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526 Gaffney Road
Fairbanks, AK 99701
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Local Food – a Wise Investment Toward Food Security

December 6, 2010 By mary.christensen 1 Comment

Interior Alaskans often picture themselves as self-reliant individuals, growing huge cabbages and putting a moose in the freezer each fall.  Growing produce in the long days of summer and gathering from the bounty of nature indeed can be productive, spiritually rewarding, and economical.  However, the reality is our population as a whole imports a high percentage of its food from outside the state.

With only an estimated 10-day supply of food in warehouses, Alaska is vulnerable to a prolonged disruption of the long-distance transportation network on which we rely daily.  Rising cost of fossil fuel will impact food production and transportation prices.  Relying heavily on outside sources means we are also at risk when one of the few major producers has contamination that can manifest widespread effects on many people, even if caught relatively quickly and recalled.

U.S. policies favoring inexpensive food after World War II included price supports for commodities (foods, fuels, and fiber crops, such as cotton) and low taxation on fossil fuel, which is also a feedstock for fertilizer and pesticides.  The cost of food as a percentage of annual income has steadily declined in the industrialized world during the 20th Century.  Today Americans spend only about 10% of income on food.  However, the “savings” come at a price to the environment (chemical loads, water use) with consequences to international policy on energy (including military engagement), immigrant labor, and trade—externalities that don’t show up on the label in a grocery store.

A local system of food production and processing for storage capability in Interior Alaska, if it (likely) does not qualify for price supports enjoyed by “industrial” agriculture Outside, would be more expensive to consumers because it would reflect more of the true costs. However, what is the value of not being so vulnerable to a disruption of transportation, such that shelves of major grocery stores begin to go bare when trucks or barges are delayed for just one day?  What is the return on your dollar spent when you can see it remain in the community, providing jobs for producers, processors, and grocers?  How much are you willing to pay for supporting a local food system has to be more accountable because it is composed of your neighbors, not a faceless entity thousands of miles distant with many corporate fingers taking a cut between the grower (doing the work and taking the greatest risk) and the supermarket?

The mantra of industrial process is increased efficiency, which indeed can help feed the world—if consumers can afford the shipping.  But heavily mechanized production means high start-up and operational costs for younger people with the urge and skills to produce food. To quality for many of the federal cost share programs you need to have the private money or loan collateral up front–a Catch 22 for young families.

Alaska is highly unlikely in our lifetimes to produce all the food needed by our growing population approaching ¾ of a million people across a vast area, some of which is unsuitable for agriculture or livestock. However, trials a hundred years ago at various locations across the state demonstrated a high potential for growing food on relatively small areas with intensive labor—something young aspiring farmers can handle. There are incredibly resourceful producers of crops and livestock in the Interior right now, growing for personal consumption and maybe a little at the farmer’s market or customer shares.  Our collective challenge is to help them scale it up!

I envision Fairbanks Community Cooperative Market as one venue that can help with food security by providing a reliable local outlet for many smaller producers.  We can still buy the more exotic foods from far away, but we can buy a lot more of the basics much closer to home.

Filed Under: Issues Tagged With: food security, local food production

Does Food Rule?

May 6, 2010 By mary.christensen Leave a Comment

A review of the new “quick read” by Michael Pollan, “Food Rules”

By Rich Seifert,  Co-op Market Board Member

I read Michael Pollan’s first book, the Botany of Desire many years ago, and now his stature as America’s food folk hero is perhaps at its peak.  He has followed an interesting road, and one we should all travel along these days.

His latest, “Food Rules”, is a very quick but effective read written in the pattern of “Life’s Little Lesson Books”. This format makes the book, dense as it is with inspirations, a very quick read.  It is perfectly designed for any aspiring “food missionaries” out there who want to promote healthy eating and move to a healthier diet.

And for those of us who want to see Alaska, and for me, Fairbanks, become healthier through healthy eating, the virtues of this little tome are as timely as they are helpful.

The plan for the book was to ask people, through a New York Times blog called “Well” (as in wellness) for their best advice in an aphorism on eating well and healthy.  Spinning onward from his previous book, In Defense of Food, he condenses the entire message of the book into these seven words:  Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

Pretty comprehensive actually.  But in this little book he refines the message further into paragraphs of food insight, which I can best relate by showing examples of my own “favorites’” list.  Take these examples as a few seductive tastes to incite you to read the book:

–       Avoid food products that contain ingredients no ordinary person would keep in their pantry. For instance ethoxylated diglycerides, cellulose, xanthan gum.  Doesn’t seem too hard, does it?

