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Community-Based Food Systems: Small is Smart
by Billie Best, Executive Director, Regional Farm & Food Project

(April 12, 2006) 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 American culture, and it’s killing us. Shopping is our national pastime, our favorite sport and our group therapy. It’s 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, toxins in your mother’s breast milk, air you can’t breathe, and ever 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.

Small begins at home. Living simply so that others may simply live is difficult in a culture of stuff junkies. 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 to 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. 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.

All natural systems go through phases of consolidation and diversification. Regionalism is a way to ensure that the changes 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. The alternative is a smaller, more stable world that would harmonize rather than homogenize our differences. We are a paradigm away from the world we seek. Each of us can only do what we can where we stand. When will you make the shift?