We are no longer the hunters and gatherers of native civilizations. We are not even the farmers we once were, a hundred years ago. No, we are shoppers. Most consumers in the Western world are owners of refrigerators, magical instruments that keep produce and beverages cold year round, so we don’t have to worry about our fresh produce going bad right away. Once a week we take our wallets and we drive to the nearest mega-mart, where every item of food we could ever hope for is nicely ordered in rows with easy-to-read price tags. We simply put the items of choice into a cart, wheel it to the front of the store, hand over our money, and voila, we have food.  Eating has never been so easy. But, where exactly did this food come from?  How was this head of broccoli on my plate grown? What chemicals were used to produce it? How many miles has it flown for me to eat it? How much labor went into producing it, and were those people adequately paid? Was the environment harmed during the transportation of my broccoli?  It says this broccoli is organic, but what does that mean exactly? If you haven’t already begun to ask yourself these questions when buying your groceries, maybe you should.

 

 

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(Chris Brady,  the weblicist of manhattan)

    

     IIn the past few years, the term “Organic” has come to encompass all forms of healthy living: organic food, organic laundry detergent, organic Twinkies, but do we really know what this term means?   It has become a buzzword, a word used to market a product, but its initial value has lost all meaning. According to the online Merriam-Webster dictionary organic can be defined as: “relating to, yielding, or involving the use of food produced with the use of feed or fertilizer of plant or animal origin without employment of chemically formulated fertilizers, growth stimulants, antibiotics, or pesticides.” Modern society has become addicted to the term “Healthy,” so we have begun to purchase “organic” food because we are made to believe that it is the healthier choice. Organic is just a word, though.  When we buy organic food it in the supermarket, we still have no actual connection or knowledge from where it came.  The USDA has a long list of procedures that a farm must follow in order to become certified organic. But just because a farm is certified by the USDA,  doesn’t make it geared to helping the environment, its workers, or you.  In the last, twenty years  sales of organic  products sales have gone up 30%. Clearly, t there is big money in selling organics, and large factory farms want in.

 After World War II, farmers moved away from the conventional modes of production (which actually were organic, or chemical-free) towards a more massive and modernized way of production that used chemicals and large machinery. Massive machinery and chemical-filled fertilizer helped workers to ensure a good harvest. Food was being produced in massive quantities and for less. Consumers were very pleased. Farmers no longer harvested different plants but began focusing on monoculture, or the production of one crop.  Monoculture is not common in nature because it creates a haven for diseases and insect infestation. Chuck Burr in his book “Culture Quake” quotes science writer Janine Benyus on monoculture and writes, “They are like equipping a burglar with the keys to every house in the neighborhood –they’re an all you can eat restaurant for pests.”(Burr p. 191). Therefore, when agribusiness began focusing on one-crop productions, it led to massive bug outbreaks and subsequently, the use of unhealthy chemicals, like DDT, in order to prevent them.

In 1962, Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, and began an incredible environmental movement.  The book, which monitored the decrease of bird populations as a result of local DDT use, started a public outcry. People began to realize that the use of chemicals in food production was unsafe for the environment, workers, and for the people who were purchasing the produce.  As the environmental movement became larger in the United States, people became more motivated to live more natural lifestyles. People began to grow and farm their own food without the use of massive machinery and chemicals.  Soon the first farmer’s markets emerged with people selling produce by the side of the road with signs labeled “Organic food for sale”. (Burke, p. 43)

Small Farmers began to realize that it was necessary for the environment and for themselves to return to the old methods of producing vegetables and animals in more humane ways and without added chemicals. Organic meant “local” and “sustainable”. However, in the last few years, as marketing has caught on to this “green” approach, it has manipulated the term organic, leaving it without the same meanings it once held. 

            This is why CENYC’s Green Market doesn’t advertise the term organic, but rather the terms “Local”, and “Sustainable.” Although a lot of these farmers are not certified organic, it doesn’t necessarily mean they use chemicals on their crops. It just means they refuse to pay or comply with 100% of the regulations that such certification imposes.  It is much harder to turn a farm completely organic than I had previously realized. USDA regulations ask that farms be chemical-free for three to five years, and most farmers are unable to put off the production of produce for that long a period of time because they will lose too much income.

