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Page added on January 8, 2013
The Local Food Shift: Peak Food
Recording and/or Handouts:
Description:
Across the nation, a robust and inspiring local food movement is gaining momentum but faces critical challenges of overwhelming demand, limited production capacity, lack of infrastructure, and limited access to capital. Meanwhile, as the unsustainability of the industrialized corporate food system becomes increasingly evident, a global food crisis threatens to land on our own shores. Our communities are food insecure.
This call addresses these key questions: For the Transition movement, what is the role of food localization in building community resilience and self-reliance? How can food localization address the challenges of fossil fuel depletion, climate change, and economic decline? How can Transition Initiatives be catalysts for food localization as economic development? What are the most promising strategies, tools, processes and pathways for localizing our food systems?
Join two seasoned Transition leaders in an exploration of innovative food localization efforts in Colorado and Florida: Michael Brownlee, co-founder of Transition Colorado, and Don Hall, founder of Transition Sarasota. Learn about the evolution of the EAT LOCAL! and Local Food Shift campaigns, and how you can catalyze the local food movement in your community!
- Session 1 (Oct. 16): Peak Food and our global food predicament—the opportunities of food localization; ingredients of food localization (tools, processes, systems, pathways)
- Session 2 (Oct. 23): On the ground—Transition Colorado and Transition Sarasota case studies
- Session 3 (Nov. 13): Getting there—utilizing the Transition process to achieve food localization in your community (it all starts with an initiating group!)
The Vision: Food localization can result in stronger community economies, ecological sustainability, better nutrition and health, more civic engagement, and more resilient local food systems based on deep ecological principles and a more connected populace, with far less dependence on fossil fuels and petroleum-based inputs. The overarching vision is that in such food-localized communities our health will improve greatly, especially the health of our children. We will feel more connected, more alive, more engaged, living more meaningful and satisfying lives. We will be devoted to rebuilding the soil in our farmlands. Our local farmers will be able to buy the land on which they farm. We will transform the landscape. Our agricultural land will mostly be used for food production for local consumption. We will produce thousands of new jobs; our local economies will be robust! We will dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions and environmental degradation. We will be sequestering carbon in the soil, in plant growth. We will have plans and food stores in place to feed all our people in times of crisis or emergency. We will all have a far greater degree of food security and food sovereignty; major corporations will no longer be in control of what and how we eat. Our local foodsheds will be resilient and self-reliant. This will be a revolution!
Trainers:
6 Comments on "The Local Food Shift: Peak Food"
Rick on Tue, 8th Jan 2013 8:52 pm
It all sounds good, and I’m all for it. Though, there are a lot of “ifs” — one “if”, is if Mother Nature doesn’t take us out first.
PS – It’s too bad we (the US) and the world didn’t do this in the first place.
GregT on Tue, 8th Jan 2013 9:36 pm
Rick,
We did, and then we discovered oil.
Arthur on Tue, 8th Jan 2013 9:48 pm
My father taught me how to grow food more than 40 years ago during two seasons. Surprising how easy it is and how big the yield can be. Most work was travelling towards the garden and picking the weed and fighting the Colorado bugs on the potatoes. And of course the planning left a lot of room for improvement as you want your harvest spread out as much as possible over the year. Food conservation was another unexplored issue. My mother thanked heaven when the project was abandoned.
But it can be easily done, it is not exactly rocket science. And being close with organic growth processes gives you a perspective on life you cannot get from a screen or a book. Life is abundant, everything wants to grow and push other species aside.
GregT on Wed, 9th Jan 2013 1:10 am
Food is not grown in asphalt and concrete. It is not grown in the cities. It is grown in the country side, in soil.
Working a farm is not glamourous, it is not about designer shoes or fast cars. It is about blisters, sweat, dirt, and manure. It is not an easy existence, but it does promote discipline, character, and personal satisfaction. Things that our modern day societies have mostly forgotten about.
If people want to survive in the future, they will have to move back to the places where food can be grown. The cities are unsustainable, and this will become more and more evident as time goes by.
It is quite simply not possible to feed our cities without modern agriculture, powered by oil.
BillT on Wed, 9th Jan 2013 2:54 am
I grew up in a time where most everyone planted a garden, canned the veggies and fruits in their kitchen and enjoyed them all winter long. I still remember the delicious smells and tastes of real food. The stuff today is cardboard in comparison. I had a garden when we were raising our family. Hand dug in two feet of carefully managed topsoil that had been a garden for over 100 years. The house was log and 200 years old. I have pictures of it to bring back fond memories. That was in the 70s and 80s.
Cities are creatures of hydrocarbons. Few will last longer than cheap oil. Though they are building new condo towers here in Manila, few will live in them long enough to make the last payment. The city will be dead before 20 years passes.
Kenz300 on Wed, 9th Jan 2013 9:51 pm
We all need to live in a more sustainable way.