Eat Local Quotes

Cost Of Buying Local and/or Organic (and "elitism"):
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"Organic food seems elitist only because industrial food is artificially
cheap, with the real costs being charged to the public purse, the
public health and the environment."
                            
                Alice Waters. The Nation, Sept. 11, 2006, p.13

A line from a P.D. James mystery, "The Lighthouse" refers to "the assault on excellence by renaming it elitism" !


Environment:
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"The global food system is one of the single most important causes
of greenhouse gases; in the U.S. it accounts for almost a fifth of
the nation's energy consumption."

                Food, Energy, and Society,
                D. Pimentel and M. Pimentel,
                Colorado Univ. Press 1996

"Per capita, the U.S. uses more energy for food production, processing
and distribution than Asia and Africa use for all activities combined."

                Schueller, G.  "Eat Local" Discover:22(5)


"International trade in agriculture has increased 70% since 1990",
200% since 1980, and 1800% since 1970."

                FAO Statistics Tables, 2000

"The 2001-2002 Global Social Venture study found that for every million
we spend annually on locally-produced food, we prevent over 70 tons
of carbon emissions."
                    omorganics.org/page.php?pageid=197

"Since WW1, pesticide use has risen tenfold and crop loss due to pests
has doubled."

            Lunch Lessons: Changing the Way We Feed Our                         Children, by Ann Cooper and Lisa Holmes, p.17

"(M)ost of our food is now produced by industrial agriculture, which
has proved to be immensely productive, but at the cost of destroying
the means of production. It is enormously destructive of farmland,
farm communities and farmers. It wastes soil, water, energy and life.
It is highly centralized, genetically impoverished and dependent on
cheap fossil fuels, on long-distance hauling and on consumer ignorance.
Its characteristic byproducts are erosion, pollution and finacial
despair.  This is an agriculture with a short future.
                    Wendell Berry, The Nation, Sept. 11, 2006 p.17

Health:
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"As much as 70 per cent of all antibiotics consumed in this country
are utilized in animal husbandry."Lunch Lessons", Cooper and Holmes  p. 9


"Atrazine is a powerful herbicide applied to 70 percent of America's
cornfields. Trace s of the chemical rouinely turn up in American streams
and wells and even in the rain; the FDA also finds traces of Atrazine
in our food.  So What? Well the chemical, which was recently banned
by the European Union , is a suspected carcinogen and endocrine disruptor
that has been linked to low sperm counts among farmers. A couple of
years ago, a U.C. Berkeley herpetologist named Tyrone Hayes, while
doing research on behalf of Syngenta, Atrazine's manufacturer, found
that even at concentrations as low as 0.1 part per billion, the herbicide
will chemically emasculate a male frog, causing its gonads to produce
eggs - in effect, turning males into hermaphrodites.  Atrazine is
often present in American waterways at much higher concentrations
than 0.1 part per billion. But AMerican regulators generally won't
ban a pesticide until the bodies, or cancer cases, begin to pile up
- until, that is, scientists prove the link between the suspect molecule
and illness in humans or ecological catastrophe. So Atrazineis, at
least in the American food system, deemed innocent until proven guilty
- a standard of proof extremely difficult to achieve, since it awaits
the results of chemical testing on humans that we, rightly, don't
perform."

                Michael Pollan, The New York Times, "Mass Natural"
                June 4, 2006


Social Justice and the Question of Support for Local Economy vs.Support
for Impoverished Farmers Elsewhere:
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"Food sovereignty is defined by Via Campesina as people's fundamental
right to define their own agricultural and food policies.  This includes
prioritizing agricultural production to feed people, rather than for
export, protecting farmers'right to land, water, seeds and credit;
and granting countries the power to protect local agricultures from
the common practice of food dumping. Since the 1950s, agribusiness
companies, mostly from the US, have been unloading, or dumping, surplus
commodities on international markets, thereby undercutting the value
of local food in the recipient countries. Food sovereignty advocates
support fair trade and have been in the forefront of resisting the
myths of "free trade" advanced by the US governemtn and the WTO."

        Brian Tokar, "Toward Food Sovereignty In Vermont"
        Vermont Commons blog, April 28, 2006

"A viable community, like a viable farm, protects its own production
capacities. It does not import products that it can produce for itself.
And it does not export local products until local needs have been
met.  The economic products of a viable community are understood either
as belonging to the community's subsistence or as surplus, and only
surplus is considered to be marketable abroad.  A community, if it
is to be viable, cannot think of producing solely for export, and
it cannot permit importers to use cheaper labor and goods from other
places to destroy the local capacity to produce goods that are needed
locally.  In charity, moreover, it must refuse to import goods that
are produced at the cost of human or ecological degradation elsewhere. "
                    Wendell Berry, Orion, Winter 2001,
                    "The Idea of a Local Economy", p.10

"Albert Schweitzer, who knew well the economic situation in the colonies
of Africa, wrote nearly sixty years ago: 'Whenever the timber trade
is good, permanent famine reigns in the Ogowe region because the villagers
abandon their farms to fell as many trees as possible." ... "These
people could achieve true wealth if they could develop their agriculture
and trade to meet their own needs." Instead they produced timber for
export to the world economy which made them dependent upon imported
goods that they bought with money earned from their exports. They
gave up their local means of subsistence and imposed the false standard
of foreign demand ("as many trees as possible') upon their forests.
They thus became helplessly dependent on an economy over which they
had no control."

                           Wendell Berry, Orion, Winter 2001,
                    "The Idea of a Local Economy" p. 11