That We All Might Eat: Regionally-Reliant Food Systems for the 21st Century

Development 4: 28-33, 1996

Sharon Lezberg and Jack Kloppenburg, Jr.

With the food economy driven increasingly by global demand, the U.S. may find more and more that the way to the world’s heart is through its stomach. . . . If the world’s food production is to keep pace with rising demand, its citizens will need to eat from one another’s plates.

- Burns et al., Buiness Week, May 20, 1996

In its preparations for the World Food Summit, the Food and Agriculture Organization has drafted a Policy Statement and Plan of Action the basic premise of which is that 'every man, woman, and child has the right to be free from hunger and malnutrition' (FAO, 1996, p. 1)?  But who will act on this premise, and how will they act, to implement that right for the 800 million or so people who now, according to the FAO, do not have enough food to meet their basic needs?

Since we all must eat, the FAO is not alone in its concern for the availability of food.  Recently, the prominent U.S. journal Business Week devoted a cover story to 'The New Economics of Food.'  Highlighting an emerging global pattern of increasing demand but lagging production, the authors of the story anticipate a period of rapidly rising food prices and warn of possible increases in hunger among the poor of both the developed and developing nations.  But if they worry about the risk of political and social political dislocations associated with rising levels of hunger, Business Week's writers assuage their concern with the assertion that, in a globalizing world market, the citizens of the global village can 'eat from one another's plates' (Burns et al., 1996, p. 84).  That is, they believe that market interdependence is the path to food security; 'eating from one another's plates' is simply a metaphor for trade

For anyone with some sense of history and the realities of political economy, the phrase eating 'from one another's plates' cannot but carry additional and much darker resonances.  One of the principal dynamics in the historical relationship between geopolitical entities (e.g., North/South, center/periphery) has been the subordination of agricultural production in one area to the needs and demands of another.  'Eating from one another's plates' has meant the displacement of local subsistence production by commercial production geared to distant markets and the impoverishment, poisoning and even destruction of local communities of farmers and indigenous peoples (Moore Lappé and Collins, 1977;  Wright, 1990).

The degree to which the privileged are indeed eating from the plates of others is perhaps most clearly seen in a walk down the aisles of any supermarket in the North.  The global sourcing increasingly being practiced by the food industry has resulted in the emergence of international produce that knows no season. But for most of us in the North, and globally for anyone with a secure job, little thought has to be given daily to food availability.  For producers and laborers in the South, where development policies often encourage production of traditional or non-traditional agricultural exports as foreign-exchange earners, the filling of their own plates is predicated on first filling the plates of others elsewhere in the world (Barkin, 1987; Cook and Rosset, 1996).

Our concern in this article is to consider the implications of such patterns of consumption.  We reject the Business Week approach to food security that looks to the market as the most appropriate arbiter of what food gets produced where and who gets to eat.  We present an alternative conceptualization of food security that is based on sustainable, self-reliant, local/regional food production.  We believe that such production must in turn be founded on the regional reinvestment of capital and local job creation, the strength of community institutions, and direct democratic participation in the local food economy.

We have found the concept of the 'foodshed' to be a useful aid to thinking about such possibilities (Kloppenburg et al. 1996).  As its derivation from the term ‘watershed’ is meant to imply, the foodshed calls attention to the geographic sources from which food flows to particular points of consumption (Getz, 1991).  The term also reflects the central hypothesis that shapes our work: that as a general principle, food ought to be produced relatively proximately to where it is consumed.  This return to locality, regionality, and proximity may seem misguided in the context of what is clearly a general tendency toward globalization in today's political economy.  We want to emphasize that our respect for the importance of place is intended not as a retreat from the realities of globality, but as a means to better respond to its challenges by identifying particular loci of engagement, to provide standing places for action from which to work toward the realization of a more sustainable, just, and equitable patterns of farming and eating.

From Global Food System to Local/Regional Foodshed

For virtually everyone in the North and for many in the South, to eat is to participate in a truly global food system.  Harriet Friedmann (1993, p. 221) identifies the principal dynamic in the world food economy as a move to 'distance and durability.'  The objective of the 'corporate reapers' (Krebs, 1992) is to restructure this marvelously diverse world into a homogenous plain free of physical or social obstacles to the free flow of capital and agricultural commodities.  This process of 'distancing' (Kneen 1989) has been driven by the demands of a competitive market economy that tends to reduce the physical and social worlds to arrays of price tags.

