Changing the World one Hard Hat at a Time

"Hope cuisine, not haute cuisine."

Barre, Vermont, is a small, working-class town and the center of the state's granite industry—a place known for quarries and tombstone carving. Here on Main Street, in a small fifteen-foot-wide building that has been feeding residents for over seventy years, is one of the most revolutionary and progressive businesses in the nation—the Farmers Diner. In this tiny diner with its green vinyl booths and white Formica countertops, we find proof that a more hopeful harvest is already under way.

The Farmers Diner is the brainchild of owner and organic farmer Tod Murphy, who one day wondered if it would be possible to create a restaurant with good old American diner food at good old affordable prices but have most of the food come from local and sustainable sources. He took over the landmark diner in 2002 and since then has turned it into a prototype for a national franchise that may someday put Mc- Donald's and Starbucks to the test. More than a meal, the Farmers Diner represents the cutting edge of the local foods movement. So far, the Farmers Diner is spending 70 cents out of every dollar on products from farmers and small-scale producers who live and work within seventy miles of Barre. You'll find milk shakes, burgers, and omelets on the menu, but the burgers and milk will come from local grass-fed cows, the omelets from the eggs of free-range and small-flock hens. And if the season is right, you're likely to find a few surprises, such as a slice of green zebra heirloom tomato under your burger bun or a dish of local organic strawberry ice cream.

The way Tod Murphy sees it, he's building a bridge between the sustainable local foods movement and the everyday customer who may not be able to afford a meal at Alice Waters's Chez Panisse in California, but would still appreciate the riches of local, seasonal fare. (In fact, the diner's tomatoes are grown by one of the farmers who used to supply organic tomatoes for Chez Panisse.) Many of the residents who first started coming to the diner in 2002 didn't really care much about local sustainable. foods, they just wanted good, reasonably priced diner fare. While customers have come to appreciate the local connection, it is the food that keeps them coming back.

Murphy speaks fondly of his regulars, such as the elder Vermont ladies who come from the assisted living retirement housing two blocks down from the diner. "They almost wept when they tasted our sauerkraut," he said. "It's not cooked, it's just chopped cabbage with sea salt, and for a lot of these ladies over seventy this is the sauerkraut they remember from when they were little girls." They have the same reaction to the diner's beet salad made of four different varieties of local, organic beets. "For many elder customers, the resurgence in local fresh food gives them a chance to remember and retaste the food from childhood, before industry got in the way," said Murphy. "And hopefully the desire and the commitment to pay what is needed to taste it again."

Sometimes it's not until customers start reading the menu and place mats, profiling all the local farmers who brought them their breakfast, lunch, or dinners, that they are even aware that the diner offers local riches. The customer literature explains that the diner only sells animal products that have been raised without antibiotics and hormones, and all livestock has access to the outdoors and pasture as a principal part of their feed ration, thus explainin_gwhy the butter is bright yellow. "That's the way butter is when the cow is outside eating fresh grass, not chained up in a barn," said Murphy. The literature also gives the history of the diner's hamburger, how it made a seventy-mil_e route from farm to plate instead of the almost 2,000-mile journey of most industrial beef.

Tod Murphy may be an organic farmer with an idealistic vision, but he is also a savvy entrepreneur. It certainly hasn't escaped his attention that just about every food and travel magazine now includes a favorable feature about local foods. He also noted that food trends, such as gourmet coffee, seem to first appeal to consumers in the top upper 10 percent income bracket, but eventually become popular among the middle class. He sees the local foods movement eventually becoming a mainstream mandate.

His vision is to create a national franchise of Farmers Diners—with about five to ten diners working with a central pod of local suppliers. So far his sights are on a pod in the Pioneer Valley of western Massachusetts, another one in the Hudson Valley/New York City area, and eventually moving on to the San Francisco Bay area and Portland, Oregon. According to Murphy, each pod will help eighty to 200 local farms become secure in their economic viability. For now he's seeking investors while he continues to infiltrate the working class of Vermont. He likes to recount the time a crew of construction workers came into the diner for some hamburgers. They had come to Barre from another part of the state to work on a local gas station.

