Reclaiming Our Food Supply

Revolutions.

They always start at the bottom, from the bottom up, from the ground up. In this case — the one that we’ve been working to catalyze for more than 10 years — from the very ground itself.

What some of us are witnessing across our country today is sublimely remarkable and equally gratifying. Amidst the headlines of political upheaval and uncertainty, we are seeing people across this great land calling to life the very beginnings of regional revolutions.

Revolutions disguised as local foodsheds.

They are fragile sprouts these foodsheds, tiny and tenuous, emerging from the earth in a harsh and hostile environment.

Together we are learning, under very challenging circumstances, how to grow localized food supply chains that are capable of feeding, supporting, and sustaining our local populations; it is a very radical thing that’s happening here.

But we’re not cultivating local foodsheds because local food is some kind of cool lifestyle choice that makes us feel good about ourselves. We’re doing this because our food supply has been stolen from us by the Unholy Alliance of big ag, big food and big pharma, with the support of big government and big banking.

The kind of food that the industrialized food system serves up day after day is an exploitative substitute for what our bodies truly need for nourishment. It’s a food system that is making us unwell, rendering us powerless, and disconnecting us from nearly everything alive and sacred — including each other.

We have become mired in this system as it’s turned us into mere consumers compelled to endlessly buy whatever it produces because almost nothing else is available, and because it is all so seductively convenient and cheap.

It’s a slippery slope.

A slope made slicker because the global industrialized food system itself is profoundly unsustainable, burning 23 percent of all fossil fuels and contributing as much as half of our greenhouse gas emissions. With rapidly falling yields due to soil depletion, an over-dependence on artificial inputs and genetic modification, farmland being lost to urban growth, human population on the rise and the devastating impacts of global warming, the industrialized food system is starting its slip-slide to inevitable decline.

In it’s place?

For the last few years now we’ve been saying that what is called for is a revolution — a local food revolution.

We’re not speaking of a rebellion, or a revolt, or violent extremism. We’re not speaking of taking to the streets in protest, or smashing grocery store windows, or blockading fast-food restaurants, or setting fire to vast fields of GMO crops, or laying our bodies down in front of an army of advancing combines or hijacking and dumping semi-truckloads of industrial food.

We’re talking about something far deeper, more fundamental and sustainable, more effective, and more generative and regenerative than all that.

Fundamentally, localizing our food supply is right at the heart of an effort to bring healing, restoration, and regeneration into our troubled world, to begin to reverse the widespread destruction caused by the industrial-growth society. Food localization is revolutionary because it’s regenerative. It gets right to the heart of what needs to shift in our society and then quietly and efficiently goes to work.

We are revolutionaries, yes, but we are not revolting, not rebelling. We are building something new, authentic, home grown, local. And it’s exactly what people are hungry for.

We’re resigning as “consumers,” opting out of the system. We’re leaving the field of engagement. We’re not declaring war; we’re simply walking away.

This local food revolution is not ideological, it’s not metaphorical, it’s not a lifestyle movement. It’s evolutionary and real. It matters and it’s happening right now.

But a revolution asks something of us, and it will not be possible for any of us here to remain neutral. It’s no accident that those who signed the Declaration of Independence 241 years ago pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor.

In a revolution, we are first called and challenged to respond. And then we decide whether or not we can align with the fundamental aims and values of this revolution, and whether we will become revolutionaries ourselves.

We can think of this role as “evolutionary catalyst” — which means becoming so aligned with the underlying evolutionary thrust that drives this revolution that we seek not to control it but to contribute to it, to support it, to be connected with it in heart, mind, body and soul. And to make necessary decisions, commitments, promises, pledges and even sacrifices.

We are all capable of sensing — feeling, really — where the centers of aliveness are in all this, those places and people where forces are powerfully converging that are the heart of this revolution. I doubt that many of our farmers think of themselves as revolutionaries, but if they’re working to serve their local population, to feed their communities, they are certainly engaged in truly revolutionary activities. They are creating centers of aliveness — and we can feel this.

Here in Colorado, we can feel it in the Arkansas Valley Organic Growers food hub, a farmer-owned cooperative. We can feel it here in the extraordinary work that Brook and Rose LeVan are doing at Sustainable Settings, and the groundbreaking work Jerome Osentowski is doing at Central Rocky Mountain Permaculture Institute.

We can feel it in the Rocky Mountain Farmers Union helping to catalyze a gangly network of some 16 food hubs in the region.

We can feel it in the awesome work of ReVision and their emerging Westwood Community Food Co-op, right in the heart of perhaps the worst food desert in Colorado.

We can feel it in the Poudre Valley Community Farm project in Ft. Collins, where a community-owned cooperative is buying conventional farmland, converting it to organic and leasing it to local farmers.

And there are scores more from-the-ground-up uprisings taking place at this moment, not just throughout Colorado but in places like Portland, Maine and Portland, Oregon and in places in between and beyond.

These revolutionaries are demonstrating that local food is not a “lifestyle choice,” but a choice for life itself — a life-giving, life-restoring, life-generating choice. It is the beginning of the reversal of the devastation we have unleashed on this planet, the reversal of our desecration of life, and our desacralization of what is sacred, holy and fundamental.

Whether you choose to start a garden, join a CSA, volunteer at a soup kitchen, or begin exploring the many ways our food choices deeply affect society, you can become a foodshed catalyst — choosing to take responsibility for the well-being of your own backyard and your own community is real and radical action.

For more than a decade, Michael Brownlee and Lynette Marie Hanthorn have been working on the challenge of localizing the nation’s food supply, helping to catalyze a network of highly-localized regional foodsheds as a regenerative alternative to the industrial food system.

Besides being long-time local food organizers and publishers in Colorado, they are also the authors and editors of The Local Food Revolution: How Humanity Will Feed Itself in Uncertain Times, published by North Atlantic Books in 2016.

Today, they are collaborating with academics, farmers, ranchers, philosophers, public servants, publishers, authors, activists and people from all walks of life who understand the value and importance of replacing our industrialized food system with localized foodsheds that, by nature, consider all of its members holistically.

Their latest offering, The Local Food Summit 2017, is a 10-day free and interactive online conference, taking place from June 18–28, that gathers together the leading thinkers and actors catalyzing the national movement toward localized food systems.

To register for The Local Food Summit 2017, please click here; registration is free to all.