(A speech by Billie Best, RFFP Executive Director, on April 19, 2006, at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Ecologic Club Troy, New York, on the occasion of the Ecologic Club launching a campaign to get more local foods into their campus food system. CLICK HERE for a printable PDF copy.)

My name is Billie Best.  I am the Executive Director of the Regional Farm & Food Project.  Thank you for inviting me to speak to you today.  Thanks in particular to Elly Braco and the Ecologic Club for organizing this event.  The Regional Farm & Food Project is a member supported, farmer focused non-profit serving the Hudson Valley, from Washington County to Westchester, and the Mohawk Valley from Albany to Syracuse.  We work to build supply and demand for local foods.  I am here today because I believe there is a connection between how you spend your money and life on Earth, and I believe you can change the world by changing what you eat.

The Regional Farm & Food Project brings the relationship between sustainable agriculture and a healthy planet to the table of public opinion, raising awareness of the connection between the food system, the environment, culture and community.  When we talk about sustainable agriculture, we mean the process of staying in sustained balance with nature; replacing and refreshing the natural resources—air, water and soil—consumed in the process of producing food.  Unlike conventional industrial agriculture, sustainable agriculture does not externalize the cost of sales by dumping pollution into the environment or treating animals inhumanely.  A food policy designed to improve human health would encourage innovations in sustainable agriculture and end subsidies to polluting industrial agriculture. 

Our definition of 'small farm" is one with annual revenues under $500,000.  We believe small farms practicing sustainable agriculture are essential to a diverse, competitive food system where the goals are food security, self-reliance, self-sufficiency and good health.  Food security is essential to democracy, social justice and social order.  In fact, I don't believe you can have democracy without ultimately addressing the issue of food security.  Food security means having a food supply that is accessible, affordable, healthy and nutritious. 

As you know, democracy depends upon the education and free participation of the people.  Nothing is more socially disruptive than hunger.  Chronically hungry, sick people are not free.  Think of the images you saw of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, or of the Kashmiri people after the earthquake a year ago.  Once the calamitous event was over, people scattered in search of food.  People left loved ones behind to find food.  People took up arms to protect their food.  And people waited, and waited, and waited for their government to bring them food. 

When was the last time you were hungry?  How often do you pass up a meal?  How long have you gone without food?  How did it make you feel?  What could we pay you to go without food for a few days?  How functional would you be after your second day with no food?  How functional would you be if your children were sick and screaming because they had no food?

Nothing is more socially disruptive than hunger.  That means that whoever controls the food supply controls the people.  Governments are formed to manage the food supply.  Armies stand to protect the food supply. Countries go to war over access to food.  Stalin moved people by force onto collective farms to manage the food supply.  The Berlin Airlift was about getting food to people isolated by war. The story of the settling of America is about people following the food supply, digging for gold to ensure their purchasing power, and building railroads to move food to market.  In the United States, the Department of Defense manages the logistics of our national food supply, the system that supplies food to our military bases and our schools. Celebrities sing at Live Aid and Farm Aid and U2 concerts to bring attention to the issue of food justice. Food makes the world go round.  Without it, even for a few days, life as we know it would cease to exist. 

The food system, like nature, is a dynamic system.  Those of us who wish to eat regularly need to understand food system dynamics within our own bodies, within our households, within our communities, across our nation and around the world.  A stable food system depends upon sustainability and food security, both of which are more of a process than an end state.  We don't know that something truly sustainable until it becomes unsustainable, that is until systems veer out of balance and need to be re-balanced.

Use of antibiotics in food is a good example of something veering out of balance and becoming unsustainable.  In the beginning, antibiotics were fed to livestock to make them healthier.  Then it was discovered that antibiotics can make an animal grow faster in an unhealthy environment.  Then antibiotics enabled the proliferation of unhealthy animal husbandry practices and had to be fed to animals routinely.  And now we know that the more antibiotics we feed to the animals humans eat, the less effective antibiotics are in treating human disease.  Seventy percent of the antibiotics in use in the United States today are fed to cows, pigs and chickens raised in animal factories.  If we were serious about bringing our system of animal husbandry back into balance, we would phase out the use of antibiotics in food, which would force animal factories to operate in harmony with natural systems — that is to operate more sustainably.  If we were serious about minimizing a global pandemic, we would take 100% of antibiotics out of the food system immediately.

