Walking the "Local, Seasonal, Organic" Food Walk

. . “Be” in the Foodshed . . . .



Walking the "Local, Seasonal, Organic" Food Walk
The Valley of Heart 's Delight tag line - reconnecting to local, seasonal, organic food - rolls off the tongue nicely - but what does this small phrase mean to me when I try to live that way?

What would you do?
What would you do if ...

You want to buy some local, organic food at the Farmers' Market but the stand doesn't say "organically certified".
You want to buy local food at the Farmers' Market, but you don't know where Cayucos, Reedley, Dinuba, or the Capay Valley are.
You want to support a local fruit farmer at the Farmers' Market who is selling apples but you realize (or maybe you don't) that apples are out of season.
These situations highlight some really difficult underlying questions such as

What does it mean for a farmer to be "organic" vs. "certified organic"?
How local is local?
How seasonal is seasonal?
Food as a Koan
For me, figuring out the answers to these questions is like pondering a Zen Buddhist koan (i.e. a story or question generally containing aspects that are inaccessible to rational understanding, yet may be accessible to intuition). I'm still on the path to figuring out my own answers - which will likely be different than yours. My answers slip and slide around the more I learn about our food system.

What Does Organic Mean?
If a Farmers' Market stand doesn't say "organically certified", I take a deep breath, walk in, and ask the farmer what his/her agricultural practices are. Here starts my relationship with the farmer. I want to know what the farmer uses for fertilizers and whether he/she uses pesticides. I rarely ask about how the farm workers are treated - but I'd like to ask that -- mark that under my growth path. The farmer answers my questions by telling me what he/she does and oftentimes why the farm is not certified organic. I then make my own decision about whether or not to buy his/her produce. Sometimes I go home and look up the farm on the web to see if I can glean additional information.

In the early days of organic farming (long before certification came along), the organic stakeholders held discussions about saving family farms, taking care of the soil and the land, diversity of crops, and the relationship of the farmer with his/her customers.

Before certification, any farmer could say that his/her food was "organic" - but for the consumer, what did that really mean? Eventually, California (through California Certified Organic Farmers - CCOF) and Oregon (through Oregon Tilth) created an organic certification process. Their processes eventually became the underlying structure for the 2002 National Organic Program (NOP) organic standards. At that point, the word "organic" became co-opted by the NOP and now cannot be used in marketing unless certain requirements are meant.

Today, when a Farmers' Market stand has an "organically certified" sign, it's easier for me to walk into their booth because I don't need to ask difficult questions. When I walk into a market, it's easy for me to buy something labeled "organic" -- and at that point in time, I don't have the possibility of a direct relationship with the farmer to ask him/her what his/her practices are. But, the certification process has it's own issues. Everyone who is "certified organic" is not environmentally sustainable and socially just, and everyone who grows "organic" food is not certified. The farmers who practice organic methods but who do not certify do so for a few broad reasons:

Certification is too expensive/onerous,
Certification is not needed - the farmer has direct relationship with customers through onsite markets/farmers' markets/restaurants/CSA, etc., and/or
Certification is not strong enough - the farmers are doing great things outside the boundaries of the certification process and feel that the floor of the NOP standards is too low.
For me, if I have a relationship with a farmer, understand his practices and can visit his farm to see what he is doing (should I choose to do so), it's less important for me that he/she is certified. However, when I walk into a market (where I don't have a direct relationship with the farmer), the first thing I rely on are the certification labels. So, I play both sides of the fence depending upon circumstances.

What Does Local Mean?

Although I like to think of the Farmers' Markets as selling "local" food, the farmers oftentimes come from pretty far away. What does local really mean? Can I bike there? Is it in my watershed? Is it within a certain mileage? Is it in my bio-region? Is it within a certain distance time-wise? Is it closer than Italy (olive oil) or the tropics (for bananas)? What is my foodshed?

Buying food for a 100-mile diet creates an "easy" definition of "local". When Valley of Heart 's Delight held a 100-Mile Thanksgiving Feast, I knew exactly how "local" was defined. This clear definition was great at the start, but it soon raised some other fundamental and difficult questions. What were the underlying reasons for choosing a 100-mile boundary? It felt like an arbitrary number. As I started researching foods available in my local foodshed, I no longer appreciated the arbitrary and "easy" nature of that boundary. Then, I thought, OK - so if it's arbitrary, what's my definition of local? What reasons underlie my decisions when I say something is "local".

