THINK GLOBAL, EAT LOCAL

Jim Robbins

The sustainable food movement. Are its proponents just dreaming? Or is a real revolution underway? The produce in the average American dinner is trucked about 1,500 miles to get from farmer to your plate.

Greg Higgins, chef and owner of the downtown Portland restaurant Higgins, walks to the back of his bustling kitchen and opens a door into the heart of the latest environmental movement. The walk-in refrigerator is crammed with sides of beef covered with blankets of fat, glassy-eyed fish, rows of restaurant-made sausage and ham, trays of fresh vegetables in plastic tubs and assorted comestibles, nearly all of it originating within 100 miles of here, in what Higgins calls the Portland "foodshed." Virtually every item is brought in and dropped off by the farmer who raised it.

A personal connection between a restaurant chef and the people who grow his beef or broccoli might not sound radical, but it's a major element of a burgeoning movement. It's called "sustainable food". A shorter food chain cuts down on oil consumption, puts money in the pockets of disappearing farmers, is more humane, helps protect soil and water and, best of all, usually delivers food that tastes better. Alice Waters of Chez Panisse in Berkeley is credited with starting the movement in the U.S. Now, from the ivy-covered dorms at Yale to the public schools at Berkeley to the grocery stores, white-tablecloth restaurants and fast-food joints of Portland, a grass-roots movement is sprouting that emphasizes food with a local pedigree.

That this kind of relationship is even news is an indication of how crazy the food production and distribution system has become. Brian Halweil of the Worldwatch Institute, an environmental research organization, estimates that just 1% or 2% of America's food is locally grown. He thinks the locally grown share could easily reach 40% or 50%, "and there's no reason why we couldn't grow all of our food."

The produce in the average American dinner is trucked about 1,500 miles to get to the plate, according to a 2001 study by the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University, up an estimated 22% during the past two decades. And growing food is no longer a way of life, but a commodity. Large food producers focus on supplying products as cheaply as possible, and consumers are waking up to the fact that something's wrong. Acres of topsoil get washed away by large-scale farming and pesticides wind up in human breast milk. Small farm and ranch families are disappearing, while large corporate farms reap huge federal subsidies, sometimes for growing nothing.

Some consumers are rebelling against the global marketplace and seeking out food whose history is known and friendly. While there are alternatives to mainstream food-organic, biodynamic, fair trade and other-the idea of a sustainable food system is generating the most interest.

The rock-rib Republican governor of South Dakota, Mike Rounds, supports a state program that requires animals to be tracked from birth, fed high-quality feed, treated humanely and otherwise remain well-cared for, under penalty of felony charges. Sustainable food "is growing beyond the culinary fringe," says Worldwatch's Halweil, who also is the author of Eat Here: Reclaiming Homegrown Pleasures in a Global Supermarket. "It's showing up in restaurants, supermarkets, even Wal-Mart."

A cascade of factors is driving this new attitude toward food. In 2001, the U.S. Surgeon General released a "Call to Action" that found more than 60% of Americans are overweight or obese, which is a major contributor to Type 2, or adult-onset, diabetes. Food scares also have raised awareness. More than any single factor, mad cow disease has made people rethink what they put in their bodies.

One of the first groups to respond to the decline in food quality was an organization called the Chefs Collaborative, which has some 1,000 chef members, including current Oregon chapter chair Greg Higgins. Higgins is the godfather of sustainable food in Portland, a movement that started in earnest in the mid- to late-1990s. This progressive, environmentally aware town with European sensibilities is filled with savvy gourmets and food activists. With its embarrassment of gastronomic riches-wild mushrooms and salmon, an array of berries and fruit, organic dairy farms, rustic bakeries, coffee roasters, vineyards and a crop of top chefs-Portland has become a destination for serious eaters. It's nearly impossible to find white-tablecloth restaurants here, for instance, which would dare serve farm-raised salmon. There were two farmers' markets in the 1980s; now there are more than 20. [Community Supported Agriculture, a movement in which people buy shares of produce from a farm family before it is grown, is booming.] Higgins and other chefs meet regularly with fishermen and farmers.

Sustainability would not mean much if it were relegated to the world of elite restaurants or expensive organic grocery stores. In Portland the goal of food activists is to permeate even the culinary demimonde with local and sustainable alternatives. New Seasons Market is a sustainable grocery store chain that has thrived in Portland, a fusion of Whole Foods and Safeway, with twists of its own. "Our goal is to try and change the food system," says Brian Rohter, chief executive of New Seasons Market. "People want to buy locally. We give them the opportunity." Apples from Oregon are labeled with the name and location of the farms where they were grown. So much of the produce is bought locally, one greengrocer's sole job is to make contact with Portland-area farmers and arrange to buy their wares for New Seasons markets.

