Blog Action Day: Food and Sustainability

It's blog action day - and I would be greatly amiss in not taking the opportunity to participate in the discussion, especially since my food ethics are so bound up in my environmental and community ethics. As a reminder, I'm not just an amateur home food experimenter. Food - where and how its grown, how it gets into salsas and bread and plastic wrappers, and how people find and purchase it is something I spend a lot of time thinking about professionally. In particular, since my graduate school days (while not quite salad days), I've been exploring how food impacts community sustainability, health, and economic vitality. The farm bill, which has been a new target of activist attention (especially those concerned with conservation and community food security) can be seen as a major piece of environmental legislation, since it sets the rules of the game (i.e., programs and subsidies) for what gets grown and what gets eaten in the U.S. If we want to see the preservation of family farms, programs that encourage farmers to go organic, and funding for farmers to practice landscape stewardship by creating biodiverse farms that support native species and habitats, we need a better farm bill. And if we want consumers to have better, cheaper access to fresh, local produce, we need a better farm bill. I'll just make passing mention to great sources on the farm bill: anything Michael Pollan has written this year, and the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy's fact sheets on understanding the farm bill are both excellent places to start. Yes, this is a blog about a very small subject: what I (and my esteemed colleague) cook. But I try to remember that what I cook is also about the environment...and that without a substantial redirection of the farm and food policy in this country, buying from the farmers' market and the CSA (while something I'm thrilled to support) won't cut it in the long run.