The result of this market-driven dynamic is a complex global mosaic of food flows increasingly structured by the needs and interests of agribusinesses.  Ironically, the global food system is at once decentralized and centralized.  It is decentralized inasmuch as production tends to be globally dispersed and any given food item is likely to have been grown and processed far from its point of consumption.  On the other hand, the food system is centralized in the sense that any given agricultural product is grown in an increasingly limited number of areas on a decreasing number of farms and is processed and retailed by a narrow set of transnational agribusinesses in which economic and political power are being progressively concentrated.

The existing global food system promises food security as an epiphenomenon of market activity.  But as Amartya Sen has so often and so eloquently shown (e.g., Sen, 1995), the existence of abundant food supplies is perfectly consistent with the existence of widespread hunger.  Responsive as it is not to 'demand' but to 'effective demand' (need backed by the ability to pay), the market provides no better food security to an Ethiopian farmer today than it did to an Irish tenant during the Great Hunger of the 1840s.  A sufficient reason for rejection of the existing food system is that it has not historically provided comprehensive food security and, indeed, is structurally incapable of doing so.  What then are the alternatives?

For there are alternatives -- many alternatives.  There have always been movements of 'self-protection' in opposition to the historical extension and imposition of the global food economy.  Operating on the peripheries (or the interstices) of the dominant market economy, there have been and now are a wide range of alternative farmers and eaters whose activities involve various degrees of disengagement from the existing food system, and especially from the commodity and market relations on which that system is based.

Recognizing the ecological and social destructiveness of the globally-based food system, a variety of analysts have suggested alternatives founded on respect for the integrity of particular socio-geographic places  (e.g., Berry 1977; Dahlberg 1994; Friedmann, 1993). In adopting the term 'foodshed,' we align ourselves with a wide array of farmers, consumers, academics, and activists who are working to carve out insulated spaces in which to maintain or create the alternatives that might eventually bring about substantive changes in the food system as a whole.

Bringing Food Back Home: The Hope of the (Relatively) Local

We agree with Frances Moore Lappé (1971) that what we eat is an effective entry point to the much larger issues of the global community.  Food is still wrapped round with family, ethnic, and community traditions that remind us of who we are, where we are, and what we value.  Food is closely connected with the health and vitality of our bodies.  Food represents our most intimate link with the land.  In the production, purchase, and preparation of food we yet retain substantial capacity to disengage from some of the most damaging components of the global economy.

If foodsheds are to be evaluated alongside the global food system in terms of their potential to achieve food security, indicators of benefits will have to be different -- and more inclusive -- than simple aggregate production figures.  Measures that articulate social well-being, community cohesion, and democratic participation are essential to the long-term health and sustainability of communities.   Below, we set out several principles that we believe will be central to realizing this goal.

Regional Food Self-Reliance.  We subscribe to a view that might be called the 'proximity principle' -- that the food supply of a region should come from proximate locales rather than from distant places where the production practices remain invisible to eaters.  Regional food self-reliance is the pivotal characteristic of the foodshed, for it entails the restructuring of food economies for the benefit of communities and labor rather than corporations and stockholders. 

To produce and consume food within a foodshed implies adjustment to the agroecological and social parameters of a specific place.  In so doing, residents of a place reduce dependency on global supply and the vicissitudes of global production and market volatility.  Even if the global market could assure the world's eaters of sufficient food supplies, this would be a precarious assurance, with people the world over 'more dependent on -- yet experientially disengaged from -- vast, impersonal supporting background systems' (Sclove, 1995: 166).  Producers and consumers in localized food systems are experientially engaged with and knowledgeable about all components of the production process, and thus less at risk should any one link in the system break down.  And although we advocate self-reliance, we do not imagine foodsheds as isolated, parochial entities.  Self-reliance implies reduction of dependence on other places, but does not deny the desirability nor the necessity of external trade relationships.  Trade can be mutually beneficial if arranged democratically with due regard to the needs of participants.

Internal Circulation of Capital and Jobs.  The extent to which food production, processing, distribution and retail is linked to global markets is inversely related to the level of control enjoyed by the producers, workers, and economic institutions of local communities.  The vulnerability of labor and communities to capital mobility in the United States is clear as deindustrialization advances and as companies relocate to regions where labor accepts lower wages.

