Apparently a major cause of the late blight that’s wiping out tomato and potato crops across the Northeast are well-intentioned home gardeners. Well, what this argues (from Growing for Market via Chelsea Green) is that home gardeners who bought wee little tomato plants from Wal-Mart, Lowe’s, Home Depot and Kmart were buying from a centralized, industrial nursery in the South. The lack of biological diversity therein, combined with a centralized, industrial knack for incubating devastating disease and spreading hither and yon is crippling our small farmers (oh, and there won’t be enough heavenly, delicious, red, round tomatoes for us).

I’m posting the whole thing because I think it’s worth reading and because I support the idea (of course) that we need to scale back production and decentralize. In all things. (P.S. I’m writing this on an artisanal Mac laptop, the profits of which went equally to the corporate bitches at the top and the factory workers who assembled it…)

There’s irony in the fact that many backyard gardeners who wanted to grow their own food — the ultimate in local, as they say — went to big-box retailers to buy vegetable transplants started a thousand miles away. The irony is made bitter by the fact that those transplants are now being blamed for an epidemic of plant disease that is devastating farms and gardens all over the Northeast and mid-Atlantic. The disease is late blight, which is a common problem in August and September for tomato and potato growers throughout the United States. But it has never appeared as early as this year — mid-June — nor spread as far, with crop losses reported from Maine to South Carolina and as far west as Ohio and West Virginia.

Hundreds of tomato and potato fields are being plowed down in an attempt to stop the spread of the disease, causing tremendous financial hardship to farms that are already struggling from cold, rainy weather. The customers of those farms will have to buy their tomatoes and potatoes from someplace else, possibly someplace a long way from being local.

William Fry, professor of plant pathology at Cornell University, told the New York Times that one cause of the rapid spread of the disease was hundreds of thousands of tomato plants sold at Wal-Mart, Lowe’s, Home Depot and Kmart stores, grown at a Bonnie Plants greenhouse in the South. Bonnie Plants recalled all remaining tomato plants from the retailers on June 26, a move that a company spokesman said cost more than $1 million in sales. The company also denied liability for the spread of the disease, saying that only five of the recalled plants showed signs of late blight. Whether there is any culpability in this incident is not the point. The issue is that the plant distribution system is much like the food distribution system and is, therefore, a weak link in the local food chain.

Bonnie Plants started 91 years ago in Alabama as a grower of field-grown vegetable plants for Southern farmers. Over the years, it switched to potted plant production and expanded, but still remained a regional supplier. In the 1980s, as mass-market garden centers proliferated, Bonnie Plants “saw an opportunity to increase sales at an even greater pace,” according to the company’s web site. “In 2009, we have 62 greenhouse production facilities located in 38 different states. 450 sales reps service over 13,000 accounts…throughout the United States…” In other words, this local, family business grew itself into a behemoth. That’s the inevitable result of big corporate retailers demanding huge volume of homogenous products. It’s tough for a small, family-owned greenhouse operation to supply enough plants for even one Home Depot or Wal-Mart, let alone an entire region’s worth. And so small greenhouse businesses don’t even try; instead, they find a niche as retail garden centers. Or they go out of business.

Similarly, supermarket chains demand volume that only a very large company can supply, and so we have food safety problems like the spinach contamination of 2006, in which the deadly E. coli pathogen occurred in a field in California. The spinach harvested from that field was mixed with spinach from other farms, then washed, bagged and shipped all over the United States. Ultimately, 103 people were hospitalized, 35 suffered acute kidney failure, and four died. Or consider Tanimura & Antle, the Salinas, CA, vegetable grower. It found Salmonella in one lot of Romaine lettuce in late July, and issued a voluntary recall. The recalled lettuce was sold in retail, wholesale and food service establishments in Canada, Puerto Rico, and all 50 states. One lot of lettuce.

