius, some food experts have come up with the idea of a Foodshed.

Akin to a watershed, the foodshed is based on the idea that food flows in and out of an area, much like water flows in and out of a watershed. Introduced by permaculturist Arthur Getz, the idea of a foodshed was made popular by sociologist Jack Kloppenberg, Jr. In his article, Coming into the Foodshed, Kloppenberg and his co-authors write, “…foodsheds will have no fixed or determinate boundaries… [a] foodshed will be a function of the shapes of multiple and overlapping features such as plant communities, soil types, ethnicities, cultural traditions, and culinary patterns…foodsheds are socially, economically, ethically and physically embedded in particular places.”

Here in the west, some communities have taken on the idea of the Foodshed and begun to assess and develop action plans to implement such a system. One of these projects is the Community Food and Agriculture Coalition (CFAC) located in Missoula, Montana.

In 2004, a steering committee representing 15 local organizations with a variety of interests guided research that was carried out by University of Montana faculty and students (of which I was one).  The research led to a report called, Our Foodshed in Focus, detailing the state and role of agriculture in Missoula County. The findings led to the formation of a Community Food and Agriculture Coalition (CFAC).

Supported by County Commissioners and City Council, CFAC seeks to “facilitate dialogue, education, and collaboration within the community, encouraging creative problem-solving and proactive policy advocacy.” Through the dedicated involvement of community members, CFAC addresses community needs related to food and agriculture in a comprehensive and creative way. 

Food safety is a tangential element of forming a foodshed. And while these studies and initiatives cannot form a complete food safety net, they can certainly provide a new approach to monitoring our food safety. A foodshed includes the ability to track the origin of food not only to reconnect with the farmer and ecosystem, but also to find the source of any unsafe food. It allows for direct and localized monitoring and even prosecution of safety failures. It might even allow food to be safer for us, and our animals.

Look for the Spade & Spoon column every Tuesday at www.newwest.net/spadeandspoon. If you have article ideas for Spade & Spoon, email kisha@newwest.net.

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