[FLPERMACULTURE] Eat-Local Backlash

[Simon St.Laurent]

Jeff Schreiber wrote:
> But what about those grains, Joel? They throw a wrench
> into the whole eat local debate. No urban area,
> regardless of how many urban gardens it has, will ever
> have the space to grow enough local grains to meet its
> needs. What to do?

I'm not sure I see the crisis in that, except perhaps for the few people 
who really want to insist on a hundred-mile limit.

Grains are fairly unique in their ability to travel and be stored.  The 
Erie Canal made it possible for New York City to grow rapidly, first 
letting them get grains from upstate (Rochester-Buffalo especially) and 
then the midwest.

Unlike produce or many forms of meat, they don't need much special 
handling.  Boxcars can carry bags of grain, though the industry prefers 
to ship bulk.  There's no refrigeration needed, just clean dry storage, 
and shippers certainly could return to the Erie Canal if energy costs 
limited trucks and rail.

Christian Peters gave a great presentation at Cornell last year on New 
York State foodsheds, looking at whether New York State could feed its 
cities.  The big problem - unsurprisingly - was New York City, though I 
suspect even that could be substantially eased by including New Jersey 
and Connecticut in the mapping.  Upstate cities had little trouble 
finding appropriate food from their surrounding areas.

I was delighted to find wheat that's actually grown in the Town of 
Dryden, but I'm not really expecting that 30 acre plot to feed the 
13,000 people here.  It works well for my experiment now, but everything 
about grains suggest that they're the food least in need of localization 
to create sustainable systems.

If we could make everything else local or at least regional, and still 
have grain moving from place to place, we'd be way ahead of the current 
situation.  (Except, perhaps, in the places that currently export food.)

>>From what I can tell from the literature,
> permaculturalists have attempted to wrestle with this
> specific problem for awhile now. Some, such as Mark
> Shepherd of Wisconsin, have developed large, complex
> agroforestry systems of fruit and nut trees designed
> to  be an attractive replacement to the rural "corn
> and bean" farms of today. Others, like Dave Jacke,
> have focused more on small, suburban plots.

In my reading, I haven't found much sign of permaculturalists being 
opposed to grain per se and looking for alternatives. Instead, I see 
them worrying about the problem of monoculture.

You certainly can grow grains within a permaculture system - the corn in 
the three sisters is a pretty classic example.  There are also 
definitely alternatives to growing grain in the pure monocultures we've 
developed today, as anyone who explores farming in the 1800s will find.

> Guess I'm wondering if anyone has any other take on
> this issue, as the "either/or" way I'm thinking about
> it seems too simplistic. Urban parkways of wheat
> fields? Nutritional substitutions for grains? Take
> down "civilization" to destroy the rural-urban
> dichotomy, as Derrick Jensen would have it? 

You asked, so I'll say that the "either/or" you're proposing definitely 
seems far too simplistic to me.

I think those of us interested in local eating are pushing hard to make 
people aware of where their food comes from, how, and why, and to 
understand what we've all given up in pursuit of convenience.  I don't 
see a lot of people engraving "THOU SHALT EAT ONLY FOOD FROM WITHIN 100 
MILES" on stone tablets.

There's a lot that cities could do to reduce the impact of their food 
demands, from planting fruit trees in public places to working on 
regional planning to help keep truck farms from turning into subdivisions.

I don't think, though, that we're heading to a world where city-folk eat 
sci-fi yeast products just because all of their food has to come from 
their immediate environment.

Thanks,
Simon St.Laurent
http://livingindryden.org/