Food security is the process of balancing the supply and demand of food.  We don't know for certain if we are truly food secure until we know when we are not.  The diabetes epidemic is an example of us believing we have enough food, and then finding out that the food quality is so poor it makes us sick. Obesity is easier for our society and culture to sustain than hunger, because obesity is less socially disruptive than hunger.  So for the time being, we live with obesity as a solution to food security.  That is we feed the poorest among us cheap food filled with empty calories to maintain social order, then we pay the true price of their food with our healthcare dollars.

The industrial food system is designed to give the appearance of cheap food while the real burden of low-nutrient/high-toxicity food is born by the healthcare system.  Food is our connection to nature.  We need to consume a certain amount of nutrients every day in order to maintain optimum brain chemistry for bodily functions, thinking and moving about.  To do our personal best, we need to metabolize those nutrients a few times a day.  Otherwise we get slow, sleepy, stupid and cranky.  Hunger is very social disruptive.  Hungry people are controlled by whoever controls their food supply—whether that's your mother, your country or an airline stewardess.  

The quality of your food bares a direct relationship to your quality of life.   Food is the source of life.  Food is the measure of wealth and poverty.  Slavery is all about where your food comes from and what you have to do to get it.  Since the beginning of recorded history, people have enslaved each other by controlling the food supply.  The pharos of Egypt enslaved the Jews, the Japanese enslaved the Koreans, the English enslaved the Irish, the Europeans enslaved the Africans, and the Indians invented the caste system so they could enslave each other.  It's easy to tell who the slaves are.  They are the ones without food, without the access to food, without the economic power to procure food, and without the resources to produce their own food.

Slavery is the complete absence of choice.  Slavery is economic powerlessness.  Modern slavery is on the rise as more and more people on the planet migrate from rural self-sufficiency and subsistence farming to urban ghettos, refugee camps and sweatshop labor.  Why?  Because, we westerners are gobbling up their resource base as fast as we can take it away from them:  soil, lumber, minerals, oil, coal, water, a longer growing season, cheap labor—we want it all.  Globalization has unleashed predatory corporations, hungry for natural resources, on rural communities around the world.  Farming communities are paid to leave their land, or their land is simply taken from them, and with it goes not only their food supply, but their capacity to produce their own food, their self-sufficiency, their economic security, and their self-respect. 

Without land to tend and food to grow, these agrarian people tend to move to the nearest city to look for work, work for which their rural skills may not be well suited, in cities that already have large populations of unemployed hungry people.  These newcomers are entirely dependent upon the job market to provide them with the money to purchase food.  Their ability to grow food for themselves has become worthless.  No skills, no job, no money, no food.  You could call it the World Trade Organization's farm-to-squalor program.  It's happening in countries all over the world.  Millions of people are slipping into economic powerlessness because they have lost their capacity to produce their own food.

Could it happen here?

It is happening here.  In the United States we move farmers off productive land to develop subdivisions, office parks and shopping malls.  The farmer may make money in the deal, but the community loses the resource base essential to its food security.  How do we move farmers off the land?  By supporting an industrialized food system that extracts natural resources from wherever they are cheapest.  Cheap food requires cheap labor, which means farmers can make more money selling their land than they can selling the food they grow. 

In the United States, we are in the midst of a grave strategic error.  We are developing our land based on patterns of consumption rather than on patterns of production.  What happens when we can no longer afford to consume and we don't know how to produce, or we don't have the capacity to produce?  Our way of life collapses.  As a nation, we are shopping our way into slavery.  Every time a farm becomes a shopping mall we reduce our capacity to feed ourselves and we become more dependent upon imports for our survival.  Yet, we remain clueless.

Here in the United States there is a popular misperception that food comes from factories, not from farms.  We don't see farms as a vital link to our food security, to our democracy, to our nationhood.  Oddly, we no longer seem to value our factories either.  Our factories are moving offshore where labor is cheap, environmental standards are lower, social justice is someone else's problem, and having an export economy is the dream of an indebted nation. 