–       Avoid food products that make health claims (!) Well this seems counter-intuitive at first, but upon reflection, makes great sense.  If a product has to tell you how healthy it is, then it is making up for some deficiency it obviously has.  Carrots don’t have to convince you that they are good for you.

–       Avoid foods you see advertised on television. Whoa, this is a biggie!  I have heard a friend describe commercials for pizza or Red Lobster restaurant as “food pornography”.  A fairly apt description of the visual effect of the commercials. It shouldn’t be necessary to say that the vegetable lobby doesn’t need to do TV ads.

–       Eat only foods that will eventually rot. Again, anything that will last indefinitely has so many preservatives and probably toxic ingredients that keep it from “spoiling” that it cannot be very good for living creatures such as we humans.   An exception is honey, which has an indefinite shelf life, but it is unique in that respect.  All food needs to be digestible, and if it can’t be digestible outside your body by other creatures who need it just as much, it is unlikely to be healthfully digested inside your body.

Since I am writing this for both the general public and particularly for the future patrons of our Fairbanks Community Cooperative Market (Co-op Market), I want to encourage the best food products for a healthy life, and make them available in Alaska, and preferably grown here too.

Michael Pollan’s  “Food Facts” is motivated by much the same things. He started out with a keen interest in finding out how to eat well to maintain his family’s health. He discloses two major facts in the preface that he has gleaned from this search, and he concisely summarizes what he has learned and written about since.

First, populations that eat mostly the “ Western” diet, consisting of lots of processed foods and meat, added fats and sugars, lots of refined grains, lots of everything except vegetables, invariably suffer from high rates of the so-called Western diseases:  obesity, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and cancer.  Virtually all of the obesity and the diabetes, 80% of the cardiovascular disease, and more than a third of all cancers can be linked to this diet.

And second, in contrast, populations eating a remarkably wide range of traditional diets generally don’t suffer from these chronic diseases.  It appears that we human omnivores are well adapted to a broad range of mixed traditional diets, except for one: the WESTERN DIET, recently fallen upon us.

There is a third factor though which is good news, and which I hope that our new co-op will help to promote:  People who get off the Western diet see dramatic improvements in their health.  Pollan cites research that suggests that the effects of the Western diet can be rolled back by getting off it, and relatively quickly.

It is our intent with the Co-op Market to help in every way to achieve this option and promote community health and wellness. We even have a committee devoted to those very subjects. (The next meeting of the Health and Wellness committee is Tuesday, June 1 at 5:30 pm at the Volunteer Center.)

Stay with us, be patient, and start developing these suggested eating habits now. As soon as we can, the Co-op Market will do all it can to keep you eating healthy and maintaining local food availability.  Join the Co-op Market, become a full voting member, and eat well.  Live long and prosper…  and come and visit us online at www.FairbanksCoop.org/

Filed Under: Food, Issues, Member education Tagged With: books, education, food systems, health

Talk by David Fazzino and Phil Loring on Alaska food systems

December 9, 2009 By coopmarket Leave a Comment

This event, part of the Anthropology Colloquium Series, may be of interest to FCCM members:

Anchorage? Uh, Washington? Anyone? We Have a Problem! Disaster Politics and Cumulative Effects in Alaskan Food Systems
David Fazzino and Phil Loring, Department of Anthropology, UAF
Friday, Dec. 11
3:30 p.m. – Schaible Auditorium, Bunnell Building, UAF
****
Information: pplattet@alaska.edu

Filed Under: Events, Food, Issues, Member education Tagged With: education, food systems, local food production, rural Alaska, sustainability

Community sustainability meeting

November 3, 2009 By coopmarket Leave a Comment

Suzy Fenner of SCANFairbanks and Mike & Ritchie Musick are holding a meeting on community sustainability:

November 4th, 6:00 – 8:00 pm Wednesday evening at the Noel Library Auditorium

There will be a presentation by Ritchie and Mike Musick on The Natural Step for Communities, discussion afterwards, and a second presentation and discussion at 7:00 pm on food security and sustainable agriculture.

