Jeff Schreiber wrote: > But what about those grains, Joel? They throw a wrench > into the whole eat local debate. No urban area, > regardless of how many urban gardens it has, will ever > have the space to grow enough local grains to meet its > needs. What to do?
I'm not sure I see the crisis in that, except perhaps for the few people who really want to insist on a hundred-mile limit. Grains are fairly unique in their ability to travel and be stored. The Erie Canal made it possible for New York City to grow rapidly, first letting them get grains from upstate (Rochester-Buffalo especially) and then the midwest. Unlike produce or many forms of meat, they don't need much special handling. Boxcars can carry bags of grain, though the industry prefers to ship bulk. There's no refrigeration needed, just clean dry storage, and shippers certainly could return to the Erie Canal if energy costs limited trucks and rail. Christian Peters gave a great presentation at Cornell last year on New York State foodsheds, looking at whether New York State could feed its cities. The big problem - unsurprisingly - was New York City, though I suspect even that could be substantially eased by including New Jersey and Connecticut in the mapping. Upstate cities had little trouble finding appropriate food from their surrounding areas. I was delighted to find wheat that's actually grown in the Town of Dryden, but I'm not really expecting that 30 acre plot to feed the 13,000 people here. It works well for my experiment now, but everything about grains suggest that they're the food least in need of localization to create sustainable systems. If we could make everything else local or at least regional, and still have grain moving from place to place, we'd be way ahead of the current situation. (Except, perhaps, in the places that currently export food.) >>From what I can tell from the literature, > permaculturalists have attempted to wrestle with this > specific problem for awhile now. Some, such as Mark > Shepherd of Wisconsin, have developed large, complex > agroforestry systems of fruit and nut trees designed > to be an attractive replacement to the rural "corn > and bean" farms of today. Others, like Dave Jacke, > have focused more on small, suburban plots. In my reading, I haven't found much sign of permaculturalists being opposed to grain per se and looking for alternatives. Instead, I see them worrying about the problem of monoculture. You certainly can grow grains within a permaculture system - the corn in the three sisters is a pretty classic example. There are also definitely alternatives to growing grain in the pure monocultures we've developed today, as anyone who explores farming in the 1800s will find. > Guess I'm wondering if anyone has any other take on > this issue, as the "either/or" way I'm thinking about > it seems too simplistic. Urban parkways of wheat > fields? Nutritional substitutions for grains? Take > down "civilization" to destroy the rural-urban > dichotomy, as Derrick Jensen would have it? You asked, so I'll say that the "either/or" you're proposing definitely seems far too simplistic to me. I think those of us interested in local eating are pushing hard to make people aware of where their food comes from, how, and why, and to understand what we've all given up in pursuit of convenience. I don't see a lot of people engraving "THOU SHALT EAT ONLY FOOD FROM WITHIN 100 MILES" on stone tablets. There's a lot that cities could do to reduce the impact of their food demands, from planting fruit trees in public places to working on regional planning to help keep truck farms from turning into subdivisions. I don't think, though, that we're heading to a world where city-folk eat sci-fi yeast products just because all of their food has to come from their immediate environment. Thanks, Simon St.Laurent http://livingindryden.org/ _______________________________________________ fingerlakespermaculture@lists.mutualaid.org listserv RSS, archives, subscription & listserv information: http://lists.mutualaid.org/mailman/listinfo/fingerlakespermaculture Support the list host by donating to: http://www.mutualaid.org
