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COMMUNITY

THE FOOD SYSTEM SPIDER WEB

The importance of regional food systems and how we should strengthen them .

BY LILY ROBY | PHOTOS BY JACOB DURBIN | DESIGN BY LAINEY DOUGLAS

One bunch of bananas from a big-box chain store like Walmart can travel over a thousand miles from farms in Mexico, Central and South America to reach a customer’s kitchen, according to Business Insider. Commonly grown at massive farms in South and Central America, this fruit is picked and packed into containers kept cool at a steady 56 degrees Fahrenheit to ensure freshness, even though it can take up to four weeks to reach your local Walmart.

The process of growing and shipping food to chain grocery stores is complex and has been perfected by corporations over decades. This has left many accustomed to having almost any food at their fingertips, just a card swipe away. While the promise of fresh strawberries in the dead of winter may sound sweet, the corporate capitalization of America’s palate hasn’t just left regional food systems crumbling but has caused society to stop questioning where their food originates from entirely.

Ohio University’s adjunct associate professor of environmental and plant biology, Theresa Moran, has always been alarmed by this consensus of lack of engagement when it comes to food and its origins. Originally, for the thousands of years humanity had walked the earth, food was chosen based on local availability — what people could grow, raise or find in their region.

Only in the past few centuries have chain groceries and convenience stores become the norm, sourcing their produce, dairy and meats mainly from wholesale farmers. This prioritization of convenience over all else may make things easier, but Moran can’t help but see holes in the system.

“What COVID has shown us is that our food supply chain is extremely brittle and fragile and can be disrupted with a single production plant going offline, or with a single outbreak of disease,” Moran says. “I think the value that has been made the clearest in this COVID time is that we need regional systems, and farmers markets are a very important instrument … because if you build a regional food system, we don’t have to rely on broccoli coming from California.”

What Moran means by rebuilding a regional food system is that by buying produce, meats, dairy, grains and other groceries from local farmers and producers, consumers are able to know not only exactly what they’re putting into their bodies, but they’re also strengthening their regional food system and, in turn, their local economy.

Think of it like a spider web: if purchases are made frequently between the same local sellers and buyers, the entire region will be stronger, versus if consumers ignore the origins of their food and put their money into wholesale farmers and corporations thousands of miles away.

While there is obviously no sole way to shift society’s taste buds from preferring cheap, mass-produced and hormonepumped chicken over free-range, organically raised local chicken, farmers markets can be a good alternative. Local markets like the Athens Farmers Market (AFM) bring towns together, allow buyers and sellers to connect and meet in real life to discuss their products, send money back into the local economy and redirect community members’ thoughts on food away from convenience and toward the quality and impact of their purchase.

“Going to the farmers market connects you to a person who’s making the food and I think psychologically and sociologically, that is critical because then children become aware of the fact that food comes from a person and there is an actual person involved with delivering food to their table,” Moran says, emphasizes that educating the youth is key in rebuilding our food systems. “Maybe that kid grows up and thinks, ‘Well, I don’t really want to go to Walmart because I don’t know where it came from.’”

But the bottom line, Moran says, is that if people don’t continually ask about the origins of their food, corporations aren’t going to talk. And without paying attention to what we’re eating, we give chain stores like Walmart almost unlimited freedom to capitalize on the food industry and force local farmers to

either lower their prices or sell out their crops to the corporations themselves.

Consumers can also help strengthen our regional food systems by buying from locally owned grocers and restaurants like Kindred Market, the Farmacy, Seamen’s Cardinal Super Market and Jackie O’s Pub and Brewery, who source a majority of their food from within and around Athens. Encouraging those around you to eat locally and think about the origins of food helps, but only goes so far when local farmers can’t even fund their crops without a steady income stream from consumer purchases.

According to Moran, the state of California’s university system is a great example of a massive network of institutions attempting to make change through institutional procurement. After declaring a clear goal to prioritize purchasing foods from within the state of California, the university system has run into issues supporting farmers without offering them long-term commitment.

“What farmers generally do is borrow money to get the seed in the ground and use the profits in order to pay off the loan,” Moran says, explaining the process of funding crops for small-scale farmers, and the importance of farming-related loans, subsidies and grants often provided by the USDA or other government organizations. “If you don’t have access or the ability to do that, you’re not going to be able to, so it’s a long, complicated issue… so we have to have groups of people uniting around this issue and pressuring policy makers in order to create change.”

At the AFM Cowdery Farms booth, Larry Cowdery is a fifthgeneration farmer who has been farming for his whole life and selling at the AFM for 21 years and is present every Saturday and Wednesday to sell a wide variety of produce. Most of his product is sold at the market and Athens restaurants.

Previous generations of Cowdery Farms took the wholesale route and traveled a hundred miles about five times a week to ship produce to Columbus, costing the farm drastically when it comes to mileage and presenting more of a disadvantage than an advantage when it comes to selling wholesale. That, along with the connection he gets with the people he sells to, is why Cowdery prefers selling locally.

“I [also] like to sell locally because I get to know the people and they get to know me,” Cowdery says as he stands at his booth, an array of fresh veggies displayed in colorful cartons before him. “I’ve had customers that I’ve had for many, many years and they keep coming back and I get to know their children and watch their children grow up. It’s nice because they feel better because they can talk to me and ask me questions rather than buy from a box store where they don’t know anything about [the food they’re buying.]”

At the end of the line of vendors, a small booth sits to the side, offering another solution to the pressing issues Athens’ food systems face. Community Food Initiatives (CFI) is a nonprofit focused on providing healthy and affordable foods while sustaining the local economy with a large majority of the produce donated by community gardens, farmer’s market vendors, home gardens and large-scale commercial farms.

Reggie Morrow, CFI’s donation station coordinator, explained that while Athens County is a food desert, Athens is still the wealthiest town in the county, so we have to look into places like Nelsonville to truly strengthen our food systems here.

“You have to make sure that the people who are receiving these foods know what to do with these foods,” Morrow emphasizes. “You come across an eggplant or delicata squash or something where people don’t know what to do with it, they’re not going to take it because they don’t want to waste it.” Starting in early education, people can be taught how to utilize produce to make healthy meals, according to Morrow. Live Healthy Kids is a program through Live Healthy Appalachia in which second graders go through a year-long cooking and food course. It’s Morrow’s hope that with courses like these, kids will be encouraged to ask for fruits and vegetables, and on top of that know how to make them into a meal.

But ask a farmer what you can do to rebuild our regional food systems, and you won’t be surprised by their response: ask for local food in supermarkets and just eat locally. Sassafras Farm’s Ed Perkins explained that the AFM is limited in its hours, and to seriously grow local food consumption, the food needs to be sold in more grocery stores and people need to realize that local food means that all types of food aren’t available year-round.

“People have the supermarket mentality — you go to a supermarket, and everything is there, all the time, and the farmer’s market and local stuff isn’t like that,” Perkins says. “... So to seriously grow local food, people have to change their mindset and eat more with the seasons. Quit expecting ripe tomatoes in the middle of the winter. But how do you get people to change their mindsets, I don’t know.”

The Athens Farmers Market is open at 1002 E. State St. Wednesdays 9 a.m. to 12 p.m. and Saturdays 9 a.m. to 12 p.m. Visit at athensfarmersmarket.org. b