Accessing Our True Wealth

As the US falls deeper into economic recession, the dollar continues to lose its value, more people are having difficulty finding work, and the price of food is rising. Financial hardships and intense budgeting have become a reality for many Americans. Some are referring current urban conditions as third world. One Brooklyn food pantry fed 5000 new families, up from 3000 a year before. By all accounts, it's getting ugly and by the look of it, the worst has yet to come.

Already, many urban areas have come to be considered "food deserts" where access to fresh, healthy food is not close by. Is Chicago, these food deserts are mostly found in the black communities where the average distance to a grocery store is almost double the average distance to a fast food restaurant. These communities are most in the far south side (past 87th st.) southwest (west of the Dan Ryan) and west. The impact on the health of those who live in these communities is disastrous. Chicago's black communities have the highest rate of premature deaths due to cancer, diabetes and cardiovascular disease.

It's estimated that most American cities have only enough food to last about 2 days if their supply is cut off. While only about 11 percent of our food is imported from other countries, many Illinois residents have become concerned with the fact that Illinois imports 90% of it's food from out of state. In fact, food travels an average of 1500 miles to get to our grocery stores. Even though 80% of Illinois' land is used as farmland, 80% of that is corn and soy. Almost all of that is exported as animal feed or used to make ethanol or high fructose corn syrup (toxic goo). With fuel prices continually on the rise, the distance that food has to travel to our dinner table is becoming more of a factor.

With this in mind, there is a growing movement of people seeking to buy locally grown food. Buying locally grown food has many advantages. The shorter distance it has to travel means less fuel is burned, reducing the negative impact on both the environment and our finances. Because it's fresher, there is less breakdown of the natural enzymes that make produce healthier and tastier. For the same reason, local fruit is allowed to ripen more before it's picked, and local farmers are less prone to rely on varieties that are tampered with to lengthen shelf life. Because local farmers are local, it's easier to build relationships with them and influence the type of products they offer. As long as we're using money to buy our food, we might as well spend it with people we know.

While the demand for locally grown produce increases, the number of people willing to grow it remains small. It's estimated that fewer than 1% of people living in Illinois are farmers. That means that for every farmer, there are more than 100 people to feed. What's worse, in 10 to 20 years, half of Illinois' farmers will have retired. Once this land is lost to the giant agri-businesses, it will be close to impossible to recover, and if it is ever recovered, it will take years to revitalise the soil.

A bill called the Illinois Food and Farms Act has recently been passed to encourage the growth of local farms dedicated to providing fresh, organic produce to urban and rural residents of Illinois. A task force has also been appointed in conjunction with this bill to create "a plan containing policy and funding recommendations for expanding and supporting a State local and organic food system and for assessing and overcoming obstacles to an increase in locally grown food and local organic food production." Another group called the Chicago Food Policy Advisory Council is doing similar work in the city. While this seems to be a step in the right direction, it remains to be seen if grassroots work within the government will be able to overcome the lobbying power of giant corporations -- the likes of Monsanto and ADM.

Meanwhile, there is an urban movement in Chicago to create small farms and gardens in the city and train people to run them. One of these organisation is Growing Power. Growing Power currently runs 8 community gardens, farms and school gardens and community outreach projects in Milwaukee and 6 in Chicago, along with 5 National Training Centers. One of Growing Power's Chicago sites is located in Cabrini Green where it hosts over 200 children in agricultural activities and training. They also provide fresh organic produce to many of Chicago and Milwaukee's farmers markets, including the Bronzeville Community Market at 44th and Cottage Grove on Sundays from 10am to 3pm. As Will Allen, Growing Power's CEO says, "we cannot have healthy communities without a healthy food system."

Part of a healthy community is an active lifestyle. Farming requires a healthy load of physical labour and a lifestyle based on routine and precise timing based on natural rhythms which also empowers the mind. While we have come to consider a sedentary job in an office to be a luxury, many people are awakening to the fact that exercise is necessary for a healthy body. However, many Americans are still very weak and inept when it comes to basic manual labour and survival skills. These skills are essential to farming life. Recent catastrophes involving hurricanes, tsunamis and earthquakes should serve as an urgent wake up call to city dwellers that most of us have become sitting ducks, completely unable to care for ourselves when worse comes to worst. We are unable to even feed ourselves unless that food is available to us at a grocery store.

Although the rural life of a farmer has been denigrated as unsophisticated, backwards and unprofitable, at least a capable farmer will never go hungry as long as the weather permits the food to grow. Actually, farming can turn out to be quite profitable if done right. Many farmers lose because they sell their crops to distributors which sell to wholesalers which sell to retailers, so they get a fraction of the profits while absorbing all of the cost of growing the food. Farmers who get their goods strait to customers through farmers markets or directly to retailers stand to gain much more. There is also money to be made in processing fresh food into finished food products, maintaining farming equipment, selling products, administrative positions, tech-support and more.

Angelic Organics is a 100 acre, bio-dynamic (a higher standard of organic farming that includes specific composting methods to care for the soil) farm that feeds about 5000 people through a community supported agriculture (CSA) structure. A CSA farm sells shares of the harvests throughout the year and, in turn, provides weekly boxes of fresh produce to customers throughout the region. This type of arrangement is affordable and sustainable for all parties involved. However, only about 0.4% of all crops grown in Illinois are sold directly from the farmer to the consumer.

Supporting local agriculture is a step in the right direction, but it's not enough. It's become clear that our present way of life, as a society, is unsustainable. All of our methods, all of our values have to be re-evaluated. We can't be satisfied just being consumers of local agriculture, we have to become producers of local agriculture. Once again, our greatest obstacle is going to be our colonised mentality that shows itself in every excuse that we're used to hearing to maintain our current life styles, but negative consequence of our destructive actions are not changed by the lies we tell ourselves to justify those actions.

Blacks In Green (BIG) is a Community Education & Trade Association that hosts and supports events to raise awareness of the importance of the "green" movement. Their major projects include the kind of training and networking that leads to the development of sustainable communities called "Green Villages." Organisations like BIG will be instrumental in to guiding people back to the land. Every material resource that we have comes from the land, and yet land ownership is rarely considered as a goal by most people.

Educating and reintroducing people to the necessity of becoming stewards of the land are two things that absolutely have to be done in order for us to become the major contributors to our own means of survival. If we can't affect the actions of politicians and the corporate forces that control them, waiting for a change to magically come about is stupidity. We only have control of ourselves. We alone are accountable for our own decisions and the paths we take in our lives. Let us at least be wise in choosing the paths we travel. It's the more challenging path that usually reaps us the greatest harvest.