Contact: Suzy Fenner, SCANFairbanks
(Sustainable Community Action Network for Fairbanks — advocating for economic, environmental, and social sustainability) (907) 479-2345, polarsolar@gmail.com

Filed Under: Events, Food, Issues Tagged With: community, sustainability

Essay on Sustainable Agriculture

October 30, 2009 By mary.christensen 3 Comments

for SARE New Voices Contest
December, 2007

I didn’t grow up on a farm.  When I was young, I never learned how to fix a screen door let alone a tractor.   I didn’t know which end of a seed to plant in the ground.  If you had told me twenty years ago that I would own the farthest north certified organic farm in the country, I would have told you that you must be crazy.

I come from a long line of Jewish tailors who never ventured too far from the city.  My connections with agriculture were like many kids growing up in suburban America – with the pictures of fields of grain on cereal boxes or occasional trips to the “country” to visit an apple orchard or to see goats and rabbits at a petting zoo.   But my parents always had a garden we always liked to eat and we liked to eat good fresh food.  This is how I came to agriculture – through gardening.  Through getting back to that connection with where your food comes from and acting on it.  I wanted that feeling of looking down a row of crops and feeling that connection with the plants and soil and the thousands of years of farmers and gardeners before me – food growers.

It took me a while to get into farming.  It didn’t come until my mid-thirties, when after many years of having a garden, I quit my day job and followed the dream of many back-to-the land folks before me. I had no idea of what I was doing, but I expanded the garden, bought a rototiller and Elliot Coleman’s “The New Organic Grower”, and started to make a go of it as a market farmer.  It certainly hasn’t been easy, especially since we live in interior Alaska square in the middle of agricultural zone 1.  There is very little historical farmland where we live.  Our farm was literally carved out of the Alaska wilderness with a chainsaw and bulldozer – hardly a soft footprint on the land.  But we justified the destruction of 10 acres of our forest with the belief that having a farm and feeding people was, in the end, a good thing for the community.  After all, wasn’t that what all farmers had originally done?  Also by farming organically, we hoped we were insuring a healthy environment for any wildlife that used the farm, for ourselves and our workers, and for those who ate our produce.  The demand for quality local produce is high, and despite our growing pains as a farm, we are still able to stay afloat with a lot of hard work, and all of our savings.  After 10 years, we have a healthy farm and an increasingly successful business.

Since I come from this new movement of market gardeners turned farmer, my models for success and role models to seek advice from have been organic farmers many with similar experience as I but with more years under their belt.  We have learned the appropriate models for ecologically sound agriculture and the goals for our farm are the same as the goals for many farms like ours across the country – to minimize off-farm inputs while maintaining high soil fertility, to produce high quality and healthy produce, and maintain a profitable business.

We think about sustainability a lot in Alaska, however most of the discussion focuses on natural fish and wildlife populations and their relation to subsistence versus commercial harvest.  There is little talk about sustainable agriculture, but there should be.  Although one’s vision of Alaska might be one of a hunter alone on the tundra, we get most of our food like the rest of America – from large supermarkets run by huge corporations.  If the average piece of food travels approximately 1500 miles from producer to consumer in the rest of the country, it travels much farther to us in Alaska.  For this reason, and many others, we should be concerned about sustainability on a local and community scale.

If our state seems extreme, it is but a microcosm of the country as a whole.  We need to look within our own communities for inputs to agriculture and other resources.  Our model for farming does follow a community approach.  Eating locally is not just a buzzword for marketing – although that is very effective – but it also should be the way we do business.  “Thinking globally and acting locally” is not only the right thing to do for the earth, it is the only economical thing to do.  With the cost of fuel rising ever higher coupled with high shipping costs, we have to think very carefully what it is we import.  Looking at ways to improve the soil, create energy, and market crops must be local in order for us to make a living and feel as though we’re living our lives for the betterment of our community.

Small-scale and locally marketed agriculture should not be just a fringe or niche economy. By showing that we can make a living while growing healthy crops by ecologically sound methods we will make ourselves assets in our local economies by encouraging both new farmers and intelligent agriculture.   It will continue to cost more for food, but we cannot keep going down the path of large scale commodity agriculture transported huge distances or we will be paying a higher and higher price for the wrong reasons.