Consumers are looking for a new system, a safer system. They intuitively recognize that buying food at the local farmers market, or direct from a farm CSA, is smarter and safer than buying from a big grower shipping from the other side of the continent. The increase in consumer demand has created new opportunities for farmers and aspiring farmers to sell more local food than this country has seen in decades. The late blight epidemic serves as yet another reminder that we need to do more to restore food security and rebuild local commerce in our communities. Perhaps the transplant problems will create another opportunity, for local greenhouses growing plants to sell to local gardeners and farmers. When that happens, we may be able to stake a claim to true local food, from planting to plate.

On Sunday, June 28, the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine published this
poorly researched anti-localvoristic tirade. Our response is below:

To the Editor:

Tom Keane grossly misunderstands the principles and practices of
“locavorism,” and the implications of industrial agriculture.

To say that locavores’ worry only that transporting foods long distances
is environmentally taxing is to be truly in the dark about what goes on on
America’s factory farms. With beef, for example, heavily-subsidized,
petro-chemical guzzling corn grown in the country’s heartland is shipped
to feedlots, where cattle live in conditions that give rise to fatal E.
coli outbreaks (like the one causing the current beef recall as of today,
June 29). The inputs are far greater than I’ve outlined here and are more
than just a truck ride east.

This is only one example of how the industrial food system works. Its
hidden costs and its dangers are very high and very real. (A problem with
a centralized food supply affects all of us; a problem with centralized
microchip production, as in his poor example, does not spell life and
death.)

One need only look as far as the Boston Globe itself to find example
conscientious eaters explaining that their locavorism is not about denial.
“I don’t just need coffee, I love coffee. It’s the center of my world and
I’m happy to support it.” And “I’m in no way a purist.” (Locavores relish
the challenge of winter, February 11, 2009, by Devra First).

We’re not sure where Mr. Keane got his ideas but we wish he’d asked us.
Over coffee, even.

Darry Madden & Kristi Ceccarossi
Boston Localvores (www.bostonlocalvores.org)

This is indeed the inside of our freezer. Pretty unspectacular. Except, wait! What’s with that ice cube tray?

I bought ten garlic scapes for $2 at the Copley Square Farmer’s Market last Friday, plus Sarah from Kristi’s office gave her two surplus scapes. So 12 garlic scapes equals twelve cubes of garlic scape pesto (parmesan, walnuts, oil, salt, pepper). I took them out of the tray a few hours later and dumped them into some tupperware. The idea is that later, in the winter, we can grab a cube or two and make a quick pasta sauce or somesuch.

[Insert your own segue here]

Pete Wells, the editor of the New York Times’s Dining section, wrote this last week. It’s about how he can no longer sustain buying expensive, local, organic food from the farmer’s market. $14 gallons of milk, $50 pork roasts and the straw-that-broke-the-camels-back $35 chicken. He said he was unable to continue spending $100 a visit on this food when it would last only three days. I’m not sure what to say. I remember, growing up, my parents (who, needless to say, did not make anywhere near the salary of a New York Times editor, combined) talking about the insane cost of feeding us. They tossed around numbers like $1,000 per month. $100 every three days? That’s roughly $1,000 per month. Put it that way, and it sounds kind of…average.

I have no real idea what we spend currently to feed us both. I think it’s somewhere around $500 per month, much of it of the $35 chicken variety, and I’ll tell you right now that I make less than Pete Wells. Even after the depreciation of his mutual funds (that’s Kristi laughing in the background.)

I would prefer the New York Times and Pete not publish stories like this knowing what he knows about the other kind of food — the kind that’s affordable for an average family like Pete’s but that leaves in its wake a trail of misery and disease. In the interest of being constructive and not just snarky, I think the real question is, What’s going to happen with the cost of sustainable food? Will it continue to rise and forever stay out of reach for the truly less-than-privileged families? Will the end of agribusiness subsidies ever happen, and if they do, will that change the cost of industrial food? In other words, one day, will the cost of all food reflect the true cost of its production? What then? Will the day come when we all spend the bulk of our earnings feeding ourselves, and not just the fraction we spend now (Americans spend the smallest percent of their income on food of nearly every culture and people on the planet and in history).

Perhaps even the most sustainably-minded of us don’t want to part with the luxuries (aside from great food) that make life so pleasant sometimes. They’ll pry my hot showers from my cold, dead hands, for example.