Published: July 2014 (11 years ago) in issue Nº 299-300
Keywords: Organic farming, Food, Agriculture, Sustainability, Annapurna farm, Solitude Farm, Farm Group, Solar Kitchen, Slow Food movement, Farmers markets and Foodlink
The ‘eat local food’ movement
Why is eating locally-grown food so important?
Krishna: We have lost our relationship with nature, with the land. Masonobu Fukuoka, author of The One Straw Revolution, said that “the society that doesn’t know where its food comes from is a society without culture. And humanity without culture will perish.” I think the social problems we see around the world are very much connected to the fact that many people don’t have a relationship with nature, and that means with an aspect of ourselves.
Food is the foundation of any society, any civilization, but many people don’t know or care any longer where their food comes from. The ‘Local Food’ movement is a way of connecting us back to the land and to each other: it has a huge healing possibility for society.
Do we need a local food movement in Auroville?
Krishna: Very much so. A lot of Aurovilians are buying processed, industrialized food rather than locally-grown food. In Auroville we have no excuse not to be eating a much larger percentage of the food grown by our farmers. Today, there are tons of rice in Annapurna’s granary and kilos of papayas and other fruits from our farms that are not reaching or being eaten by Auroville consumers.
Tomas: I’m thinking that part of my rice land will have to go under cash crops because nobody wants our rice, and I need money to run the farm. But is this the right direction to go in? I don’t think so.
Over the years you have tried to encourage people to eat local food through the Farmers Markets, Foodlink etc., and food from Annapurna Farm is used in the Solar Kitchen. Are you saying that this has not changed people’s attitudes to eating local food?
Tomas: We have been trying to do this for the last 30 years through the Farm Group but with only limited success. I think many people agree that the processed and chemically-grown food we eat is becoming less and less safe, and a lot of the problems we have health-wise and psychologically have to do with this. But we continue to eat this rather than nutritious local food.
Why?
Tomas: There are many different reasons. Quite a lot of Aurovilians don’t care very much about what food they eat: they just want something convenient they can pick off the shelf. We advertise ourselves as a very conscious community but this is not the reality. We like to talk about it, but in reality we don’t live it.
Krishna: Also, there is a lack of education, communication, which means some people don’t understand the advantages of eating local food. Eating locally-grown food is not only nutritious and chemical-free, but it supports local farmers, it builds community and society, and you have less associated pollution because there are zero food miles. Food that comes from far away supports the machine of industrial farming, which is highly processed and damaging to the environment.
Some people, of course, don’t want to know this: they would rather bury their heads in the sand. And some people in our food sector are busy fighting their own corner rather than finding ways of working together to promote local food.
Tomas: The Farm Group had been working on a five year plan to improve the situation, but we couldn’t manifest it. It wasn’t so much problems with the funding as the fact that we could not get a dynamic team together to run it. We have been meeting with the Solar Kitchen management for the last five years, trying to get them to use more locally-grown food, but nothing seems to go forward. I’m not sure why this is. At the moment it could be a financial thing because they are struggling economically.
Krishna: I don’t think the present Solar Kitchen team has thought much about local food and its implications. They sometimes mention our food is too expensive for their budget, but the reality is that the farms have only increased their vegetable and fruit prices by 4% this year, far less than the rate of inflation, and we are still losing money. Moreover, while food bought on the open market may sometimes – not always – be cheaper, that cost is heavily subsidized, and food purchased on the open market is far less nutritious and healthy.
Tomas: It’s also to do with the energy available. The Solar Kitchen management, like the farmers, is just trying to keep its head above water at the moment; there isn’t much energy for anything else. And then there is the trust thing. Nobody seems to trust anybody else at the moment.
Krishna: But the problem is broader than this. Fukuoka says that when it comes to agricultural policy, most societies are like a ship at sea that doesn’t know where it is going. Auroville is no different. We still lack a collective agreement about the importance of food security.
