Local Organic Food for All: The Solution

To continue the discussion of providing local, organic foods to everyone, I will now explore what can be done to address this problem. How can we ensure that all Americans have access to affordable, healthful food?

The food industry is definitely not providing healthful food and the organic, local food chain often does not provide food that is widely-affordable. Closing the Food Gap, describes a multifaceted solution, using community gardens, CSA memberships (community supported agriculture) and farmer's markets. Community gardens take advantage of the thousands of plots of unused land found in each city, giving the residents of each community the ability to take control of their own food production and reviving many nearly-lost cultural-agricultural ties.

As for the CSAs, they can reach the poor and the hungry, by relying both on support from non-profit organizations such as food banks and those in the community who can afford to pay more for their CSA subscriptions. The premium paid by those who can, allows the farms to offer CSA memberships to lower-income members at a discount. Often farms will also offer CSA memberships in exchange for a period of work done on the farm by the member. This too reestablishes peoples' ties to their food, its production, and to the land.

Finally, farmer's markets are a means to get high quality, local and organic foods to low income individuals while still supporting the farmers. Farmer's markets that are opened in lower-income communities brings the high quality food directly to those who wouldn't have access to it otherwise and a federal program, Farmer's Market Nutrition Program (FMNP), allows the farmer's to receive a higher price for their goods that would have been received had the produce been sold into the industrial food-stream. The FMNP is a program that is available to those who participate in the WIC (women, infants and children) food stamps program and has a counterpart for senior citizens. Under the FMNP, state and local government agencies receive cash grants from the federal government and distribute coupons to the FMNP recipients who use those coupons to shop at farmer's markets. The farmers then redeem the coupons with the state or local agency for cash. This allows the farmers to keep their prices lower and still reach a wide audience.

As this post as, hopefully, illustrated, it is possible to provide organic, local food to all Americans, but it is going to take concerted effort on our part to ensure that it happens. Just as we can not fall back into the complacency born of Earl Butz and his food subsidies, we can not allow the local, organic food movement to leave lower-income individuals behind. We need to work with our local and state governments to ensure that vacant lots are turned into community gardens, that we do what we can to support those CSAs that offer lower prices shares, and to keep Federal interest alive in the FMNP so that farmer's markets are accessible to all.

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