So I finally finished the book I was referring to last week. It was a struggle, because, to the end, it wasn’t very well written. Which was a shame, really. I had really high hopes that it would be. In fact, I really, really wanted it to be a well written, informative, inspiring book.
Instead I was mostly irritated by the author’s tendency to contradict himself in every other paragraph. But I’m getting ahead of myself: the book is The Town that Food Saved, by Ben Hewitt. It was lent to me by an acquaintance who recently traveled to the town in question, a little rural town not far from Burlington, Vermont. She warned me in advance that the book wasn’t well written, but I plugged away anyway, hoping against hope that here, in these pages, would be the answer I hadn’t even realized I was seeking: how DO you create a viable, localized food system? What does one even look like?
As it turns out, Mr. Hewitt doesn’t know either. That’s the impressive thing about the book. It takes him over 200 pages to come to the conclusion that he doesn’t have the faintest idea what he’s talking about. There are some interesting descriptions of the “characters” that play a role in the town’s emerging ag businesses, but aside from that, this town doesn’t seem so different from our town. A bunch of individuals are all kind of doing their thing, and some people are being successful, and some people aren’t, and some other people (me) are trying to link it all together. This is not to say that he doesn’t have valid thoughts- there are a lot of germs of great ideas within the book. It’s just that, well, if you aren’t sure what the answers to the questions that you’re asking are, maybe you don’t need to write a whole book on it. That’s why I write a blog, after all. I haven’t got things figured out at all yet.
In fact, I found the book rather reflective of the things I typically ask on this blog. What is an appropriate scale for so-called “sustainable” agriculture? Where is the balance between making money and staying local? What about accessibility? What about the people who have been doing this all along?
That question, in particular, was of great interest to me. The author pointed out, and rightly so, that there are plenty of people who have been plugging along, direct marketing their products to neighbors and nearby towns, without any sense of being a part of a “movement”. They probably wouldn’t even call what they do “local foods,” except for the ones (and this is most of the people around here, at least) who have caught on to the trend going on right now, that people will pay premium for things marketed as local foods. But there’s nothing much new about people selling food to the people nearby. What’s new about it is that all these people are suddenly acting like it’s the most amazing thing ever. Suddenly, it has significance. Local foods are going to save the world, didn’t you know?
I appreciated that Mr. Hewitt took the time to ask these kinds of questions, rather than just slamming through a book praising the local foods movement in his area as the saviour of the world. He has no delusions that what they are doing is completely brilliant, completely unlike anything that’s gone before, or even particularly great for the area in general. He addresses both sides of the argument- the messiahs of local foods, and the rest of the world, who continue on shopping at discount supermarkets as if nothing has changed. It’s well worth exploring these concepts, it’s just- well. I’m not sure why he wrote a whole book about it. If he really had been writing just about what his neighbors were doing, how they were starting these small, specialty farms and making lots of money at it, then he could have written a book about that. He didn’t need to ramble on at length about the broader implications. But if he was going to look at the broader implications- well, I would have hoped he would have actually come to some conclusions. Or maybe looked at more than one town.
There are many similarities between his town and ours, though I have to say that at least according to his descriptions, Vermont sounds like a world apart. All these people running around with solar panels on their roofs and eating tofu. That is NOT the case here, that’s for damn certain. And all the farms smaller than 100 acres? It sounds like another planet, if you ask me. I can’t quite puzzle out what all the landowners are doing up there in Vermont, if they aren’t doing local ag and they only have farms averaging 60-90 acres. Every time I tell someone around here that I want about 60 acres or less they look at me like I’ve lost my mind. And I find it really, really, hard to believe that everyone in Vermont is a tofu eating solar panel sporting ex hippie. Indeed, Mr. Hewitt makes reference to this other population (the normal one, I think), but somehow they never seem to enter into the story. And this is something I often fear our own movement lacks. If any movement is only made up of intellectuals, most of whom aren’t even from the area in question (and you aren’t a local here unless you’re at least four generations in), you aren’t going to make much headway, and the “locals” are going to start resenting you pretty early on (as seems to happen in this particular town in Vermont).