As with manufacturing industries, so too the food industry has experienced structural changes toward internationalization and concentration of ownership (Krebs, 1992; Marion, 1986).  To the degree that productive processes are subject to distant control, workers and consumers lose economic security and -- by extension -- food security.  Workers and farmers are replaceable within the global production system.  Communities too compete with each other in order to attract jobs from the industrial and service sectors, with business and governmental leaders often making decisions that will be attractive to capital rather than to the inhabitants of the place (Gunn and Gunn, 1991).  In this sense, communities, as well as labor and land, are commoditized, and are able to offer services and protection to their citizens largely as a function of their success in the market.

The circulation of capital and the maintenance of jobs within a locale is essential to reclaiming control over local production and consumption.  Alternative types of business enterprises, such as locally-owned businesses, small-scale producer and consumer cooperatives, and community supported and financed agricultural enterprises have been chartered for the specific purpose of meeting the needs of communities, rather than the profit directives of the  industries of global capital.  Assuring control and retention of markets for agricultural products is one example of how the needs of the producers can be met.  Reinvestment within the community in integrated agricultural enterprises, such as processing of locally grown produce, is another.

Food Security Through Strong Community Institutions.  Even in the United States, where food supplies are adequate in both city and countryside, people still go hungry.  In market economies, food security hinges not so much on the availability of food as on integration into the job-cash nexus.  And when food security is considered from the standpoint of those excluded or marginalized by the market, food insecurity results from possession of inadequate cash resources with which to procure food, and the inability of government and social institutions to assure social welfare through redistributive mechanisms.  One need only follow current political debates in the United States, where presidential candidates compete to 'end welfare as we know it,' to recognize that fiscal restraints and neoconservative political forces now threaten the foundation of protections built on welfare state economies.  At the center of this process is precisely the reduction of cash payments and other programs (food stamps, nutrition programs) that have allowed the poor to eat.

In moving towards more regional food systems, community institutions that represent a variety of community interests and concerns may be better able to safeguard protections guaranteed either at the local, state, or national levels.  Food policy councils, which have been established in over a dozen North American cities (Dahlberg, 1994) and anti-hunger networks and coalitions can provide a venue for democratic participation in discussions and actions around local food, community and environmental issues.  These types of initiatives have gained support in the U.S. at the national level through the Community Food Security Empowerment Act, which supports local efforts toward food security through improving regional  food production and strengthening community institutions (Gottlieb et al., 1995).

Democratic Participation in Decision-Making. People in both the North and South have sacrificed their own economic and food security through loss of control over decisions made within the locale.  Decisions that affect community well-being are often now made either by distant politicians or by even more distant corporations that have little vested interest in the well-being of the community and the people who live there. 

Advocates of local systems have identified the reconstitution of civic life and community control as a prerequisite for any meaningful economic restructuring (Kemmis, 1990; Korten, 1995).  Economic and food security is contingent on community control of public, political, and economic spaces.  Precedents for citizen involvement in public life are numerous -- from the U.S. legacy of town meetings to the Zapatista employment of electronic communications to seek ideas and suggestions from distant constituents.  A 'politics of engagement' can happen only within a limited and defined place, not a global everywhere, and it 'depend[s] first upon people being deeply engaged with one another . . . and second upon citizens being directly and profoundly engaged with working out the solutions to public problems, by formulating and enacting the 'common good' (Kemmis, 1990; 12).  In the arena of food production and processing, farmers and consumers need to collectively determine appropriate production techniques that are respectful of the land and compassionate to the people of that place (Moore Lappé, 1990).

Starting at Home, Reaching Out

Each foodshed will be a unique expression of a particular region and of the people of that region.  A foodshed in Bangladesh will look radically different from a foodshed in Chiapas, Mexico.  Given that we ourselves are situated in -- and eating in -- our own community of Madison, Wisconsin, that is the place from which we start both our analysis and our action.  Surely we have much to gain from interaction and communication with other food activists around the nation.  We also have much to gain from looking towards the experience and practice of communities in the South that have been and continue to be relatively self-reliant, as well as those that are now striving to reinvigorate an economy of food self-reliance.  Our efforts can be connected to similar efforts elsewhere, for instance through arrangements to establish fair and democratic trade relations outside the conventional market.

Starting at home, we can identify a constellation of alternatives to the existing global food system.  One of the strongest examples of the potential for regionalized food systems in our area is Community Supported Agriculture (C.S.A.).  CSA is a partnership of mutual commitment between farmers and consumers, where both share in the risks and rewards of agricultural production.  Shareholders pay the seasonal operating costs of the farm, in return for which they receive a portion of the farm's harvest.  Community supported agriculture members in Madison are emerging as a 'commensal community' (Kloppenburg et al, 1996).  Farmers, share-members and activists have promoted this community of eaters through a strong community organization, the Madison Area Community Supported Agriculture Coalition (MACSAC). 

