Findings

About a month has passed from the initial inspiration for "How Does My Food Come From?" of investigating the interrelations between Localvores and local food systems to the completion of our project, and the way that we all think about local food systems has matured substantially. It has always seemed so easy to eat locally, just spend a bit more money and buy your food at the farmers' market, right? What really goes into eating truly local was eye-opening to say the least.

The benefits of eating locally produced foods are numerous and well established. Your money goes to members of the local community, farming is sustained in the Champlain Valley, The food is fresher and healthier for you, you save fossil fuels by avoiding both the mechanization of large-scale agriculture and the transportation of foods from farms to vendors, and you are using your purchasing power to support something that you truly value instead of the distant and disconnected farms of large-scale commercial agriculture.

Instead of investigating the tired topic of reasons to commit to buying local produce, we decided to investigate the numerous models of local agriculture and their advantages and drawbacks. Through interviewing farmers from many different types of local food systems and taking an introspective look at our own consumption, we found both bountiful hope and large hurdles that still must be surpassed.

The Intervale has developed into not only community agriculture, but a community of farmers who are all stakeholders in each others' success. The interrelations between the farms which all occupy the same Winooski River floodplain is a microcosm of the local agricultural movement. While Pitchfork Farms is only 6 acres, their impact is that of a much larger farm. Members of the community are encouraged to visit the intervale and the farm, volunteer, and engage in the production of the food that they so regularly purchase off the shelf at the supermarket. This engagement is vitally important in transcending the "cheap food" concept that we are so accustomed to. The opportunity afforded to volunteers to participate in daily farming activities allows them to experience the true amount of labor that goes into producing food, and fosters an understanding that rich food costs more than we are used to. This paradigm shift is one of the major road blocks to transitioning from conventional, subsidized food to a more local, logical food system.

Bread and Butter Farm takes connecting the consumers to the producers one step further with their summer Burger Nights. For one night a week community members come to the farm and participate in a truly special event. The food is local, the music is local, and the people all come together to spend one night together eating food from the very farm at which it grew. Bread and Butter farm transcends the idea that volunteering is the only way that the community connects with farm. The burgers, bread and salads are modest in price, but resplendent in flavor.

Common Ground Farm functions not as a commercial farm, but as a student-run organization. Five students work full time, many volunteer, and the food is distributed exclusively through a Community Supported Agriculture, or CSA model. Shares are sold at the beginning of the season, and delivered weekly throughout the summer. CSAs are a great educational tool, serving both to engage us in the farming of our food and to teach us to eat seasonally, cooking what you get when you get it and making dishes with vegetables you may or may not be familiar with.

Lewis Creek Farm also has a CSA system as well as an on-site farmstand, but most of its food is distributed through Black River Produce to restaurants and vendors throughout the Champlain Valley.  So even if restaurant patrons don't know exactly where their spinach salad came from, they can rest assured that they are supporting local agriculture through the Vermont Fresh Network.  And although the farm is not fully organic, its locality is perhaps more important than the fact that some pesticides and fertilizers are used, and best agricultural practices are still followed on Lewis Creek Farm, ensuring the availability of high quality foods in perpetuity without the need to add exorbitant amounts of synthetic fertilizers to the soils to maintain their productivity.  Hank Bissell, who runs the farm, is a steward of the local foods movement, having played a large role in the establishment of the Burlington Winter Farmers' Market, making healthy, local food available to community members year round.

The final aspect of our inquiry was to test the feasibility of actually eating local for a period of time. Scott attempted this and encountered hurdles that none of us had anticipated. Being early spring, the selection of locally produced food available in northern Vermont was limited, and he found that he was not familiar with all of the vegetables that he was able to purchase at the farmers' market. There was also the issue of products that are essential to the diet that we are used to just aren't always available from local sources. Not only is it complicated to eat seasonally, but even in Burlington it is difficult to avoid non-local goods for a period of two weeks. On a daily basis we are tempted by the availability of prepared foods on campus. Eating fully local would require menu planning, a practice common for restaurant chefs ordering their produce for the week, but a bit out of the ordinary for your average college student. Lastly there is the issue of the budget. When attempted on a conventional foods budget, purchasing enough local foods for a week is very strenuous.

We started with a simple inquiry: "how does my food come from?". What we uncovered was far more complex than we had anticipated. The multifaceted answer to the simple question has economic, social, and climatic contributing factors. To establish truly local food systems will require a shift in our Americanized point of view about how much of our income we spend on our food, which is relatively small compared to what individuals in other cultures spend.  It will also require more engagement and education about local food systems. Finally, we found a false sense of seasonality engrained in the way we think about what to cook and eat. If we want to eat local, we will have to eat apples in the fall, root vegetables in the winter, and tomatoes in the summer; all foods are not available all of the time. However, our case studies were all very promising. There are many people across the Chittenden Valley participating in the localvore movement, we are very lucky to live in a community where eating truly local is a very tangible concept. It would require the aforementioned augmentations to change the way that we live and eat, but as the aptly named band Rage Against the Machine's front man Zach De La Rocha says, "What better place than here, what better time than now?"