February 4, 2010:

The Local Foodshed: Where Does Our Food Come From?

Editor

The perception that buying locally-produced food costs more is being challenged as both businesses and customers come to understand the benefits of community-building and caring for the community’s resources.” — Sustainable Seattle, Why Local Linkages Matter: Findings from the Local Food Economy Study

While watersheds outline the flow of water supplying a particular area, “foodsheds” outline the flow of food feeding a particular area. A foodshed is everything between where a food is produced and where a food is consumed—the land it grows on, the routes it travels, the markets it goes through, the tables it ends up gracing.

The modern U.S. foodshed includes the entire world. Much of our food traverses the globe to reach our dinner table. In fact, food can often travel back and forth thousands of miles to different processing plants before it eventually reaches us.

Foodsheds are particularly useful in describing and promoting local food systems. When we look at our agricultural system in terms of the origins and pathways of our food items, then it becomes easier to expand these pathways and focus them at the local level.

What is the current foodshed of Boulder County? How far does it extend? How much of our food comes from outside the county, from outside the state of Colorado, from outside the U.S.?

If we could design it, what would we want our local foodshed to look like in five years? In ten years? In 25 years? What would be the characteristics of a truly sustainable Boulder County foodshed?

Our food now travels an average of 1,500 miles before ending up on our plates. This globalization of the food supply has serious consequences for the environment, our health, our communities and our tastebuds. Much of the food grown in the breadbasket surrounding us must be shipped across the country to distribution centers before it makes its way back to our supermarket shelves. Because uncounted costs of this long distance journey (air pollution and global warming, the ecological costs of large scale monoculture, the loss of family farms and local community dollars) are not paid for at the checkout counter, many of us do not think about them at all.

What is eaten by the great majority of North Americans comes from a global everywhere, yet from nowhere that we know in particular. How many of our children even know what a chicken eats or how an onion grows? The distance from which our food comes represents our separation from the knowledge of how and by whom what we consume is produced, processed, and transported. And yet, the quality of a food is derived not merely from its genes and the greens that fed it, but from how it is prepared and cared for all the way until it reaches our mouths. If the production, processing, and transport of what we eat is destructive of the land and of human community—as it very often is—how can we understand the implications of our own participation in the global food system when those processes are located elsewhere and so are obscured from us? How can we act responsibly and effectively for change if we do not understand how the food system works and our own role within it?

While corporations—which are the principal beneficiaries of a global food system—now dominate the production, processing, distribution, and consumption of food, alternatives are emerging which together could form the basis for foodshed development. Just as many farmers are recognizing the social and environmental advantages to sustainable agriculture, so are many consumers coming to appreciate the benefits of fresh and sustainably produced food. Such producers and consumers are being linked through such innovative arrangements as community supported agriculture and farmers’ markets. Alternative producers, alternative consumers, and alternative small entrepreneurs are rediscovering community and finding common ground.

Recognition of one’s residence within a foodshed can confer a sense of connection and responsibility to a particular locality. The foodshed can provide a place for us to ground ourselves in the biological and social realities of living on the land and from the land in a place that we can call home, a place to which we are or can become native.

[Adapted from Locavores.com]

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 4th, 2010 at 11:31 am and is filed under Local. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.