Blog

By Sean Sellers

First Published on Grist.

Over the past two decades, Trader Joe's has grown rapidly as bargain-hunting foodies swarmed into its outlets. The chain now runs more than 350 stores with sales topping $8 billion in 2009.

The secret to its dazzling success? Fortune magazine describes the retailer as "an offbeat, fun discovery zone that elevates food shopping from a chore to a cultural experience."

Equally important, Trader Joe's business model is based on offering a limited selection of high-quality products at very low prices. By restricting its inventory, it's able to effectively wield its purchasing power and demand deep discounts from its suppliers.

Unfortunately for farmworkers, it is precisely this type of high-volume, low-cost purchasing that has created strong downward pressure on wages and working conditions as suppliers look to cut costs in order to maintain profit margins...

As our last assignment for the Food and Society fellowship, IATP staff asked us to interview an "elder" about the future of the food movement. I decided, however, to approach this task in the format of an article, articulating any accumulated wisdom I might have gained from the numerous thinkers who have influenced me over the years. Some of these influences have been:

Bob Gottlieb, who has helped me to understand the role of social movements and broad based coalitions in making change;
Mark Winne, who has shown how food can be a very effective tool for organizing and how building alliances is essential to increasing power;
Gail Feenstra, who has worked diligently to show how community food system projects have had tangible impacts on the way food is produced, consumed and distributed;
Anim Steel, who has shown me the wisdom of youth; and
Hank Herrera who has vociferously demonstrated the importance of listening to the unheard.

Why food?
Food is an extraordinary organizing tool. It touches everyone's lives in very personal ways. The food system impacts so many different fields of interest: economy, family, land use, health, and environment, that virtually all professions are stakeholders in food system change. Food brings people together across class, race, geography and culture.

Yet at the same time it plays a bridging role, food can also separate us. To PETA activists, "meat is murder."  Public health activists may believe that fast food corporations are peddling disease, no differently than tobacco companies. To the working class, farmers' markets and organic food can be perceived as the province of elitists. Improving the quality of school food can be seen as the work of a "nanny state."

We will...

Printed in The Sun, Issue 418

Driving north from Wichita, Kansas, toward Salina on a warm day last October, I saw an oil-well pump sitting in the middle of a sorghum field. And not just one. As I drove, I saw hundreds more, maybe thousands, all surrounded by amber waves of grain. Like giant, insatiable gulls, they bobbed their heads up and down, up and down, gulping black crude from the earth’s depths. Oil wells in farm fields. Here was a symbol for modern agriculture, dependent on petroleum-based fertilizer to produce high yields.

I had come to Kansas to meet one of its native sons, a man who has dedicated his life to changing the way we grow food. Wes Jackson is a plant geneticist, president of the Land Institute, and, at age seventy-four, one of the godfathers — along with farmer and author Wendell Berry — of the sustainable-agriculture movement. Thanks to bestsellers like Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma and Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, that movement has gone mainstream. We’ve been told that our food system is broken, and the fix is to grow food organically and procure it locally. The organic farmer eschews pesticides, spreads compost instead of nitrogen-based fertilizer, and sells her Hakurei turnips at the Saturday-morning market. All big improvements, says Jackson, but ones that stop short of a solution. They are...

To learn more about the history of the food movement in the Pacific Northwest, where I come from, I interviewed Mark Musick. Mark has quietly yet significantly influenced many successes of our region’s Good Food Movement for more than thirty years. He was a founding member of the Tilth Association, which emerged out of the Northwest Conference on Alternative Agriculture in 1974. Wendell Berry and others from his generation have influenced Mark’s vision and efforts in the Pacific Northwest throughout his career.

I was fortunate to have some time with Mark to learn more about his experience working to cultivate and implement his vision for a better food system. What I found so remarkable is that Mark’s descriptions of his years of doing Good Food work exemplified the kind of storytelling that is a lost art in many ways—the unfolding of all the details necessary for us to truly grasp the significance of events. Here are some of the thoughts Mark shared with me.

What’s next for the Good Food Movement?

I’m very encouraged by people’s engagement in food-related issues over the past few decades, and I think the next step is to institutionalize the movement through food policy councils at every level: county, city, state, regional and federal. We now have the models and need to fill in the map to move these efforts across the...