I can now fix a screen door, sometimes fix my tractor and plant seeds right side up.  If the son of a long line of Jewish tailors can carve out a niche in small scale agriculture, then I’m optimistic that this growing movement of community-centered agriculture can keep gaining momentum.  We need to invest in community agriculture – it is at the core of sustainability.

Mike Emers
Rosie Creek Farm
Ester, Alaska

Filed Under: Issues, Member education Tagged With: community, education, local food production, news stories, sustainability

Your Food Co-op – A Survey

June 28, 2009 By mary.christensen 3 Comments

As a member you are a part owner of FCCM.

Volunteers already working toward the goal of opening our food co-op want to know what you think.

Please take the time to answer these questions:

_____________________________________________

What do you want to see your food co-op look like?

What kinds of products do you want to see or discourage?

How big of a store will fit your needs?

What departments do you think are important?

What kind of community involvement and events would you like to see happen?

E-mail us your thoughts, desires, big dreams of the kind of grocery store you would like to see and any other ideas you may have at fccm2010@gmail.com

Filed Under: Issues Tagged With: poll, product selection, store design

Article from NewWest

April 27, 2009 By coopmarket Leave a Comment

Hans Geier found this article on western farms by David Frey, “Across the West, More Farms, Less Land, and a Widening Divide”:

The story of farming in the country, and in the West, has become a tale of two farmers. Countering the growth of small farms is a concentration of more and more agriculture in the hands of fewer and fewer mega-farms. The small farms serve a growing niche of farmer’s markets. The giant farms fill the supermarket. The middle is disappearing.

Filed Under: Issues Tagged With: farmland

Help needed on storefront design

April 7, 2009 By coopmarket Leave a Comment

Our co-op is continuing to get closer to opening a storefront. Our board is supportive of the Foodland location. We inspected the site on March 19th. Much work needs to be done to make this location work. If you are interested in volunteering with this effort please get in touch with Jerry Wackers at thewackers@alaska.net. We are need of individuals with experience in all areas of construction – to include engineering, architecture, electrical, plumbing, heating, cooling and refrigeration, as well as site development and contracts.

Filed Under: Business, Issues Tagged With: construction, planning

Ripe for Change at Schaible Auditorium

March 2, 2009 By coopmarket Leave a Comment

The Sustainable Campus Task Force is hosting a showing of the documentary Ripe for Change, Tuesday, March 3, 6:30-8:30pm in Schaible Auditorium on the UAF campus. This documentary explores the intersection of food and politics in California over the last 30 years and highlights some of the major issues associated with large-scale agriculture practices in our country.

Filed Under: Events, Food, Issues, Member education Tagged With: education, movies, politics

Alaska Farmers’ Market Association

January 14, 2009 By coopmarket Leave a Comment

The Alaska Farmers’ Market Association is in the process of forming, and is soliciting membership from among the various markets springing up across the state. Their latest meeting (a teleconference) was held January 6, 2009. Here is a recap of information about the group:

The AFMA seeks to support and promote vibrant and sustainable farmers’ markets throughout Alaska, by creating a recognizable statewide organization to increase market awareness; helping market managers communicate and network with each other; educating farmers about best farming practices, sustainability, and quality assurance; working to regulate farmers’ markets internally rather than externally (by the legislature or some other outside entity); holding an annual forum; and educating the public about Alaska farmers’ market products.

Amy Petit of DNR is the state contact for the organization, which is filing its 501(c)(6) paperwork; she is gathering information about the various markets and coordinating the teleconferences held so far. The group hopes to enow its program so that it can become independent from the state or the farms, and the sustainability of the AFMA is of importance to its membership (especially given the financial straits that most granting agencies find themselves in now). It is pondering how best to be sustainable, membership dues, who and how work for the organization should be done, and such details as travel budgets, a grant from the Farmers’ Market Promotion Program, and other items.

Voting members consist of one appointed ‘market representative’ from each farmers’ market in Alaska. The AFMA is working on a website, and hopes to get twelve board members (60% of whom must be farmers’ market reps). Bylaws are also in process.

For more information, please contact Ms. Petit.

See also “Farmers markets are big business in Alaska, by Marcia Hahn, of Farmers Markets Today.

Filed Under: Issues Tagged With: local food production

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