"One day at a quarter to twelve in walks a whole crew of construction guys looking for burgers," Murphy recalled. "They have Dallas Cowboys stickers on their hard hats, and they immediately take over two booths with their cement^- covered boots sticking out in the aisles."

When the burgers were served, one of the guys declared, "This is the best hamburger I've had since I was a kid inMontana. This has got to be Black Angus from Colorado or Montana or Wyoming."

But his friend said, "What the hell are you talking about? Can't you read the menu? It's from right around here—in Starksboro, Vermont."

The other guy got mad. "No way did this come from Vermont. I'm telling you I grew up in the West and this is Western beef." For a while it looked like a fight might break out.

This story especially delights Murphy. "These guys didn't come into the diner because we offered local food. They came in to get hamburgers and get back to the job. But suddenly they are having a discussion about local food. You now have a guy sitting there thinking holy smoke this tastes different and better than anything else because it's local and you got another guy who's now got emotionally involved in defending the position that this is local. This is what the victory for our side really looks like."

Another encouraging trend is Burgerville, a chain of thirty-nine fast food restaurants in the Pacific Northwest that was dubbed "America's Freshest Fast Food" by Gourmet magazine. Their menu is nearly identical to Mc- Donald's, but the mini-chain buys the bulk of its ingredients from farmers in Oregon and Washington. Some of its big sellers are local Tillamook dairy products. This may not be remarkable for a restaurant that features local sustainable foods—but what is remarkable is that McDonald's is catching on. Drive by the Seattle McDonald's that serves the Space Needle tourists, and you'll see a brightly lit sign, boldly advertising its exciting new menu item—local Tillamook ice cream.

An Organic Wave Worldwide Part 2

HELPING WOMEN TO TAKE CARE OF THE EARTH

In Tanzania, the Jane Goodall Institute has originated the TACARE (Ta(ke) Care) project in thirty-three villages around Gombe National Park. This has hugely improved the lives of more than 150,000 people by introducing fuel- efficient stoves for cooking, tree nurseries, methods of farming most suitable for the very steep rocky slopes bordering Lake Tanganyika, and ways to prevent or deal with soil erosion. All of our methods are, of course, based on organic, sustainable land use.

TACARE has established nine small microcredit banks (based on the Grameen Bank model) so that now small groups of women can start their own environmentally sustainable projects. Bright schoolgirls can apply for scholarships to enable them to go on to secondary school. And TACARE also offers women's reproductive health counseling, including family planning information and HIV-AIDS education. There is an emphasis on educating girls and women partly because, traditionally, their lives have been unacceptably harsh, but especially because it has been shown, all around the world, that as women's education increases, family size drops.

All the TACARE villages can now collect their supply of firewood from their own woodlots where fast growing species have been planted close by. And when they stop hacking at the tree stumps growing on the bare mountain slopes a new tree springs from the seemingly dead wood—within five years it will be twenty to thirty feet high. Now "TACARE forests" have sprung up around many of the villages. We are now taking the first steps to replicate TACARE in other parts of Africa.

IT ALL BEGINS AND ENDS WITH SOIL

More than 90 percent of the world's food comes from the soil. If you take into consideration that the food animals are sustained by plants, then everything we eat originates in the soil. Thus it is disturbing to learn from a recent U.N. report that each year more than 10 million hectares (25 mil- lion acres) of topsoil are swept away from cropland by rain and wind. Three hundred million hectares, an area that could potentially produce enough to feed the whole of Europe, have become so degraded that they cannot be used for agriculture, at least in the foreseeable future. "Farming," as Dr. Ward Chesworth of the University of Guelph said, "has produced an agricultural scar on the planet affecting one third of suitable soils."