Without farms and factories to produce the essentials of daily life, we are dependent upon the kindness of other nations to make the stuff we need and sell it to us at a price we can afford.  Today, we have an import economy.  That is we buy more stuff from other nations than they buy from us.  The U.S. economy is based on our continuous consumption of cheap stuff made in other countries.  We are a nation of stuff junkies hooked on shopping.  Our addiction to cheap stuff makes us quite vulnerable to a nation of ambitious producers hooked on the idea of being just like us.

Enter China, and the question 'Will you be eating China's dust for breakfast?"  I believe the answer is yes.  Yes, you will be eating China's dust for breakfast, and so will I.  We all will, in every sense of the word.  China will control the cost of living in our country by controlling both the cost of money and the cost of goods. According to the World Watch Institute's State of the World 2006 Report, 80% of the companies in Wal-Mart's database of suppliers are Chinese.  In 2005, China used 26% of the world's crude steel, 32% of the rice, 37% of the cotton, 47% of the cement, and they are just beginning to ramp up production.

China will become the world's largest auto producer by 2015.  Someday you will drive a car made in China.  Today, New York farmers compete with peaches, apples and milk from China because Chinese peaches, apples and milk come from the other side of the world but they are cheaper that what we can produce here at home. As long as we are hooked on cheap, we will eat China's economic dust. 

Today, China's ecological footprint is 4 acres per person.  The ecological footprint of the United States is 24 acres per person.  China is home to two billion people—compared to 300 million here in the United States—and all two billion of them want to live just like us.  The problem for us is that if they consume the way we consume, they will need a planet of their own. Our standard of living is unfairly high.  We consume more than our fair share of the planet's resources.  Their standard of living is, from their point of view, unfairly low, as they consume far fewer resources per person than we do.  Distributing the planet's resources more fairly means that as China's standard of living rises, ours must fall.  This is not theoretical.  This is inevitable.

You will not inherit the world your parents grew up in, a world where the United States dominates politics, power, culture and industry.  You will have to compete and negotiate for everything you get from the global economy, and still your standard of living is going to fall.  I am 52 years old, more than twice as old as most of you.  I have two grandmothers who will turn 100 years old in the coming year.  One of them still lives at home, she still cooks for herself, and she still plays bridge.  If I live as long as they do, my life is only about half over.  For the next 40 years, I will become increasingly dependent upon you, upon your generation, for my care, for my culture, for my community, for my commerce.  And there are millions more like me.  

For most of the rest of your life, whether you know it or not, whether you want to or not, you will be taking care of us aging baby boomers.  You will be working to pay for our social welfare, our food and healthcare, our economic welfare, our housing and energy, our environmental welfare, our potable water and breathable air.  You will be paying for it because we bought it on credit and soon we will not have the resources to pay our debts.  Boomers have drained the national bank account living a lifestyle that much of the rest of the world finds grotesque, and most of the rest of the world wants to emulate.

We boomers have inherited a legacy of abundance from our parents, the generation that fought World War II, and we have squandered it.  You will not inherit it because we have spent it all on ourselves, and left you to pick up the tab.  We are living on credit, as individuals, as households, and as a nation.  We have made a lifestyle of living beyond our means.  Who has loaned us the money to live so extravagantly?  China, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and others.  You only have to watch the Sopranos to know what comes next.  If we don't pay back what we have borrowed on their timetable and terms, they break our economic legs. That means you and your children will have to pay my bills before you can build wealth for yourselves.  And it's not just my bills you will have to cope with.  I am leaving you with an ecological environment so toxic that your breast milk may become unsafe for your babies; and a world of social injustice so extreme that it incubates suicide bombers as community-based weapons systems. 

So far, your generation seems pretty accepting of this inheritance. You are in a position today to exercise control over much of your future, but you seem to be eerily complacent, even oblivious.  Boomers would be marching in the streets if they faced the future they are handing down to you. 

