I recently had the privilege of attending a local food systems meeting in Iowa City. Brenda Nations, Iowa City’s Environmental Coordinator, organized it and she did a brilliant job of gathering over 15 organizations to present their ideas and activities.

Thank you, Iowa City, for recognizing that a dedicated coordinator of local environmental strategy helps magnify and speed up everyone’s efforts. Kudos also for ensuring the sustainable cultivation of food plays a major role in increasing the health of our environment. (If you have a chance, send the city council a quick “thank you”.)

What does a local food system do for us? How does look and feel? My vision treats people as more than just the endpoint of the system. We are not just “consumers” who must be influenced to feed from a local trough rather than a foreign trough. I believe people want to play a much stronger role in the system while simultaneously reweaving our fractured ecosystems.

Holistic Thinking

In Edible Forest Gardens, Dave Jacke states, “We design landscapes with a completely different set of goals in mind than ecological health and food production. The tremendous infrastructure we have built in our cities and towns reflects a culture and horticulture of separation and isolation. Disconnection is a major theme of suburban life.” (Mr. Jacke will be presenting this topic at events on March 12-14 in Iowa City.)

When we create systems in our communities, we tend to focus on individual elements rather than trying to link the elements together into a cohesive whole. This myopic approach in the local food movement typically means focusing only on economics; for example, increasing farmer prosperity, bolstering the local economy, and saving money by not wasting and shipping food. These elements must be part of our local food system, but by focusing only on economics, the system will not be as effective and resilient as it could be.

We focus on economics because it is the heart of the current ubiquitous industrialized food system. Any recent book or documentary on the subject shows that Big Ag is in a constant race to the bottom line, often trying to grow profits rather than high-quality food. This strategy has yet to meet its promise of feeding the world and enriching farmers. One in six people struggle to feed themselves in the United States and our Midwest farm economy is propped up by federal subsidies. Focusing on profits has also made the health of our environment of marginal concern. Even with improvements, is this a model worth emulating?

Ethical Focus

Where should we focus? I invite you to remember why we are doing this local food thing in the first place and make this ideal the centerpiece of the effort. Our true motivation stems from ethics and values: we want everyone to have easy access to an abundance of nutritious food and, simultaneously, we want to improve the health of our environment. Let us create a food system that revolves around these ethics while ensuring it cannot be broken by less predictable weather patterns, fluctuating government policies, competition from Big Ag, and rising energy costs.

This enduring and resilient food system begins and ends with you. It is a simple idea: in some way, we all participate in the cultivation, processing, preparation, and storage of food.

The yearning to cultivate food is already surging through our nation so now is a perfect time to use that wave of popularity to our advantage. The idea is exploding on the coasts and Des Moines is implementing it through a project entitled Digging Deeper.

I am not talking about row crops in the front yard. This industrialized agriculture model requires tremendous amounts of fossil fuel energy and supplemental fertilizer. It is also unnatural, unattractive, and time consuming.

Vision of Resiliency

We can surround ourselves with lush, beautiful, self-maintaining, ecologically regenerative edible landscapes bursting with food. We can share, trade, sell, process, and store the bounty in homes, hospitals, schools, and churches. Nothing is wasted because we know the people (our neighbors) who grew it. Those who have little time and some spare lawn can reduce mowing and fertilizing chores by repurposing a portion of their landscape to edibles. It should not be too difficult to find someone at harvest time to pick and share all those delicious cherries, pears, plums, blueberries, currants, and strawberries.

In this unbreakable web of food, everyone is fed regardless of societal status, politics, catastrophes, and energy prices. Now that is resiliency. We also demonstrate how an ethical, holistic system can yield more than its primary goal. Our health will improve because we have ready access to healthy food. Our community will become stronger because we interact with one another more frequently. Our economy will improve as new landscaping, gardening, and cooking jobs spring up and keep our dollars in the community.

Even farmer prosperity will increase due to more opportunities to sell plants, work the land of others, and become paid mentors in our community. Many types of food—such as livestock and grains—will continue to be cultivated at our city borders. Iowa imports over 90% of its food from outside the state; as we try to reverse that statistic, it is absurd to think that local farmers will be out of work.

When I walk the sidewalks of this wonderful community, it excites me to envision its transformation from sterile, uninspiring turfgrass into a lush oasis of green diversity buzzing with life. I look forward to yards tours and Create Abundant Landscapes classes so I can “work” alongside residents to help facilitate that change. Indeed, we will be the change we want to see in the world.