This degradation is largely due to the clearing of woodland and forest for growing crops and gathering firewood to feed mushrooming human populations in the developing countries. In Ivory Coast, West Africa, for example, the loss of topsoil before clearing the trees was about .03 tons per hectare per year; after deforestation it was some ninety tons per hectare per year. India is losing some six billion tons of topsoil per year, again mostly due to deforestation. China, about the same size as the United States, and with three times as many people, has only one eighth as much good farmland. And this precious land, in many places, is turning into desert ever more quickly. The process has been going on for hundreds of years, but has intensified in the past fifty years, as population growth has led to the attempted cultivation of increasingly marginal land. There the thin soil soon dries up and blows away. The amount of land available for food production per capita dropped by half between 1950 and 1990, and since then, despite major efforts, the problem has only intensified. It often results in major dust storms: There were twenty-three in the 1990s. And in 2001 a dust cloud blew off China so massive that it briefly darkened the sky over North America.

And now China's farming problems are compounded as new urban and industrial developments radiate out from the cities. Farmers are losing their land, so that the percentage of the country suitable for agriculture is continually decreasing. In view of this, it is clearly desperately important to regenerate as much despoiled farmland as possible, as soon as possible. It is no longer appropriate for people, however rich or poor, to continue to destroy the planet's future. Yet it is easy to understand how this happens. In many places population growth has led to more people living in an area than the land can support, and as they struggle to scratch a livelihood they cut down more and ever more trees, often in places unsuitable for cultivation. This was the situation in the once forested hills outside Gombe National Park. By the early 1980s virtually all the trees outside the park were gone and cultivated fields stretched up toward the hilltops and to the boundaries of the park. During the wet season each heavy rain washed precious topsoil into the valleys and often directly into Lake Tanganyika. Once the trees from the higher slopes had gone, there were often flash floods. I visited one tiny lakeshore village where half the houses had been washed away and fifteen people killed during such a flash flood. The people around Gombe, like so many across Africa, were too poor to buy food from elsewhere. Some moved away, leaving family and friends to try their luck in the less crowded areas to the south. The others continued, desperately, to try to coax food from the increasingly barren land.

One of TACARE's most exciting projects helps people repair overused land, and to reclaim farms that were abandoned after deforestation, overuse, and erosion left them seemingly dead. Two demonstration farms, now lush, green, and with many trees, serve as models, and are popular with local farmers, who arrive in large numbers to learn new techniques. This fantastic ability to regenerate quickly is typical of many kinds of trees in the tropics, and there are methods of building up soil even in the most arid places, provided there is some rain.

As we have seen, the corporate-dominated, global food markets have a tendency to create plantations and industrial farms that degrade and pollute precious resources, such as the topsoil, water, and forests. Community projects such as TACARE can create a vast landscape of worldwide farmers who won't be bought out or compromised by the dangling carrot of immediate cash. Instead, the main incentive will be creating sustainable farms that best serve the farmers and their families, the land, and the consumers who are nourished from them.

LOCAL FOOD FOR LOCAL PEOPLE

Projects like these give us great hope. They restore degraded soil and safely increase crop yields all over the world. But one of the most inspiring outcomes of the growing interest in global, organic agriculture is that it emphasizes the importance of local food economies. Some skeptics might dismiss the local foods movement as a bourgeois food trend, serving those who have the resources and leisure time to eat delicious organic meals. But eating foods from local, sustainable sources is far more than a luxurious choice. It is our global mandate. Currently, 38 percent of the earth's land area is cropland or pasture and that amount is only increasing as the human population continues to grow. Some predict our supply of food will need to at least double and possibly triple over the next several decades to accommodate the planet's population growth. The use of toxic synthetic chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides, growth hormones, antibiotics in animal feed, food irradiation, and genetically modified organisms to increase food production has been justified, in part, by the rationale that without these products the world will not be able to feed itself. This is not the case—and even if it was, would a plentiful supply of contaminated food be the solution?

An OrganicWave Worldwide Part 1

"Humans merely share the earth. We can only protect the land, not own it."

