Food Security is
Knowing Your
Farmer

My husband and I live and grow all our own vegetables in New York State, and because we use what each season provides there, we eat lots of potatoes in the winter. When the spuds begin to run out in April - when the urge to sprout overcomes my determination to keep them from doing so and we have to eat them or loose them - I anticipate sadly the prospect of doing without potatoes until we begin harvesting again in July.

For two years now, we have practiced our mini-farming on a piece of land 36 feet wide that runs 230 feet from our house at the street to the west bank of the Hudson River. Last year, 100 sunny feet of this fertile soil produced our best harvest ever. This year was different. Starting with record rainstorms in late fall and early winter, through record snows in January, and a March northeaster that sent three foot waves crashing over our boardwalk to drown the soil under six inches of river, we've had more wetness than we could cope with. Our yard is a bathtub; water that gets in can't get out. It soaks in, but it takes time. The winter drenching was followed by a soaking summer. The ground never dried.

Potatoes, as it happens, do not take well to months in soggy soil, but mold and wireworms love it. Many of our tubers had soil-filled entrance and exit holes, and some, covered with little white spots, collapsed in my hand when I tried to pick them up. Last year we grew 100 pounds of potatoes, almost 100 pounds of onions, and more than 100 pounds of sweet potatoes. This year we dug less than half as much out of the chronically soggy soil.

All this may seem a lesson about the riskiness of depending on local production. At first, the root crop shortfall definitely made me insecure. Of course, we have "the income to buy food"; and access to potatoes, onions and whatever else fails is a block away in our village. When I mourned our potato shortage, several people who knew I was aiming for vegetable self-reliance told me righteously, "That's why we import food."

But what guarantee is that? I already count on others for all my grain foods, much of my fruit and what few animal products I use. But the desert durham wheat that goes into my pasta was quarantined with karnal bunt in 1996 - first in Arizona and then in Imperial and Riverside counties in California. (Karnal bunt is not a play in a nudist baseball game, but a wheat-kernel damaging disease.)

Persistent drought in the nation's wheat and corn growing country led to a forecast of the smallest winter wheat harvest since 1978. Corn prices hit a 20 year high last year, and farmers shipped pregnant cattle (carrying the next year's crop!) to slaughter because grazing lands were burned out and grain unaffordable.

Nature keeps reminding us that we live on her beneficence, but supermarkets let us forget that. We have money, so someone always sells us what we want, no matter what the weather, the health of the producers or the state of their environment. How is the weather treating Mexican, Brazilian or South African fruit growers this year? I don't know, but the mobs of hungry people out there make me wonder whether I'll be eating their fruit tomorrow.

Most people have no idea whose soils produce their food - forget, indeed, that there is a connection between food and land. California's productive Central Valley loses one acre of farmland an hour; the nation loses one million acres of farmland a year. My state alone loses 20 farms a week, over 1000 a year. As populations elsewhere grow and urbanize, as industrialization, roads and golf courses devour their lands, more and more countries are slipping into import dependency. China changed in one year from being a grain exporter to being the world's largest grain importer. It is a truism to say that every country can't import most of its food, but the world eats as if it's untrue.

I feel even less secure when I realize that much food production here and around the world is falling under the control of giant corporations. Their lack of concern for the sustainability of our planetary home may be perfectly expressed by the case of the potato. One hundred years ago, a famine brought on by the failure of its potato crop devastated Ireland. Although a blight organism caused the disease that destroyed the crop, the crop failure occurred because both varieties of potato the Irish grew were susceptible to the organism. Now, McDonald's is playing genetic roulette.

In a recent book about the dangers of genetic uniformity (The Last Harvest), Paul Raeburn noted that McDonald's has carried a single potato variety into every country it colonizes, so that more and more of the planet's acreage grows the elogated Russett Burbank. Why? The french fries this potato can produce are long enough to hang over the edges of their paper containers.

Now, a new variety of potato blight in which Russett Burbanks are susceptible is moving about the U.S. Who knows what's next? Would consumers opt for longer french fries if they understood their profoundly trivial choice was inviting genetic catastrophe? They do not understand, of course; the distance between producers and consumers is too vast.

It is because I believe this distancing is so risky, that I have personalized my understanding that everyone can't import food. Am I feeding myself? Of course not. Do we need to trade some things? Of course. But we also need to know what we are doing. We cannot continue to eat as if food produced itself. It doesn't. We need farmers. Most regions of the country and of the world can be much more self-reliant than they now are - as long as we keep local farmers in business. We can do this by learning about local foods and eating them year round.

Knowing where my food comes from is the basis of my food security. That's why my husband and I will eat more beets, carrots and dry beans and fewer potatoes and onions this winter, and why, if we have to fill in, we'll try to find a local farmer to supply us. Unless we want to keep depending on people who will risk everything to make a longer french fry, we must support local farmers, care about what nature does to them, and stick with them through good times and bad. Farmers and their cropland are all we have between us and starvation; we would do well to remember that before we have lost the opportunity to make choices.

Joan Dye Gussow, Ed. D., is the Mary Swartz Rose Professor Emeritus of Nutrition and Education at Teachers College, Columbia University, New York.