Tomas: We have to do something different from what is happening with food agriculture all over the world. Not doing anything and letting the same thing happen here would be a huge mistake.
What are the solutions?
Krishna: Ignorance keeps us from acting together to achieve the common goal of food security which, like the water issue, is an issue of global as well as local importance. I think we both feel that the Auroville consumers have to wake up, and for that to happen we have to create a relationship with them. Our idea is to start a people’s movement around local food.
We began by putting out a call in the News and Notes to all those who are ready to build the ‘Slow Food’ movement in Auroville. We explained that Slow Food is about embracing locally-grown food, using local recipes, while educating ourselves about the danger of chemically-grown food and the implications of industrialized agriculture.
We have a whole list of ideas. We would like to make the Farmers Market a dynamic community meeting place where we can bring local food as an issue alive. We will promote local food initiatives like Solitude Café and the Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) project that Solitude has been running for five years now. (CSA is a scheme where people pay the farm six months in advance, and in return they get weekly baskets of farm produce.)
This week I put in a note in the News and Notes telling everybody which foods are abundantly available at present in Foodlink (a lot of people don’t even know there is a shop at Foodlink!). Bridget and Jasmin, who wrote the Green Column in the News and Notes, are going to contact all the cafés and eateries and tell them that a lot of locally-grown food is not being used, and ask them to stock it as part of an awareness campaign.
Then we are going to start giving lunches to The Learning Community twice a week, and we want to pick up the community vegetable garden project again, where a group of us go out and create vegetable gardens in different Auroville communities so they can grow their own food.
In the longer term, hopefully the Farm Group will come up with its own certification of local organic Auroville food, and the schools will educate the children on building a relationship to the land, so that the next generation will already have a different mentality.
But our emphasis now is to reach out to the community in small and simple ways. For example, if we can get the Visitors Centre to put papaya smoothies on the menu and the Solar Kitchen to serve plantain chips, I’m sure people would enjoy them.
Tomas: Fifteen years ago one of our people went to the Solar Kitchen and showed the ammas how to make rosella teas and juices, and since then it has become a mainstay of their menu. So we need to spend more energy on making local food attractive by helping people cook it in interesting ways. This way people slowly start to appreciate these other forms of food.
This may be far more effective than talking about all the big philosophical issues behind food, because this is too much for some people. Personally, I’m not looking so much to transform society as to find ways of providing it with healthier food. I don’t mind so much if people don’t know where it comes from as long as they are eating it.
Krishna: This is a people’s movement, calling the consumer to small actions. It is the consumer, you and me, who determines that Nestle products are stocked on our shelves and that healthy Annapurna rice is sitting unused in the granary. We have to generate enough critical mass that the demand is strong enough to make the Pour Tous shop change what it puts on its shelves and the Solar Kitchen is willing to try new ways of cooking local food. We need people to come forward and help us plan the campaign, we need marketing help, graphic designers etc.
As to the trust issue, the Farm Group recently had a two hour workshop with Monica Sharma which could be the beginning of something new. Before that meeting I felt the Farm Group was not together, but rediscovering our shared values gave me a feeling of renewed trust and hope, and the sense that something is possible.
Tomas: I think if we can see we are all in the same situation, and that we should hold hands rather than keep pulling in different directions, it would solve a lot of the problems.
Krishna: Over the years, I have had hundreds and hundreds of people come through Solitude Farm, and when I communicate to them the essentials – that we must reconnect with the land and one way to do this is through cultivating and eating local food – everybody understands. This knowledge seems to reside in everybody’s heart. So this is the essential message we have to be clear about and communicate to the community.
How will you tell if your campaign has been successful?
Krishna: Quite simply, there will be much more local food in the Solar Kitchen and in all the cafeterias, and there will be more communication between consumers and Foodlink.
Tomas: It will be a success if there is more trust between us; if we start to feel better with each other.