According to the World Watch Institute's State of the World Report, in 2004, China used 1.9 barrels of oil per person per year.  The United States used 25.3 barrels of oil per person per year.  China's carbon emissions were .8 tons per person, ours were 5.5 tons per person. China has become the world's second largest importer of oil, and they want to be first.  Why is the world running out of oil?  Do the math. 

China will surpass our level of pollution with 16 of the world's 20 most polluted cities.  As the world turns, their pollution will become our pollution, and we will literally breathe and eat China's environmental dust.  China will surpass our level of food production by extracting their large, untapped resource base to feed raw materials to for-the-most-part unregulated factories producing the cheapest, lowest quality, most dangerous food our species has ever known.  We will import this cleverly packaged dust and we will eat it for breakfast.

According to the World Watch Institute's State of the World Report, in 2005, the Chinese consumed 292 kilograms of grain per person, while the United States consumed 918 kilograms of grain per person.  In China, grain consumption is mainly people eating rice.  In the United States, grain is consumed mainly through feeding grain to cows for meat and dairy.  The amount of meat we eat in the United States sets a global standard for indulgence.  Food is the measure of wealth and poverty.  In most cultures, an incremental increase in household income is followed by an incremental increase in household meat consumption.  The world wants to eat the way we do, with cheap meat at every meal.  If China's grain consumption doubled, they would still consume only two thirds of the grain we consume, yet they would require the equivalent of 40% of the world's grain harvest.  If they catch up with our consumption of grain, they will require 80% of the world's grain harvest.  Do the math.

We can't afford to have the Chinese live the way we do, but we can't really stop them.  We don't have the right to stop them.  After all, they only want to live just like us. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.  But it is not physically possible for the Chinese to consume as much as we consume.  Planet Earth isn't big enough for both of us.  How do we stop them from being like us when we can't seem to discipline ourselves to live simply, to live within our means, to establish a balance between consumption and production?  How do we ask China to be come a nation of conservationists while we remain a nation of consumers?

And what can you personally do about it?  How can you avert a global economic crisis?  Why shouldn't you be cynical and sit back and let someone else solve the problem for you?  What does it matter what you do?  Well, as I said before, I am here today because I believe there is a connection between how you spend your money and life on Earth, and I believe you can change the world by changing what you eat.

Since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, our motto has been get big or get out.  Our mantra has been shop till you drop.  Shopping is the holy sacrament of our culture. Shopping is our national pastime, our favorite sport and our group therapy.  The government doesn't promote conservation because they believe consumption is essential to our economy because today we measure our economic health by growth in spending. That economic imperative translates into credit card debt, piles of forgotten stuff in your basement, trash in your streets, air you can't breathe, a jillion dollar trade deficit, and higher taxes. But there is a sound alternative to growing big and buying more stuff — that is growing small.  On a finite planet, growing small is smarter, stronger and more sustainable than fooling ourselves into believing the twin myths of unlimited growth and ever cheaper stuff.

We need to start thinking small because our oversized ecological footprint is crushing the planet, and the people enslaved by our consumption are saving up to buy guns. Our bigness has brought with it arrogance, insensitivity, a lack of accountability, and a slowness to change.   We have been getting rich by making other people poor.  One way you can make a difference is to spend less money and save more.  When you spend less, you increase the value of what you buy for yourself, but you also increase the way you value the person who produced the good.  The more we consume, the less meaningful our possessions and their makers.  The less we consume, the more we value the work of people who produce the things we buy.  Getting small means valuing quality over quantity, knowing where your stuff comes from, and caring for who made it. 

Small is smart because learning and changing is faster and simpler in a smaller system. Sustainable systems based on diversity, redundancy and decentralization are by nature more flexible, responsive and resilient than monolithic structures dependent upon standardization, centralized leadership, consolidation of resources, and a one-size-fits-all approach. What makes a food system sustainable is its capacity to produce food without depleting its resource base.  A smaller size means less time and distance between the components of the system. 

Diversity enables multiple choices, so if one way of doing things doesn't work, there are always other options. Redundancy ensures reliability, so if one component of the system fails there is always another able to replace it.  Decentralization promotes efficiency, so if change is required it can occur with speed and accountability. A sustainable food policy would support a broad mix of products, producers, methods of production and markets, in all sizes and various locations, empowering communities to understand, develop and manage their own food security.