Although this whole thing sounds like a mental exercise, it's not. My decisions are rooted in the realities of particular foods that I wish to buy and the values I want to support. Your mileage may vary. Do our actions reflect our values? Or do our values reflect our actions?

On my way to find a locally produced olive oil, I ran into two issues

What does local mean regarding processed foods, and
What does local mean when the alternative is really far away, like Italy ?
A friend of mine found one producer, Sciabica's, that grows and produces olive oil within 100 miles of Palo Alto and sells it at our locally owned grocery store, Country Sun. Then, I found Big Paw who grows and produces olive oil and vinegar in Napa Valley and sells it at the California Avenue Farmers' Market. Others told me about Olivas de Oro who grow their olives in Creston but produce the oil in Los Gatos . And, the list goes on with growers in Shasta County and beyond.

My particular conclusion is that I'm willing to support all organic farmers who are growing organic olives in California and then producing the olive oil here as well. California is a heck of a lot closer than Italy . I decided that I wanted to support all of the California olive oil farmers, not just those within 100 miles. If more people consciously bought olive oil from local growers and producers, we could have a healthy local foodshed that included olive oil. How cool is that!

Another interesting example is bananas. I love bananas. I stopped eating bananas by accident when I made a conscious effort to focus on eating local, seasonal, organic foods - with exceptions -- we all have to start somewhere! I shopped for produce at the Farmers' Markets where bananas were never "local" or "seasonal". Instead, I bought oranges, apples, pears, and all the summer fruits. Somehow, I stopped walking through the produce section of a market (except to pick up non-local ginger), so the bananas never made it into the cart. It wasn't until much later that I realized that I had stopped eating bananas. Interesting. Then, one day at the Farmers' Market, I found a farmer selling tropical fruit - bananas, rambutans, logans , and mangos! Holy Cow Batman! Where was this fruit grown? The farmer was from a warm part of southern California . Yowza! I needed to rethink (again) what local meant to me. Certainly southern California is a lot closer than Central America for those bananas! And, mangos, wow - also a lot closer than the tropics. What to do? What to do? Well, I bought some rambutans and logans and decided to think a while on the bananas and mangos.

What Does Seasonal Mean?

Last up is seasonal. One of the ways organic farmers try to be economically viable and socially just is by creating "value added" products from their basic produce. In doing so, farmers create an additional income stream and add more jobs and/or retain workers for more months during the year.

Full Belly Farm has been selling "processed" foods in addition to fresh produce for a number of years, but each year, they add more & more processed foods to help them round out their income stream and keep their workers busy. Processed foods such as flour, nuts, almond butter, dried tomatoes, poppy seeds, and dried beans to name a few allow these farmers to sell their "produce" over a much longer period of time than if it were sold fresh. They can also increase the price over the "fresh" value because they have added value to the "fresh" item. What does "seasonal" mean when I buy local, organic flour? Hmmmm....

What about pears and apples? Some apples start coming in during August and others are just finishing in November. Pears enjoy roughly the same season. What happens after that? Have you noticed that you can still buy local apples at the Farmers' Market in February? To extend both their season and their income, farmers store their apples and pears in a "chiller" at just above freezing to slow down the fruits' ripening. Pears don't seem to last as long as apples in the chiller -- or so I surmise because I still see apples at the market but I don't see pears, and some varieties fare better at the long deep chill than others.

OK. That's what the farmer does. What am I going to do? The fruit is local and organic. But, is it still seasonal? Hmmm... Tough question. Let's go back to values again. That's the root of why we do what we do. Looking at the whole picture, my decision is to support my local farmers and eat a combination of seasonal fruit - citrus at this point in time - and chilled fruit - apples. I place my dollars with my values. Turns out that for me, it's sometimes easier to eat an apple than an orange. But, when the apples run out at the Farmers' Market, that's it for me. I won't be heading to my grocery store to buy imported and/or non-local apples.

Answers?
I don't have any easy answers, just questions -- and those seem to get harder the deeper I get into it. The bright side is that I'm experiencing a real deepening awareness of myself as I struggle with questions that are core to my values. May you all experience similar feelings while you walk your own path.

Walking the Walk,
Susan O.