            Unfortunately, the concept of Organic food has come to be distorted and commercialized since the 1970’s.  Companies such as General mills, Kraft, Pepsi, and Kellogg all own smaller corporations that produce “organic” products.  It has been estimated that organic foods brought in $20 billion in 2004. (Nestle, p. 37) However, in 2005, the Organic Trade association, whose members include the above companies, passed an amendment that allowed the use of non-organic ingredients and synthetic additives and processing aides to be used in certified organic products. (Katz p. 23) Sandor Katz in his politically spurred The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved, quotes Michael Sligh, director of sustainable agriculture policy at the Rural advancement Foundation International, “Many growers feel organic certification serves only agribusiness; it’s not so important for direct market, its more important for interstate and global trade.”(Katz p. 25)           

     

 Another key problem with “corporate organic food” is that even if the food is produced in accordance with USDA standards, it has nothing to do with community-based issues. In the past, the food we grew, was the food we ate. Now, we have a whole variety of choices, and which when purchasing food, we base on money or on social trends.  The idea of choice, or free-will made me think of the article by James Lennox on Liberty and the Human Environment.  In the article, he discusses, Ayn Rand and her ideas on free will.  He writes:

“She argued that the human form on conscious awareness includes, beyond the automatic integration of sensory information involved in sense perception, a unified set of abilities that each of us is individual responsible for initiation: first and foremost of these abilities involved in a uniquely human activity of concept formation.  Free-will she identified specifically with the volitional character of these abilities, that is, the fact that each human being is personally responsible for activating these modes of cognition.”[1]

 

            We, as conscious beings, are able to select, with our free will where we spend our money, and who we support with it. We can then have the choice to use our money, buying produce from greedy corporations, which do not even pay their workers decent amounts, or to spend it on local farmers, who will turn around and then spend their income on other people in our local community.  By buying locally we are Do-it-Yourselfing our local economy. We are making rationally informed choices with our own well-being kept in mind when we buy local. It is uniquely human and uniquely western that we have the choice whether we support and sustain our selves by choosing to eat local food or not.  The money that we use to buy our food is going directly back to the people who make up our towns. Have you ever even asked yourself where the money you spend at the super market is going?

Don’t worry, I will tell you. When you buy produce from the supermarket your money is going to more than just the farmer. Rebecca Sterling in her essay “ Fully Integrated Food Systems: Regaining Connections between Farmers and Consumer”writes, “America’s centralized distribution system resulted in a decrease in farm income, with a greater percentage of the food dollar going to middlemen.”(Kimbell, p. 352). For every dollar spent, approximately $0.19 or 19% goes to the farmer who produced the food. The other $0.81 goes to what is considered “marketing.”  This includes: labor, packaging, transportation, energy profits, advertising, rent, interest, repairs, and business taxes. (Katz, p. 2) So if you purchase organic red peppers shipped all the way from California at $6.95 a pound, you are only giving the farmer $1.99. Interestingly enough, that is exactly how much a pound of peppers at the Green Market cost. If you bought local produce, you’d not only be helping your community, but you’d be saving $5.00 per pound on the peppers that you purchase.

            The global transportation of food has become an extremely large hazard to our planet. Each ton of freight moved by plane uses forty-nine times more energy per kilometer as when it is moved by ship. (Kimbell, p. 123) Not to mention that the growing distance between producer and consumer leaves the public with very little knowledge of how their food is created. When a piece of fruit is transported across the country, an extremely large amount of energy is being used. It takes 435 fossil-fuel calories to fly a strawberry from California to New York. These fossil fuels contribute to the warming of our globe and to pollution. When local foods are transported, they travel much shorter distances and use dramatically less energy (cenyc.org). Rebecca Spector notes a point by Wendell Berry, “If human values are removed from production, how can they be preserved in consumption?” (Kimbell, 352)

  It is clear that the word “Organic” can no longer be correctly applied with its old values. Recently stores like Wal-Mart have begun selling “Organic” produce and buying it from countries like China which are over 3,000 miles away. (Burke, p. 56) It is even possible that larger stores put conventional food in bins marked organic.  (Katz, p. 17) From these arguments and evaluations of the food system, the question arises, is it still logical to eat Organic food? The lack of chemicals may be healthier, but is it environmentally efficient? Has eating an organic strawberry in winter become an oxymoron? It is possible that we have begun to disregard the environment for the sake of chemical-free food. We cannot even see the farms where the food is produced so how do we even know if we are in fact purchasing organics?

            Unlike the Supermarket the local green market places emphasis on community building and the local economy. The Greenmarket annually holds an annual Harvest Festival that helps bring consumers together with their local farmers through games and fun activities that teach about the local harvests. This year it was held on October 25 and I was asked to be official face painter of children. As I painted the faces of the children I noticed how everyone intermingled in the market square. The Green Market has helped to increase the relationship between consumers and producers. I think this sort of activity is good because it helps create a family atmosphere at the Green Market. Parents with children cannot always make food shopping a fun event, and a face-painting booth is the perfect thing to keep the kids entertained while mom and dad shop.  Greenmarket, unlike the local supermarket, is extremely community-oriented. A large policy of CENYC is for the use of  Green Market  to enhance city neighborhoods.  Green Market helps in crime-ridden areas to renew the quality of life, and create safe spaces within urban settings.  This is a valuable endeavor that demonstrates Green Market’s emphasis on community building over profit building.