In the fish department, the fish are graded with green, red and yellow signs, a system developed by Monterey Bay Aquarium called Seafood Watch, which publishes a list of seafood that's caught or farmed sustainably. Virtually all of the meat is locally and sustainably raised. New Seasons just started a program to mark with a special sticker all of its 35,000 products that originate or have value added in Oregon, Northern California and Washington.

Sustainability obviously makes some things more complicated. It's much more work to find vendors and manage 20 sources for produce rather than deal with one institutional provider. And small outfits have trouble providing quantity. Restaurants have to bend-they don't serve salmon all year, and only serve vegetables in season. That's why even proponents say this is not an effort to replace the big food companies, but only to replace what they can.

Price also is one of the drawbacks to buying food from small-scale producers. Pork in the grocery store is less than $3 a pound; the pork Higgins buys is $9. But proponents of sustainable food say that the price of goods on the grocery store shelf is deceptive. Often the global food supply is filled with hormones or pesticides, or is otherwise not as healthy. "You can pay your farmer," says Higgins of the Chefs Collaborative, "or you can pay your doctor. When people know food is local or sustainably raised, consumers overwhelmingly will buy local products."

Doc and Connie Hatfield founded Country Natural Beef with 13 other ranch families in 1986 at their High Desert Ranch near Brothers, an hour or so out of Bend, Oregon. During the last two decades a new ranching philosophy has evolved on the high desert of Oregon, moving ranchers out of the anonymous commodity business and toward a higher-quality branded product. While the co-op has grown to 70 families, it cannot keep up with the demand, and the Hatfields and other co-op families are teaching fellow ranchers the same approach, from Texas to Montana. "We turn someone who wants to buy beef down every week," Doc says. "Supply is our problem, not the market." As Connie puts it: "If you're truthful, you don't have to advertise it."

The lives of other ranchers have changed on every level. They have stopped using hormones and antibiotics and started feeding minerals and handling the animals in less stressful ways. Sensitive riparian areas were fenced off, and cattle are moved more often. They fetch a premium for their efforts. On average during the past decade, ranchers in the Country Natural Beef co-op got $120 more for each cow they sold over the price of traditional commodity beef. And their land is healthier because their operations better meet environmental standards and are verified by an independent third party, the Food Alliance. Young ranch families are coming back to work a ranch they thought they might have to leave forever. As a result, some Western towns may survive-or even thrive.

While Portland may be the capital, the push for a sustainable food system is a fledgling. The true test, of course, will be the large corporations that dominate the global food system. Five supermarket chains account for 42% of U.S. retail food sales, according to a 2001 University of Missouri study, but they're apparently paying closer attention to growing consumer awareness about food. Even Wal-Mart, one of those five corporations and widely considered hostile to local economies, has participated in "buy local" produce programs.

The impact of these gestures is not yet clear. And mainstream food producers see locally grown food as a fad. The National Cattlemen's Beef Assn. in Denver says that while it supports Country Natural Beef, its safeguards are unnecessary but appeal to "people who might not otherwise eat beef," says Dr. Gary Weber, an animal scientist who is the director of regulatory affairs for the beef association. Of the U.S. Department of Agriculture inspection and certification process, he says: "We're very confident with all of the levels of protection in place. We have the safest beef supply in the world." While antibiotics and hormones are used in cattle, Weber says they are carefully monitored. "We're dedicated to making decisions based on science."

Food activists say it's time to look at the big picture. Brian Halweil of the Worldwatch Institute argues that a highly centralized food supply imported from around the world and controlled by a handful of companies leaves us much more vulnerable to disruption in the oil supply or climate warming. "Because agriculture depends on stable and predictable weather, it will be most affected by climate change," he says. "Anything we can do to make the global food source more diverse or more decentralized will help us cope with that shock.

Perhaps the most compelling aspect of the sustainable food movement is how quickly a community can create a local food economy. It doesn't take global agreements, and it doesn't require new legislation. Every locally grown tomato or hamburger from a nearby cow, the foodies say, is a vote for a less-polluting, safer-and more delicious-way of life.

Source: Condensed from Los Angeles Times magazine, July 31, 2005. Jim Robbins is a freelance writer based in Helena, Mont. Researcher Jessica Gelt contributed to this story.