I attended a screening of the film Genetic Roulette: The Gamble of our Lives sponsored under the Academy of Lifelong Learning. Our town is an affluent university town and boasts the highest average education in the state, so it offers many opportunities to learn about the world. As the most Democratic county in Oregon (rural as well as urban), progressive ideas find fertile ground.
The audience was not one that would normally turn out for an event of this sort. In that regard, it was the perfect activist’s dream of public education. The couple seated behind me were perhaps a case in point, as they interjected skeptical remarks throughout the movie and the Q & A afterwards.
Leading the discussion was Harry MacCormack , an organic farmer since 1974. A local luminary, he was cofounder of our Saturday Market and Oregon Tilth, the first entity in the United States to certify organic farms.
Being someone who has always been able to attract a waitperson, I was able to grab the microphone and ask a question that I wanted addressed before the audience.
What is a food shed and how does it relate to food security and emergency preparedness?
Food shed. We understand how a watershed works by gathering the rain which flows to rivers and into our homes. In the same way the concept of a food shed extends that idea to include another essential staple of life: Food.
Harry MacCormack described a food shed as a locally-based regional food system which could ideally supply 30% of food available for residents. Currently, 98% of our food is imported which he described as a “dangerous situation” which would empty the grocery shelves in about a week and half. A few years ago when the Siskiyou pass to California was closed, most Oregon communities experienced food shortages. If the Big Earthquake which is predicted ever strikes, truck traffic would be disrupted for many weeks if not months creating a food emergency. Our county has recently launched an emergency preparedness program which addresses this issue by counseling people to stockpile food, an impossibility for many since 50% of our school-aged students qualify for free or reduced lunch and 20% of our residents fall below the poverty level.
For forty years, our local organic farming community has worked to establish a food shed encompassing three counties stretching from the Pacific Ocean to the Cascades. Our popular farmer’s market is the only one in the state that operates year-round. We have several groceries with organic foodstuffs, most notably the Co-op which even so imports 73% out of its local 6 region (six surrounding counties).
Harry MacCormack described the most recent effort to establish local food sovereignty by the Benton County Community Rights Coalition. The county has refused to allow an ordinance to be placed on the May ballot, resulting in a lawsuit. The county attorney, buttressed by a Monsanto attorney out of Portland, called the petitioners "domestic terrorists" which was entered in the court record. The fourth and final court hearing is next week and I will report on that.
After the Q & A, I spoke with the couple behind me who turned out to be retired university faculty in engineering and the arts. Essentially, they viewed the film and the anti-GMO movement as being quite emphatically “anti-Science”. I agreed that Science was under siege in our nation from evolution to climate change; however, they still could not credit the many scientists and physicians in the film who offered their work in support of the harmfulness of GMO foods. Regardless of their belief in the benignity of GMO products, we did agree on the food security issue. We spoke for about ten minutes, shaking hands as we parted.
One person I met that afternoon was my 27-year-old daughter’s pediatrician. I told him we thought of him as our beloved physician. The man is ever gentle and sensitive, making him a superb doctor. However, faced with the evidence in the film of children developing allergies and gut problems with the GMO food, he brushed my compliment aside, saying that he ought to have been doing something about this. I reminded him that the 20-year GMO food experiment was done in secret supported by for-profit “science”. My daughter has suffered many gastric tract issues which he knew. I told him that she had finally improved by switching to a non-gluten diet which was essentially organic and non-GMO.
I will be posting diaries about our continuing food fight.