If you are completely unfamiliar with the issues that surround local foods, I recommend taking a stab at this book (and skimming heartily). If you’ve been working on these issues for even a few months, however, you aren’t going to find any answers here, and will probably be more irritated with Mr. Hewitt’s tendency to posit a concept and then tear it down in the very next paragraph. It’s like 200 long pages of self-doubt, internal questioning, and the general type of thoughts I at least usually reserve for the time before falling asleep each night, when I lie awake and worry that all this stuff I’ve gotten myself involved in is going nowhere or, worse, is only going to make things worse.
But like I said, I’ve got a blog to talk about those things. If I ever do publish a book on local foods, I’d certainly hope it would be a bit more coherent.
Just curious, what’s the town in the book? I lived in VT for 8 yrs, & it is substantially different than the Eastern Shore. It’s got long agricultural roots (tho not quite as long as the ES’s), supplying veggies, meat, & dairy products to the Eastern Seaboard before the railways allowed the West to do it larger scale & cheaper, after which it became kind of a backwater w/ more focus on dairy. VT’s very hilly & was initially populated by small landholders. It’s not flat & wasn’t originally divided into tracts of hundreds or thousands of acres as is the ES.
VT had a major influx of hippies in the 60’s & 70’s &, altho there was & still is some resentment of the newcomers, they seem to have blended in & been accepted w/ more tolerance than in most other areas of the US experiencing similar phenomena, lacking the apparent tension between those two groups in say the Pacific NW. Perhaps it’s cuz the newcomers appreciated traditional VT life & lived more or less the same way the locals did, working seasonal, low-paying jobs & not demanding that everything be changed to suit them.
It is a unique state, highly liberal on average, & w/ less racial diversity than Alaska, I believe. I can’t explain why it’s so different from neighboring NH (the DE of New England), there being little to distinuish the two geographically or historically that I’m aware of, but they are like night & day. They’ve always been politically independent & enjoyed thumbing their noses at the rest of the country.
Even back in the 80’s or 90’s, there were probably 2-3 dozen small organic farms w/in a 1/2 hr of me, w/ some of their produce going to CSA’s & natural foods stores but most going to high-end restaurants for the tourist industry, VT’s main source of income.
While there has been increasing focus lately on bldg up the ES’s tourism industry, it doesn’t, I’m sure, supply nearly the % of the area’s income as it does in VT. I’d be highly sceptical that any local foods strategy suited for VT would be as good a fit down here.
There’s also a bigger gulf between the locals & the newcomers here, w/ most of the locals coming from longtime farming families working hundreds of acres & newcomers either wealthy retirees from DC/Balto/Philly or fairly liberal types working white-collar jobs. There’s just less common ground & mutual understanding than there is between the two in VT.
Hardwick, I think was the name of the town.
Yes, more than anything else I got the sense that VT was just a very different place than the ES… which would have been interesting and all, but seriously, the book was just not well written. He can write a sentence, but he skips around from one thought to another so much that it becomes immensely hard to follow.
Hardwick’s a pretty atypical VT town IMO. It’s about 1/2 an hr from where I used to live &, altho home to the only CSA I knew about at the time, a pretty tough, redneck, non-touristy town. I had a suitcase of 80 homemade cassettes (yes, I’m that old) stolen out of my truck at a bar there whose name changed all the time but locals all called The Flood Zone cuz the bikers who frequented it pulled a gun on the bartender during a flood that covered the floor & wouldn’t let him leave until they were done drinking.
I think Spalding Gray was hired by the town to do one of his readings there but ended up spending the whole time defending his $6,000 (or whatever it was) fee to the townspeople.
I might be interested in leafing thru the book, if it’s not already promised elsewhere.
It’s not my book, actually, but the owner might not mind if it got passed around… I have another friend who wanted to peruse it as well.
No biggy. Let your other interested friend have it first. Given that you admit the writing’s not very good, I’m mostly just interested in looking for reasons of nostalgia, so if the owner wants it back, fine.