Culture, Community, and Sustainability - Agroecology: The Ecology of Sustainable Food Systems - page 334

F OOD - BASED C OMMUNITY

system that empowers the eating public and the people
who actually grow food — a food democracy — requires
a free flow of undistorted, unfiltered information and
channels of communication among the people in different
parts of the system. Democratic information exchange
becomes the basis for active, engaged consumers who
understand the significance of their choices.

The impersonal global food system has inexorably dimin-
ished the role of food as a cohesive force in the creation
and maintenance of communities. Because food is the
most fundamental human need, humans have always come
together to ensure food supplies. Throughout our biologi-
cal and cultural evolution, the need to cooperate in the
procurement, production, storage, distribution, and pro-
tection of food has caused humans to form hunting bands,
villages, towns, cities, and societies. The religious ideas,
ways of life, values, and mores that have held these social
formations together have always — until recently in
human history — been grounded to a great extent in food.
Restoring the fundamental role of food as a bonding
force for community is beneficial not just for communi-
ties, but for the food system as well. When the production,
distribution, and consumption of food occur in a commu-
nity context, in which people have interdependent rela-
tionships, factors that cause imbalance in the system are
more readily apparent and more easily adjusted or
repaired. It becomes a community concern — something
that has a potential effect on everyone — if farmland is
being lost to development, if soil erosion is causing produc-
tivity declines, if too much food-related money is leaving
the community, and if farmers are getting economically
squeezed.

B UILDING A LTERNATIVE F OOD N ETWORKS

Farmers, consumer cooperatives, neighborhood associa-
tions, groups advocating sustainable development, green
entrepreneurs, and others have been quietly building the
foundations of a more sustainable food system for
decades. Making use of different combinations of the four
elements discussed above, they have set up farmers' mar-
kets, farm stores, direct-marketing schemes, and many
other types of businesses, programs, and institutions that
give farmers and consumers alternatives to the global
food system.
These alternative food networks (AFNs) are diverse,
varying in size, scope, and intent. What they share is a
desire to bring many of the missing elements of sustain-
ability back to our food system. They provide real-world,
working models of a different, decentralized approach to
the ecology and economy of food, thereby helping to
create a new culture of sustainability.
Like life forms, AFNs have “evolved” along differ-
ent paths to exploit different niches. There are abundant
niches in the local or regional context. These have been
filled by farmers' markets, community-supported agri-
culture (CSA) schemes, other types of direct-marketing
arrangements, local food-focused restaurants, and so
on. These AFNs are generally able to incorporate all
four elements of alternative food systems at once: they
operate in a strictly local context, create short food-
supply chains, build food-based community, and allow
for democratic information exchange. Many of them
are based on face-to-face contact between consumers
and producers.
But localness has its limitations. Not all farm prod-
ucts can be grown or produced in every farm commu-
nity around the world. Climate, soils, geography, and
local culture can all restrict what can be grown or raised
in a certain area. Coffee, cocoa, vanilla, and mangos,
for example, can only be produced in the tropics, and
then only in specific parts of the tropics. Cranberries
and olive oil can only be produced in temperate regions,
and then only in specific parts of the temperate zone.
Even if they are committed to “eating locally,” consumers
will always want to have available some food products
that are out of season or impossible to grow locally.
Creating a way for consumers to purchase such products,
outside of the current global food system, has been the

Democratic Information Exchange

In separating farmers and consumers, the global food sys-
tem has also fundamentally changed the nature of infor-
mation exchange and communication among the actors in
the system. The information that flows through the present
system is mostly controlled and mediated by the corporate
interests that receive up to 92% of the consumer dollar.
These interests want consumers to know as little as pos-
sible about the origins, nutritive content, processing of,
and economic circumstances of the food they eat, and to be
concerned as much as possible with the fetishized aspects
of food consumption — how it fits into diet fads, how it
is more convenient, and how it helps form one's image
and identity. What consumers “want” is thus manipulated
to a great extent by the food-supply oligopoly, and
this information filters down to farmers as impersonal
economic imperatives.
In political terms, democracy is dependent on the free
flow of information and open communication. For a
democracy to function effectively as the “will of the peo-
ple,” the people must have full access to knowledge about
alternatives, possible consequences, the lessons of the
past, and so on. In contrast, coercive political systems
always rely in part on restricting the flow of information
and shaping what gets to count as truth and knowledge.
Food systems work the same way. An alternative food