I ask Delilah, my first face painting victim, why she likes the Green Market, to which she replies, “Hmmm, I dunno, sometimes they’ve got good strawberries.” Unfortunately, strawberry season is over, and there are none in sight. Delilah doesn’t have to worry though, because her local grocer will have imported strawberries from thousands of miles away so that they can be readily available in all seasons, just for her. I wonder if she can taste the difference between her fresh local strawberries and the ones that have spent hours in a truck accumulating a large carbon footprint.

Mark Woods in the article, “The Preservation of Wilderness”, explores the different types of value placed on wilderness land. Some people value nature as a resource for leisure and solitude, while others value nature for its abundance of natural materials like wood and coal. Woods argues that we are unable to preserve the wilderness with these contradicting values. Like Woods’ argument, we as consumers are creating conflicting values when we don’t use our consumerism for the greater good. For instance, it is not actually ethical to eat non-season strawberries in winter.  Non-Organic strawberries contain so many chemicals, it is said it is almost possible to grind them up and use them as pesticides themselves. (Burke, p. 85) The number one chemical in conventional strawberries is known as Methyl bromide and it is a category 1 acute toxin, one of the most dangerous agrochemicals classified by the U.S environment protective agency. (Kimbell, p. 125) Strawberries, even if they are organic, when shipped, are placed on pallets and covered by bags that are injected with carbon dioxide to preserve them as they travel over thousands of miles.[2] So, even if there have been no chemicals used to grow them, you are still eating fruit that has been sitting in a bag of Carbon Dioxide as it burns green house gassing fossil fuels traveling to your local grocery store. When we buy organic strawberries flown in from foreign countries, we are also making a donation to global warming.  As consumers, we need to realize that when we buy strawberries out of season, we are placing values on toxic chemicals in our food, toxic chemicals in our wildlife and toxic chemicals affecting the health of the farm worker.  Sometimes it seems modern society has come to value having its favorite fruit in winter over saving the planet. If we have the control to help our community, and our society by merely buying our local produce from farmers and not at big name supermarkets, is there any reason not to? When we purchase those strawberries, we are choosing to support the destruction of our environment, and when we buy the local sweet potato we are placing value on community building, local farm survival, and environmental friendliness. And we must choose one side, since it is not possible to fulfill both sets of values at the same time.

Through my explorations of these issues, I have come to realize that one cannot live in the northeast and eat strawberries in winter if one values community building. To buy locally is to place value on community and the farmers. To buy imported food organics is placing value on chemical-free food, but not the people who produce it. Green Market’s values are obviously on the side of the local farmers.  Distance between our food and its place of production has given consumers the disadvantage of purchasing their dinner without having any idea of the impacts of their decision. As I said before, just because it doesn’t have a sticker that claims it is organic, does not mean all the local food is produced with chemicals, it just means, the farmers did not comply with everything demanded of them by the USDA for the Organic Label.  Through CENYC the community is able to begin to choose where and on what they place value when it comes to being conscious consumers.

Through my work with the Green Market, I was given a better idea of how hard the farmers who grow locally actually work to bring our city the freshest produce they have to offer. While my participation was limited, I know that other GM team members were glad to have me around as most of the time I would bug them to talk to me about their thoughts on this growing debate.  Unfortunately, since my work with Green Market, I have had some consumer concerns about communication between farmers and customers. On a few occasions while shopping at my local green market, I have gone to ask about the pesticide used in a certain plant and the Spanish-speaking worker could not understand me. In this case, I believe Green Market may benefit from helping workers learn more English, or finding workers who can communicate with customers. I do not believe this is a case with all farms, but it has happened more than once. It will not stop me from buying local, and it still beats funding corporate organics.

            Never has the purchasing of something as simple as a pepper or a strawberry been so wrought with ethics and values.  Perhaps because it is only in the last century that consumers have become wholly dependent on food produced thousands of miles away. It is not logical to say that we should only be eating locally, but it is clear, that if we can, we should support our regional farmers as much as possible. We have the free will to choose whom we support with the produce we buy; we just need to adjust our value system in food consumption so that we concern ourselves to a much greater degree with the health of our environment and the strength of our local communities.  

 

 

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Bibliography

1. Burr, Chuck. Culturequake. Trafford Publishing,  BC, Canada: 2008.

 

2. Burke, Cindy. To Buy or Not to Buy Organic. Marlowe & Company, New York, New York: 2007.

3. Nestle, Marion. What to Eat. (New York, New York: North Point Press, 1998) 37.

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4. Katz, Sandor. The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved.  (White River Junction, VT:  Chealsea Green Publishing : 2006) 23.

5. Guerena, Martin.  Strawberries: Organic Production. http://attra.ncat.org 2007.