The new big is small things networked together.  The strength of small systems is in our ability to network them into larger systems, or break down larger systems into clusters of smaller systems.  Networks of smaller networks are more stable than monocultures because they have more responsive players with more at stake in the system.  They have more options for seeking stability, more replacement parts and more individual autonomy. 

To take back our economic power, we need to stop promoting globalization at the expense of community economic development.  We need to start investing in our own local economy.  We need to restore the balance between big and small, growth and stability, global and local.  One way to do that is to promote farm fresh local foods.  Local foods are a smarter choice because they keep your food dollars closer to home where they can be re-invested in your local economy.  And by the way, farms don't just produce food, they provide jobs, economic growth, open space, ecological services, scenic views and community character — and they are a critical component of sustainable human health.

I think we are going to find that small is smarter.  Small communities naturally network themselves into regions.  Regionalism binds us together because we share the same source of life, the same sun, the same air and water, the same climate, the same food system, the same transportation system and the same neighbors. The world is a collection of regions.  Regions are the building blocks of nations. Regionalism recognizes that we are a community of communities, and brings focus to the importance of what we have in common. In any region, the food system is defined by the ecosystem that sustains it, the social system of cultures and communities it feeds, and the economic system of buyers and sellers who create markets.

You can play an important role is shifting our economic paradigm from consumption to production by shifting your own personal paradigm, in your own life.  Food consciousness is a simple way to promote incremental systemic change.  If every time you eat you think about where your food comes from and who made it, and you make an effort to eat food that is grown closer to home, or food that is fairly traded, you will raise your own consciousness about the role of food in your life, the role of food in society, and the impact of food in shaping our economic lives.  If we all change what we eat, we will change the food system because we are the market, and supply will follow our demand.

Changing the food system changes everything, whether it's here on the RPI campus, in your hometown or on the world stage.  Every human eats every day, hopefully a few times a day.  Our lives are organized around eating and securing our food supply.  Serving foods produced in the region would undoubtedly change the quality and character of life on the RPI campus.  You will be come a more conscious community by actively co-creating your school food system, and your regional economy.  As a student body, a big business and a small city on the top of this hill, you would be an economic engine for re-establishing our agriculture economy, ensuring our regional food security, promoting the values of conservation and environmental protection—and you might even improve your own health, lose some weight, tone up your muscles, pink up your cheeks, make your hair shiny, clear up your skin, clear up your head.

All natural systems go through phases of consolidation and diversification. It is these two continuously evolving, deeply integrated cycles that result in constant change, and the need to manage toward stability, or balance.  By virtue of their size, smaller systems are more responsive than larger systems, and quicker to find stability.  Smaller systems are more sustainable than larger systems because they are easier to keep in balance.  Regional food systems are easier to balance than global food systems.  Eating local foods promotes regionalism—that is the development of regional supply and demand, regional self-sufficiency and regional food security. 

Regionalism is a way to ensure that the changes we face in times ahead are relevant, effective and sustainable. The sun is setting on our obsession with bigness, our addiction to consumption, and our stuff junkie culture.  We can no longer rationalize pouring poison in our drinking water, paving over fertile fields, and sacrificing our children's future because we fear what will happen if we don't grow bigger, or we fear what will happen if we are not in style.

Fashion is the adjustment of the eye.  That's why baggy pants are out and tight pants are in.  The media has trained our eyes to see one thing as cool and another as uncool.  We need to adjust our eyes to see big as uncool, unnecessary and wasteful.  We need to learn to see small as smart, beautiful and resourceful.  When you think small, live simply and eat local, you change the paradigm of your personal life from consumption to production. You nurture a smaller, more stable world that would harmonize rather than homogenize our differences.  You honor the work of the people who make the things you consume.  You support incremental, systemic change — sustainable change.  You change the world by changing what you eat.

Today, we are a paradigm away from the world we seek.  Each of us can only do what we can where we stand, in the moment we are in.  When will you make the change in your life?

Thank you.