It is a long-standing tradition for the First Lady, shortly after taking up her residence at the White House, to adopt a public cause. Often, the chosen task reflects the concerns of the times, and Michelle Obama electing to plant a small organic garden at her official residence is a fitting example. One of the garden’s most important roles, Mrs. Obama declares, is to educate children about healthful, locally grown fruit and vegetables as diabetes and obesity in the nation becomes increasingly widespread. A recent expansion in her efforts is unofficially supporting a new farmers’ market held near the White House on Thursdays. Michelle’s interest in the local production of food mirrors a growing trend in the United States, one that hinges on more direct connections with food and the ground from which it grows, and consumers who eat this food. Second, and just as important, is connecting those who grow the nation’s food with those who eat it. The First Lady is using her political power to spread the message about local foods and a local marketscape, understanding that this type of consumption is a crucial component of a more sustainable food system, a healthier ecosystem, and a properly nourished constituency.
Connecting producers and consumers, farmers and ecosystem services, families-schools-hospitals and farms; practitioners- educators and farmers. Local food systems are about making connections, and are based on the idea that these will bring benefits to the people and places of a region. It might be said that the essence of a local food system is the building of community in an integrative and reflective learning process. Examining the phrase, local is a circumscribed geography; food provides the nutritive inputs for human energy and health; the system is the interconnected, interacting assemblage of institutions and people organized around common goals seeking to create a complex whole.
This case study tells of the emergence of the local foods movement in Ithaca, NY. It identifies some of the key ideas and motives that have stimulated the movement, and highlights ways in which diverse people and organizations have engaged in advancing it. It draws connections between local food system and ecoagriculture thinking. It concludes by posing questions for discussion and research that reflect key challenges that actors in the system are facing as they advance the collective vision and progress in realizing it.
Seed-Sowers and the Setting
Monika Roth, Director of Agriculture for Tompkins County Cooperative Extension and Joanna Green, Director of Groundswell Center for Local Food and Farming, for more than two and a half decades have worked together with numerous others to develop educational programs and stimulate market linkages that support food producers and consumers in creating a ‘civic’ agriculture (Lyson, 2004). Jennifer Wilkins, Leader of the Nutrition and Food Policy program at Cornell University, has been making connections between producers and public policy makers at multiple levels to enable nutritious, locally produced foods to reach children, hospital patients, low income families and others on an affordable basis. Louise Buck, Coordinator of the Cornell Ecoagriculture Working Group, brings together student and faculty researchers from different disciplines to collaborate with Ithaca-area practitioners in tracking relationships between the food system and ecoagriculture outcomes. Miguel Gomez and Christian Peters, Cornell University based researchers, lead multi-disciplinary teams that model local food systems and their consequences for food supply, affordability, consumption and the natural resource base upon which food production depends. Meanwhile, farmers in the Ithaca area including Erick Smith of Cayuga Pure Organics, Tony Potenza of Potenza Organics, John and Jen Bokaer-Smith of Westhaven Farm at Ecovillage of Ithaca and many others, work to optimize production methods and marketing strategies that make agroecologically sustainable farming a viable livelihood strategy. These and many other actors are coming together to advance the development of a local food system in Ithaca, New York.
Ithaca is located in Tompkins County at the southern end of Cayuga Lake which comprises part of the Finger Lake Region of the State. So named for the eleven linear lakes running on a north-south axis, the Finger Lakes region is composed of a mosaic of mostly small farms and a few large dairies, vineyards sloping to lake edges, a peppering of small towns, and the only national forest in New York State. Just over 100,000 people reside in Tompkins County, while the population of the Ithaca metropolitan region is about 40,000.