-CHIEF SEATTLE

Why should we be concerned about what is happening around the world? Don't we have enough problems at home without worrying about Africa or India or China? Unfortunately, as corporate globalization stretches its grasp ever further across the face of the earth, we find that the demands of the urban elite seriously and negatively impact the poor in developing countries. As when the Brazilian rain forest is destroyed in order that cheap hamburgers can be sold on the American market. Or when large areas of traditional farmland in Africa are sold to foreign companies to grow coffee or tea, the sale of which is unlikely to benefit those who live in the area.

Looked at from another perspective, the government subsidies for farmers growing corn in America, which result in flooding the U.S. market and lowering prices to the extent that small-scale farmers are going out of business, also means that cheap grain is available for famine relief overseas. And while this may be of the utmost importance—inmany cases saving thousands of lives—there can also be a downside in that local farmers in famine-stricken areas will be unable to sell their crops. Which may be devastating.

Finally, the amount of food shipped between countries has quadrupled since the 1960s, but this hasn't been a boon for the small local farmers in either the exporting or importing countries. Instead, it's perpetuated a situation where people in wealthier nations are consuming more and ever more of the food resources of poorer nations. We now have a global corporate structure where less developed nations are struggling with overpopulation, poverty, and hunger while they deplete their land and natural resources to feed people in other, wealthier parts of the world, and to put foreign exchange into the often corrupt pockets of government officials. And the small family farmers in the importing countries cannot compete with cheaper imported produce. Moreover, while the children in poorer parts of the world are often starving, even dying of hunger, the children of the developed world face an epidemic of obesity. Clearly something must be done.

SUSTAINING HOPE

All around the world we find hopeful examples of successful sustainable farming operations in poor, rural communities. And when we say sustainable, we mean, of course, the deep organic farming we've discussed, where the soil is nurtured through composting, biological pest control, and rotation of crops and livestock without the use of chemical pesticides or fertilizers. One such project linked farmers from the impoverished Makuyu community in Kenya with the Kenya Institute of Organic Farming. Before this partnership was established, the Makuyu farmers were using agrochemicals on depleted soil, and were struggling to grow enough food to feed their families. After learning sustainable, organic methods—similar to their old, traditional way of farming—they found that vegetable crop yields not only increased by 60 percent, they actually had a surplus of food.

But the good news didn't end there. The farmers decided to start a local food co-op, so they could sell surplus food and put the profits back into the community. As a result, the Makuyu co-op was able to buy dairy goats, beehives, rabbits, and poultry for community members as well as plant 20,000 trees, including 2,000 mangoes, to help revitalize areas that had been deforested. Meanwhile, the mood of the community shifted from despair to optimism. The Makuyu organic farmers have since gone on to teach other farmers in the region how to farm sustainably.

This is not an isolated example. Jules Pretty, director of the Centre for Environment and Society at the University of Essex and author of The Living Land: Agriculture, Food and Community Regeneration in Rural Europe, researched communities all over the world where farmers are replacing synthetic farm chemicals with sustainable, organic methods. He found that those who are no longer dependent on expensive imported farm chemicals can increase their yields while lowering their production costs. And because sustainable farming is often labor-intensive, it provides more employment for local and regional communities.

Pretty writes about projects that affect some 45,000 farmers in Guatemala and Honduras who now use organic farming and have tripled their corn yields. By also diversifying their upland farms, they created more local business and wealth, which helped spur a remigration back from the cities. He also reports that a million wetland rice farmers in Bangladesh, China, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Vietnam changed their farming methods to nonchemical sustainable agriculture, and increased their yields by about 10 percent.

But there is danger here. Increased food yield must be balanced by an optimization of the population in a givenarea. However carefully farmed, no land can produce enough food, by any method whatsoever, to keep pace with human population growth as it exists today in many parts of the world. When the number of people living in a given area is too great for the carrying capacity of that area they will try to move to new places. In many cases this is already impossible—there are simply too many people. If they are wealthy and can buy food from elsewhere, then they are depleting the natural resources in other areas. If we do not impose limits on our population growth, life as we know it, on this planet, will no longer be possible. Even if we could, theoretically, feed many more times the number of people than those on the planet today, how many of us would like to live on a planet where villages, towns, and cities meet and merge in one great urban sprawl across the face of the globe?