I knew several people who lived on farms and who threw parties in the cornfields after dark.
One of these guys was even my biology lab partner lab partner freshman year. Unfortunately for me, his life on a farm did not give him any inclination for biology or answering lab questions. Fortunately for me, it did give him a strong confidence in wielding a knife and cutting open frogs.
Our partnership mainly consisted of me answering the lab questions and him poking through the guts of whatever specimen we were assigned that week.
I complained, but it worked.
To my knowledge he did not become a farmer. I don't know anyone who did.
A few weeks ago I went to a panel discussion about food deserts and public policy, hosted by a local university and a coalition dedicated to issues of food security and policy.
A food desert is any population living more than a mile from a full-service grocery store (fresh produce, etc) or in rural areas, more than 10 miles.
I live in North Omaha, a large portion of which is considered to be a food desert. I'm lucky in that my closest supermarket (an Aldi) is just 1.4 miles from my house, but many of my neighbors are not so lucky.
But I didn't need to go to a panel discussion to be told what I already knew from living in the neighborhood that I live.
As one of the panelists pointed out, food desert is really the wrong word to use. We should call them food swamps. There is food around. There are two Walgreens, a few gas stations/convenience stores and a Sonic all within fairly easy walking distance of my house.
There is food. But it's the not the food that my biology lab partner harvested from his parent's farm. Or at least it's not any recognizable form of those harvested crops.
It's packaged, saturated, made to sit on a shelf food.
It's higher in calories, higher in sugar, higher in processed chemicals.
It's not a desert, but a swamp.
And most of the swamp's contents came from outside of Nebraska.
A state that is known for its agriculture, that has a history of farming and harvesting and working the land- and most of the food purchased here in the middle of America is produced elsewhere.
We have lost the infrastructure of buying and eating locally harvested goods. With that loss the number of farmers have grown smaller, the corporations have grown larger and the number of farmers managing to stay profitable has shrunk exponentially.
It is hip these days to discuss the importance of eating organically and locally for the environment. It is cool to go to farmer's markets (and rightfully so, I love farmer's markets!) and to cut back on meat. Community gardens are growing (hooray!) in all sorts of unique and beautiful corners of cities and wide open plains.
But as the panel participants pointed out, here's the million dollar question:
Who are going to be our farmers?
How do we encourage folks to become or to remain farmers?
We cannot sustain a change or a shift or a movement towards local eating unless we have the local farmers to respond.
And until the infrastructure changes for that to happen, for that to be viable and real, for that to be a choice people want to make....
the swamp is just going to keep growing.
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