The popularity of community supported agriculture and the experience of MACSAC members in 'associative democracy' -- engagement and participation through non-institutionalized organizations (Cohen and Rogers, 1992) -- has provided the example for other related efforts to bring food back home.  One such effort, initiated by local restaurant chefs and organic growers, is the formation of a cooperative to supply restaurants with locally grown produce.  From discussions amongst restauranteurs, farmers, and cooperative facilitators was born 'Home Grown Wisconsin.'  Through membership in the cooperative, farmers find expanded and more secure markets while restauranteurs find dependable, seasonal, and local supplies of produce (Lawless, 1995).  The proximity principle here lends itself to regional reinvestment of capital and local job creation, while fostering participation through the cooperative structure.

Although these incremental initiatives provide examples of what can be done at the local level, they have failed to address adequately the lack of food security due to insufficient resources with which to purchase food.  To address the issue of food insecurity among low-income households, representatives from various food banks, service organizations, and nutrition programs formed the Hunger Prevention Council of Dane County.  The council links issues of production with those of food security.  The first step -- increasing democratic participation -- is to provide a forum for local residents, particularly those most disenfranchised from the political process and mainstream economy, to contribute to the discussion and to planning for increased food security.

Concluding Remarks: Eating as Thoughtful Practice

We can attempt to understand the workings of the global food system and its impact on people and land in local places, and we can offer solidarity and support to local peoples in their struggles for self-determination (Esteva and Prakash, 1994).  Yet, the place where heart, hand, and mind can unite best in 'restoring one’s consciousness of what is involved in eating, [and] reclaiming responsibility for one’s own part in the food economy' (Berry, 1990: 129) is surely the place where we live.  Thus, we start with our own consumption habits and with the food system of our own community.  By approaching eating as 'thoughtful practice' (Heldke, 1992), we may lay a foundation for the revitalization of our own local foodsheds.

For the food consumer in the North, the social and environmental repercussions of production are hidden behind product labels, advertisements, and brand names.  The labels on packaged products contain information about ingredients and price, but information about the how the food was produced, who produced it, and about who benefited and who stood to lose from its production is obscured.  When we seek out information about conventionally produced food from the global market, often what emerges is highly problematic: that farmers in developing countries are disadvantaged by global markets, that the food industry is highly concentrated, and that the practices being used in food production, processing, and distribution are destructive of the land, of the food itself, of farmers, and of communities.   

A methodological tool that appears to be particularly effective for uncovering the environmental and social costs of agricultural production and food processing is 'commodity chain analysis' in which particular products are traced from point of production to point of consumption (Gereffi and Korzeniewicz, 1994).  Commodity chain analysis illuminates the complex interaction of production processes and the environment at multiple levels of organization.  Through commodity chain analysis we can link shrimp with the destruction of mangrove forests in Thailand (Mydans, 1996).  We can understand better the ties that bind bananas to infertility of male plantation workers in Ecuador and the Philippines (Schemo, 1995).  From imported Brazilian grapes can be teased out the story of unequal gender relations and increasing landlessness in the San Francisco river valley of northeastern Brazil (Collins, 1995).  And by comparing a Tyson’s chicken produced in Tennessee with one raised by a local Wisconsin farmer, we can better judge the implications of our food choices on self-determination of labor and community well-being (Oberholtzer, 1996).

By illuminating the concrete ways in which local food consumption is linked to global structures, commodity chain analysis can help elucidate how food consumption choices in one place affect food security in other places.  Such knowledge can provide the impetus for consumers to become more sustainable eaters. And just as eating globally obscures the negative impacts of food production, eating locally can catalyze positive local transformations.  Recognition of one’s residence within a foodshed can thus confer a sense of connection and responsibility to a particular locality, and a place from which to act.

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Address correspondence to Jack Kloppenburg, Jr., Department of Rural Sociology, 350 Agriculture Hall, 1450 Linden Drive, Madison, WI 53706, USA.  Fax: (608) 262-6022. Phone: (608) 262-6867. E-mail: jrkloppe@facstaff.wisc.edu.

Sharon Lezberg is a graduate student at the Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  Jack Kloppenburg is an Associate Professor of Rural Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  Both are involved in “foodshed” analysis and action in Madison, Wisconsin.  The authors are grateful to Lydia Oberholtzer for her helpful comments on their work and to the Pew Scholars Program in Conservation and the Environment for material support.