by Ron Miller
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A book review of The Town That Food Saved, by Ben Hewitt

When we feed ourselves, we become unconquerable.
—gardening author Eliot Coleman, to Ben Hewitt

Food is a logical rallying point for the localization movement. Agriculture is the most fundamental of all economic activities, because food is essen­tial to life. Food self-sufficiency, as Eliot Coleman (and Thomas Jefferson long before him) suggested, is the basis for independence. The corporate centralization of our food system has turned us into passive, unskilled consumers, utterly dependent on the money economy and on the avail­ability of cheap oil. In The Town That Food Saved, Ben Hewitt explains why this system is on the verge of breakdown, arguing that “our nation’s food supply has never been more vulnerable. And we, as consumers of food, share that vulnerability, having slowly, inexorably relinquished control over the very thing that’s most critical to our survival.”

The Town That Food Saved considers the economic and social dimen­sions of relocalizing our food system. Hewitt, the popular “Greenneck” columnist for Vermont Commons, spent many weeks exploring the dynamic agricultural enterprises emerging around Hardwick, Vermont—successful young businesses such as High Mowing Seeds, Pete’s Greens, Jasper Hill Farm, Vermont Soy, and others that have attracted national attention. Persistently inquisitive and thoughtful, Hewitt provides a balanced, carefully nuanced study of the commu­nity. While the emerging local food system is widely praised and “feels right,” Hewitt wants to know why it is right. Questioning simplistic assumptions, he asks “What should a decentralized food system look like?” and examines the ironies and controversies that lurk below the media hype of the Hardwick phenomenon. For example, if the econom­ics of small-scale production lead to high-priced specialty products beyond the reach of a working class town’s citizens, can the system still be called “local”?

Hewitt gives readers an unusually intimate look at the people involved—the “agripreneurs” who have become media celebrities, as well as farmers whose families have grown food in this community for generations, and back-road homesteaders who have lived off the land for decades—because this is his own community and he knows these people well. The information he gained from extensive interviews is spiced with wry and candid observations of their habits and attitudes. Hewitt is a thorough and careful researcher who gives us serious socio­logical insights, yet he is also an engaging writer who fills this book with delightful wit and humor.

Hewitt places the quirky stories of Hardwick’s people into the larger context of an economically strained community trying to gain independence from the corporate system. This is the most significant story Hewitt tells. He explains how industrial food appears to be cheap because so many production and distribution costs are externalized—that is, they are paid for by degraded soil and compromised nutritional value, and by taxpayers in the form of subsidies to agribusiness and oil companies, rather than directly by consumers. As well, there are econo­mies of scale to centralized production—and Hewitt gives a good bit of attention to the problem of defining appropriate scale—but at least a local economy is circular, and profits stay within the community. One of the keys to Hardwick’s success, writes Hewitt, is that its diverse agricul­tural businesses form a complete loop from seed gathering to planting and harvesting to compost. The system is relatively self-contained.

When the centralized economy implodes, due to resource deple­tion, ecological collapse, and financial chaos, this model of local self-sufficiency will prove to be vitally important. “If ever the chemicals and petroleum stop flowing, we will go hungry; we simply can’t have 1 person feeding 140 of us without these inputs. . . . Chemical fertiliz­ers and petroleum are to agriculture what easy credit was to the hous­ing market, and we all know how that turned out.” We will pay more for food, but as Hewitt suggests, we will be paying what this essential commodity is truly worth.

There is a political dimension to Hewitt’s analysis, though for the most part he understates it. At one point, echoing the theme Eliot Coleman sounded, he asserts that “there’s a bit of revolutionary lurking in every small-scale farmer,” but he does not explicitly define the revolutionary politics of localization. This, I think, is what he is suggesting: A life rooted in land and community reflects “a desire to connect with something real and lasting.” To pour one’s energies into this strenuous and financially difficult way of life is to resist the role of passive consumer. To claim, through one’s own effort, a life of self-sufficiency, is to refuse the seduc­tive ease of mass consumption. It is a citizen’s life, in the best Jeffersonian sense, one that is engaged with the life of nature and community; a citi­zen expects to participate in the world rather than simply to consume. And this, of course, suggests a more authentic democracy.

Toward the end of the book Hewitt acknowledges the local newspa­per editor’s lament that the Hardwick revolution has been brought about by a small number of prominent individuals pursuing their economic interests; in other passages he explains how some in the community feel alienated by the success and fame of the agrepreneurs. But ultimately Hewitt sees these as temporary flaws in the early, transitional phase of reclaiming local systems. He argues that a healthy food system has the potential to invite broad participation and reinvigorate democracy: “The participatory nature of local food systems holds tremendous power, not merely to secure and understand the cycle and source of our nour­ishment, but to reawaken a sense of responsibility for and toward the communities in which we live.” Even after his thorough, critical inquiry into the Hardwick phenomenon, Hewitt concludes that it is a hugely important step in the right direction.

September 17, 2010

A Portrait of Food Sovereignty

Food is a logical rallying point for the localization movement. Agriculture is the most fundamental of all economic activities, because food is essen­tial to life. Food self-sufficiency, as Eliot Coleman (and Thomas Jefferson long before him) suggested, is the basis for independence. The corporate centralization of our food system has turned us into passive, unskilled consumers, utterly dependent on the money economy and on the avail­ability of cheap oil.
May 17, 2010

The Way of All Empires: The United States on the Eve of Peak Oil

A book review of Confronting Collapse: The Crisis of Energy and Money in a Post-Peak Oil World by Michael C. Ruppert For me, Michael Ruppert is the Paul Revere of our present moment in history. Revere risked his life to carry news and vital communiqués to the leaders of the burgeoning secessionist movement in Boston all the way southward to New York and Philadelphia. On his historic night of “alarming” the countryside en route to the Lexington homes of the seces­sionist leaders Samuel Adams and John Hancock, a sentry confronted him and asked Revere not to make so much noise. “Noise!” exclaimed Revere, “you’ll have noise enough before long.”
May 9, 2010

The Buck Slows Here: Slow Me the Money, Vermont

We must bring money back down to earth. It might have sounded far-fetched even a year ago. But today, surrounded by the politics of a trillion-dollar bailout, it has a different ring. It has the ring of common sense in a world that is coming to real­ize that there is such a thing as intermediation that is too complex and money that is too fast. There is such a thing as money that is too fast.
April 14, 2010

When the Ecofads Fade, Ditch the Carbon- Footprint Calculator and Pick up a Shovel

2010: a few decades into the Green Dream. Sometime in the latter half of the twentieth century, upwardly mobile, socially conscious, academi­cally educated professionals—those who could afford to—began to drive the commercialization of products and services that were healthier, less cruel, and more conserving of natural and cultural resources. The intent behind this movement was, and is, well-meaning. It grew out of an increased awareness of the destruction wrought by global consumerism and has sought to change that; in the words of the movement itself, to “make the world a better place through conscious consumption.” People set out to reverse the course of destruction wrought by consumerism, through a different type of consumerism.
October 25, 2009

Afterword

In October 2007, the Declaration of the Second North American Secessionist Convention began by asserting “The deepest questions of human liberty and government facing our time go beyond right and left, and in fact have made the old left-right split meaningless and dead.” I would argue that the first part of this claim is undoubtedly true. The massive consolidation and expansion of power by the U.S. government during the past 150 years, which would have troubled most of the found­ers of the republic, has served the purposes of both ends of the politi­cal spectrum. Both the mainstream right and mainstream left seek to manipulate the political system to achieve their goals—economic expan­sion and globalization on the one hand, or greater social equality and economic opportunity on the other. Aside from wherever we might stand on the goals themselves, it is the extent of national power, and the enormous distance between the governing and the governed, that the critics of this system abhor, no matter whose agendas are being served.
September 22, 2009

The Great Re-Skilling: Inventing a Twenty-First Century Vermont

Rob Hopkins, author of The Transition Handbook and cofounder of the international Transition Towns movement, uses a phrase to describe the collective processes required to move Vermont from a twentieth-century state powered by oil, natural gas, and other forms of cheap and abun­dant fossil-fuel energy, to a twenty-first-century state powered by a more diverse portfolio of energy sources—biomass, wind, solar, hydro, along with the deployment of energy conservation and efficiency measures. He calls this transition “The Great Re-Skilling.”
September 22, 2009

The National Healthcare “Debate”: Greed, Fear of Death, and a Vermont Alternative?

Claims that the U.S. healthcare system is broken are by no means exag­gerated. The United States has far and away the most expensive health­care delivery system in the world. Our empire spends more than $2.5 trillion annually on healthcare, averaging more than $8,000 per person. Spiraling increases in the cost of health insurance impose an almost unbearable burden on employers and employees alike, as well as state and local governments. The possibility of the American healthcare system bankrupting the U.S. economy cannot be ruled out.
September 14, 2009

Decentralizing Educational Authority

What does the word “education” mean to us? Does it refer to the state’s power to shape the minds and attitudes of citizens to provide human capital for economic and political purposes? Or is education, instead, an intimate human encounter between caring elders and young people with their own aspirations and potentials?
September 14, 2009

Beyond Facebook: Building an Electronic Front Porch

Michael Wood-Lewis is the founder of Front Porch Forum, a social- and community-networking website primarily serving (thus far) Chittenden County. The following interview was conducted by Vermont Commons editor/publisher Rob Williams.
May 14, 2009

What Will You Eat if Vermont Secedes?

“What will you eat?” is a good question to ponder whether or not you support secession. In James Howard Kunstler’s recent novel, World Made By Hand, food becomes a kind of currency after the governmental and economic infrastructure collapses. People in this story are forced to eat locally because they have little access to the outside world. Although secession is a much different scenario, it is worth considering what types of questions would need to be answered and what areas of the food system might need to be built up for Vermont to have true food security, and even food sovereignty.
April 18, 2009

The First Populist Republic

Few Americans are aware that Vermont, the fourteenth state admitted to the Union in 1791, was not a colony like the others; it was a preexisting independent republic spontaneously created by its residents who rejected the authority of neighboring colonies, particularly New York, which had the strongest claim to its territory. In its fourteen years of formal independence, beginning in 1777, it very nearly fulfilled the textbook image of a society created voluntarily by free persons living in the state of nature—a favorite motif of seventeeth and eighteenth century social-contract political philosophers. In the United States, Texas, California, and Hawaii also enjoyed periods as independent republics, but Vermont’s example reflects a greater equality of persons and resources. In the case of Vermont, in the face of a trend toward oligarchy in America—evident even in the eighteenth century—an egalitarian democratic community for a time found almost complete realization.
October 14, 2008

The Case for Local Wheat and Bread in Vermont

April 18, 1775, Dijon, France: An angry mob gathered outside the shop of a wealthy miller suspected of mixing bean flour with wheat flour to cut costs. The miller was assaulted and his house and mill plundered for flour, then burned to the ground. In the weeks that followed, similar scenes followed at bakeries and mills throughout France. Everywhere, people were angry about the same things: flour was too expensive, often of poor quality, and bread, priced at fourteen sous nationwide, was unaf­fordable to many. At dawn on the second of May an angry mob arrived at the gates of Versailles, demanding action. Surprised and outnumbered, the commander of the palace guard managed to disperse the crowd with assurances that the king would lower the price of bread.